L.A. Arboretum to open sustainable garden for festival

Considering all the attention that backyard chicken coops and edible landscapes have gotten, homeowners have few public places to see these ideas in practice. The newly redesigned Garden for All Seasons, under construction this week and scheduled to open for this weekend's Grow! festival at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Arcadia, was conceived for just that purpose.

The Garden for All Seasons is a demonstration site for sustainable living practices. Visitors walk through a landscape dotted with fruit-producing trees from around the world, past a pond fed with rainwater collected on-site and through to a netted enclosure housing raised vegetable beds, a worm farm, compost bins and a chicken coop. (That's a Brazilian grape tree, top; Japanese plum tree, upper right; and flowering pomegranate tree, lower right.)

“We wanted homeowners to feel they could adapt it and make it their own,” said Amy Korn, who designed the space with her partner, Matt Randolph, of the landscape architecture firm kornrandolph in Pasadena. Even a pond fed with water from a cistern is meant to be inspiration, she said. “Maybe it’s not this grand thing, but the idea that collection and circulation is something they can do as well.”

An 8-foot-wide concrete walkway shuttles water to paver stones, sand, a gravel trench and a system of underground pipes that collect and recirculate the water using pumps that are meant to eventually run off solar power. The pond is planted with edibles that serve a secondary purpose: keeping the water clean.

TreePeople to host workshops on capturing rainwater

During the wet season, the city of L.A. sends an average of 100 million gallons of storm water into the Pacific each day. That water had been handled as pollution for years, because rainwater picks up effluents that then flush into the ocean untreated.

But rainwater is also a resource that can be harvested and reused. The environmental nonprofit TreePeople is hosting workshops to teach homeowners exactly how. A March 24 event at TreePeople's Center for Community Forestry in Beverly Hills will focus on so-called waterworks, or the plumbing of rainwater catchment, including rain barrels, rain chains and downspout disconnects. Participants can buy 55-gallon barrels at a discounted rate of $100, $25 of which is tax deductible. Admission to the four-hour workshop is free, but registration is required.

The March 25 workshop at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles will center on earthworks -- how to contour the earth to capture rain and use permeable pavement. The three-hour workshop is free, though participants will need to pay museum admission, which is $5 to $12. Registration is required.

Separating rainwater catchment into water- and earth-works sessions "helps people's heads not explode," said Lisa Cahill, TreePeople's senior manager for sustainable solutions. "It's a lot for people to take in."

During the workshops, participants will learn how to calculate the amount of rain that falls on their home during a storm and how to translate those inches of rain into gallons that can be collected. They then learn about the advantages and disadvantages of various catchment systems. Each workshop also includes information on rain gardens, native plants and pest management, Cahill said.