Gardenig in Los Angeles. Tips & Guides

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While Hallmark star Alison Sweeney was born and raised in Los Angeles, she’s recently made the move to Arizona with her husband and teenage children. The move has been more amazing than they could have ever dreamed, Sweeney says, partly due to the lush rose garden that came with the home, which has sparked a new gardening hobby for her.

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Ryan Phillips; Design: Diedre Doherty

Love them or hate them, there's no denying that throw pillows make a sofa look inviting. But exactly where is the line between a cozy number of throw pillows and an inconvenient, excessive amount?

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Whether you work from home full time, have a hybrid schedule, or just like to have a designated space for doing home paperwork, creating an organized home office doesn't have to come at the expense of your sense of style—just ask Bobby Berk.

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After a lifetime spent playing other people, Drew Barrymorehas created a new career—and a home line—based on being herself. 

Peter Estersohn

Just because our attention is focused on keeping things steady (ahem, alive) in the garden this deep into the summer, it doesn’t mean we should neglect our leafy loved ones who live indoors—especially if you have travel plans! Houseplants have special needs every season, but summer heat and time away come with their own set of challenges. 

Have you ever heard that planting a small garden is like writing a short story instead of a novel? Well, I hadn’t either—until Los Angeles designer Adam Sirak said it—and I think it’s brilliant. “Some people might think they can’t have an amazing garden or that it’s not worth the trouble because they don’t have a big space,” Sirak says. “But a small space only means you have to take all your ideas and distill them down to a concentrated big idea.” He adds that, as with a short story, there’s no room for filler, and each choice must be thought of in relationship to the whole. “In this way, a small space can be a very exciting puzzle to put together,” he says.  

The English-born Capon, a doctor of botany from the University of Chicago who went on to be a professor at California State University, Los Angeles for 30 years, has since retired, leaving time for the revamping of “Botany for Gardeners,” the bestselling title for its publisher, Timber Press, in the U.S. and England.Not only did Capon write it; he illustrated it, too, and even took the plant photographs that further bring the text to life. Capon is also a lifelong gardener, though images of his own place never appear in the pages.“Botany for Gardeners” was born as a textbook out of lecture notes for a botany class Capon taught for many years to non-science students, so it’s thorough—but not the kind of dense, full-fledged botany text that will scare you away.In fact (even 20 years later), it just keeps drawing me back in, especially for tidbits like these. Did you know:That litmus, the dye used to indicate acidity and alkalinity, is

HOW DID I MISSED MARIA POPOVA’S bee item on her compelling Brain Pickings site in September, when she gathered (or curated, as she calls it) disparate inspirations about the essential creatures, whose plight on earth is so severely challenged?  Through Maria’s filter, their story is told with two very different must-watch videos, some truly up-close-and-personal electron microscope photographs, and her own words.SOMEONE ASKED ME ABOUT EDIBLE LANDSCAPING the other day, and I realized I’d lost track of the important, inspiring work of Rosiland Creasy, but now here she is: in the “Los Angeles Times” this week, for instance, with a new edition o

Los Angeles-based Shulman is not a vegetarian, she says, but finds herself eating that way a lot–which may sound familiar to others, especially with the farm market and garden harvest season just getting into high gear.“I realized that people have problems with the concept of the vegetarian main dish. There’s really no lexicon for it. If you eat meat, you can ask, ‘What’s for dinner?’ and you can say, ‘Chicken,’ and that’s a good enough answer.“In my house, I do have one-word answers. When my son says, ‘What’s for dinner?’ I can say, ‘Frittata,’ or ‘Gratin,’ or ‘Pasta,’ and his only question will be, ‘With what?’ And

THERESA LOE packs more into a garden—or a canning jar—than anyone else I know. A longtime gardener and city homesteader on just a tenth of an acre in Los Angeles, she manages to layer her back and even front yards much the way she layers cucumber slices and spices into canning jars for her easy, low-salt refrigerator pickles. That how-to and recipe is the second of 13 short lessons this Master Food Preserver is serving up starting this week on “Growing a Greener World,” the PBS series where she is a founding producer.

Theresa describes herself as “a lifelong canner.” Both her mother and grandmother canned, she says, and Theresa eventually studied culinary arts at UCLA, then took the Master Food Preserver curriculum through her county cooperative extension.“I try to get people thinking outside the canning jars,” says Theresa, who grows much of her family’s food on a mere one-tenth acre in the Los Angeles area (including a coop for a small flock of chickens). “The new video series focuses on creative ways to can, and to use what you can.”  Each of the fun, approachable recipe videos is about 2 minutes long, offering the “aha” of the essential technique involved (with full recipe and details on the “Growing a Greener World” TV website).where to begin in canning?WHEN LEARNING to can, stick first with the high-acid foods, such as tomatoes that have

Since then, it’s all about: Stock up or be left pumpkin-less! (Haven’t I heard this before? It’s nearly the same story as this one from the “Los Angeles Times” in 2009, even quoting the same Libby’s spokesman.)How about this D.I.Y. remedy: Go buy a couple of ‘Butternut’ squash at the farmers’ market (or the supermarket, even) and make filling, putting extra batches of cooked, pureed “pumpkin” in the freezer while you’re at it to satisfy subsequent craving–or for  use in soup or bread or gnocchi.A Hubbard type (warts and all) will

Nearly everyone has ajunk drawer. And while the synonymously messy drawer filled with junk like scraps of paper, pens, gum wrappers, bobby pins, and the random key or two is often the bane of frustration, it can be a necessity for storing miscellaneous items.

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Dana Gallagher

When my wifeand I finally got around to re-landscaping our 1922 Spanish-style bungalow in Los Angeles, we did what many space-challenged Angelenos do: reimagined the unused back half of our driveway. It’s a classic SoCal bungalow move. Why park in your driveway when you can play in it? Over the years, it has served our family well, as a toy and tricycle repository when the kids were little, an outdoor weight room when the kids were bigger, and a spot for random acts of improvisational wood-fired cooking. Occasionally, we would even park a car in it. But with the kids grown and the functional-if-a-bit-meh swath of concrete not getting much use, we wanted the driveway to become a multipurpose space where we could garden, grill, dine, and just hang out. 

While it’s impossible to live inside Disneyland, we just found the next best thing for mega Disney fans. Walt Disney’s Storybook Mansion in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles is now available to rent for a cool $40,000 a month. Disney lived in the home from 1932 to 1950 with his wife and two daughters.

This article is part of our new 8-week, limited edition newsletter series, The Low-Water Gardening Guide, where we’ll walk you through what it takes to create a sustainable garden, from swapping in the appropriate plants to new irrigation methods to the tools you’ll need and more. Sign up here to get each installment straight to your inbox.

Part of a garden editor’s job is to always be on the lookout for new garden trends, and when not one, but four friends tell me they’re putting in bocce ball, my meter goes bing! “I love my bocce ball court,” says Julian Cautherley, a documentary film producer in Los Angeles (who also happens to be my daughter’s dad). “I put it in last fall, and it’s become the social center of my garden. Guests are just drawn to it—and it wasn’t expensive to put in, either.” 

The day I meet David Godshall, one of the founding members of the progressive landscape architecture firm known as Terremoto, I climb the concrete steps outside his home in East Los Angeles, open a worn hinged gate, and see his garden for the first time. What I find is not quite what I was expecting, yet it makes perfect sense. Rather than the composed plants and austere rigor of the poolside landscaping Terremoto designed for actor Mandy Moore, for example, Godshall’s own garden is a tangle of mostly native and low-water plants, placed in a way that seemed haphazard but that the plants seemed to love. A dirt path is surrounded by bursts of unruly pitcher sage, sprawling California buckwheat, and Ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’, all flourishing under the canopy of a Western sycamore. Cross-sawn timber planks from fallen local trees that otherwise would’ve been pulped weave through the yard like mini-bridges for his kids to play on. Raised beds tumble down the slope. A fashionable composter (yes, there is such a thing) sits under the eaves of a house that’s been painted black. Meanwhile, in one corner, a clawfoot cast- iron bathtub sits on a humble wood-plank base. This, I find out later, is where Godshall likes to bathe. 

Sustainability is such a buzzy (and important) topic in so many industries, especially in the architecture and design world. Like the fashion industry, there is a movement towards “slow” design, investing in things that are timeless and long-lasting. Many firms and brands are prioritizing materials and manufacturing/build methods that are eco-friendly and sustainable.

There’s an art to striking the right balance between two things that are seemingly opposites—this house is proof of that. When independent creative director Nate Clark and attorney Allen Loeb found the Craftsman in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, they knew it was the perfect spot to raise their growing family. (A second child was on the way!)

It should come as no surprise that before he became a social media “plantfluencer” with a thriving plant styling business, multiple books to his name, and a product line at Target, Hilton Carter honed his creative skills in Los Angeles, earning an MFA in film at the ArtCenter College of Design. In the lush cinematic photographs of plants he posts on his Instagram, @hiltoncarter, each plant plays the role of a character on the stage of whatever room Carter has exactingly placed it in. The principles behind this dramatic staging are to be found in his new book, Living Wild: How to Plant Style Your Home and Cultivate Happiness. Here are Carter’s tips on how to bring your houseplants outside and turn your outdoor space into an extension of your home as winter turns to spring.

Post and Beam homes are known for their exposed wooden beams, vaulted ceilings, and spacious, open rooms. With those features, the style already speaks for itself, design-wise, so when you’re decorating the home, it can be a balancing act—showcasing the beautiful ceilings and wood, while also giving the space personality through furniture and accessories. That’s what celebrity interior designer and home stager Francesca Grace was tasked with for this home staging project in the Topanga mountains of Los Angeles.

Pasadena’s Huntingdon Gardens Revisited It’s decades since I last visited the Huntingdon Gardens and my memory of them was quite hazy, other than admiring the Japanese bridge and seeing hippeastrums growing outdoors, so it was top on my list of places to go when we had a two-night stopover in Los Angeles en route to Tasmania. It has clearly been spraunced up a fair bit since my last visit and parts of it are quite breathtaking – in particular the Desert Garden – it is astonishing.

Ancient Rome in California Enroute to New Zealand, we spent a couple of night in Los Angeles and managed to visit the Getty Villa in Malibu – an extraordinary confection filled with priceless treasures in a Hollywood setting. The gardens are planted with plants that would have been familiar to the Romans and although they have struggled with the ongoing drought they did work rather well and looked far more authentic than many of the ‘gardens by the square yard’ that a feature of LA.

In the 1880s, a new disease decimated vineyards in the Los Angeles basin. California’s first professional plant pathologist, Newton B. Pierce, studied the disease and was rewarded with its being named after him.More than a century later, Pierce’s disease is still a major threat to vineyard

So, you’ve added a sago palm or two (or five!) to your garden. And who can blame you?In warm climates they’re hardy plants that can be