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In 1994 when I wrote California Wildfire Landscaping, we knew the fire season of 2007 was coming, we just didn’t know when. In those days I gathered up all known information on how to create defensible space homesites and compiled it into an easy to use book for homeowners and their families.Click this link to [...]

Everybody in garden design is talking agaves. Retro modern folks are digging golden barrel cactus. We’re even seeing fire stick euphorbia in pots of mixed perennials. While these new ventures into old succulents are revitalizing the aesthetic of our gardens, there are some key concerns for safety among these often prickly plants. Succulents have the market [...]

Celebrate a natural holiday season with decorations from your garden and the wild places near home. Cook up a fresh batch of rose hip jam as the fruit ripens this fall.          Gather twigs to create rustic wreaths to decorate.                Cut long runners of run-away vines to tie into garlands.            Harvest your herbs before frost to hang [...]

English ivy suffers a most profound duality.  While at once refusing to grow where we want it to, escapees can naturalize to engulf whole landscapes.  This is just one aspect of an insidious spreader that has wrecked havoc unparalleled in the annals of horticulture.Though it is commonly known as English ivy, Hedera helix is actually [...]

Got a computer and a color printer?  Unleash your creativity at MoPlants.com where our resources will help you make your own gifts, decorations and cards for the holidays.             Now that summer’s over, get a head start on the season with some great money saving ideas for using Internet databases of stunning vintage images.  If [...]

If you’re a first time homeowner, listen up.  If you think you can’t grow fabulous flowers, read on.  If past failures have made you throw your hands up at gardening in general, get ready to rumble!  There’s a secret to great big bold flowers.  Forget about all that stuff you see in catalogs that brands a [...]

The art of entertaining education should apply to the horticultural world as it does elsewhere.  The problem is that plant people aren’t often good communicators, and they struggle to share their life long knowledge with others. This lack of good presentation is matched by TV garden show “talking head”? hosts who can read a teleprompter but have little [...]

They can be found in the fossil record of virtually every continent on earth, changing little in the past 200 million years.  They came to prominence in the Mesozoic, a period known as the age of cycads and dinosaurs.  Plants known as “the cycads”? are true living fossils that make fabulous garden plants.  Though they may appear [...]

Aristotle made no bones about it.  Regions north of the Mediterranean Coast were not suitable for civilized life.  His southern world was a warm, mild one that stretched across most of Spain and Portugal, southern France, all of Italy except the Alps, Greece and North Africa.  There the moderate climate spawned a native flora of [...]