With Keith in the garage inhaling toxic fumes every night I started to get really jealous. So I looked around the house for something I could paint.
I’ve had these Chinese Bottle gourds for a few years. They used to be a bright mint green but have slowly dried to a beige, speckled perfection. The seeds inside even have a little rattle to them.
No patterns, no plan, just paint. It goes to show you what a little color can do.
For a new project we’re launching at GOOD, Casey, Beth and I got to visit an amazing school garden with the LAUSD’s green policy director Mud Baron (at right). Yes, that’s his real name. Theresa Dahl, in white, is a mom and garden goddess at Carthay Center Elementary, and gave us a tour of the garden that was a sea of asphalt only a few years ago.
With the help of volunteers, the school built several raised beds where just about everything you can imagine is growing. Compost was donated from local supermarkets. We had some awesome spicy mustard greens that tasted like wasabi.
The students learn to grow plants from seed, transplanting the seedlings into bigger and bigger containers until they’re ready for the ground.
This is part of a papaya grove where all the trees were grown from a single papaya that got tossed into a compost heap.
Here are some peach blossoms in the fruit orchard, where a retired maintenance worker takes care of the trees, making sure they’re appropriately pruned.
Theresa said the students were outside learning about life cycle when a mouse ran out of the compost heap and started nibbling on a strawberry, only to have a hawk swoop out from the sky and pluck the mouse from the garden. You can’t teach that in the classroom, folks!
I’ll write more soon about what we’re planning over at GOOD, but until then, I’ll leave you with some good advice from one of the students.
When the sky isn’t dumping a year’s worth of rain onto Los Angeles in five days, one of my favorite places to go in the city is the bike path of the LA River. This concrete chute is probably the most misunderstood place in all of the city, as well as one of the fastest-changing. Here, in the soft-bottom corridor of the river near Frogtown, it’s easy to imagine what the river was like before it got reigned in a half-century ago, which is also how it could look again in the future.
The Los Angeles River Master Plan was completed in 2007 by the lovely Mia Lehrer, among others, and contains all sorts of amazing ideas for revitalizing the watershed. Until then, there are small victories to be seen. Tons of pocket parks have sprung up along the river, and there’s a string of major rec centers where people’s soccer games echo into the concrete walls. Crews had just broken ground on a new bike path here (the paved one currently ends at Fletcher) and it made for a bit of a bumpy ride but it was exciting to see this part of the river finally getting some solid services.
But as much as I want the river to ease back towards naturalization, part of its strange beauty are moments like these graffiti-splotched walls near Hyperion, which I’d hate to lose in a total return to wilderness. A great resource that illustrates the many personalities of the river (as well as the many personalities along the river) is KCET’s awesome interactive river project for Departures. And if you just want to get a closer look at our riparian treasure, Friends of the LA River leads cleanup walks, birdwatching adventures, and other tours along the river.
A few blocks away from all this is more evidence of the river’s changing role in our city: The great Coco’s Variety. This is a bike store, that’s also a purified water store, which also features, among many other things, a giant parts carousel filled with all sorts of things you never knew you could live without, from Band-Aids to Mexican wrestler figurines (made in Japan). While we were there, three kids were charged with choosing one toy each from this tower of goodness, and the decision looked excruciating. Keith has some more amazing photos of Coco’s.
One of my favorite stories about living in Los Angeles involves an artist, a freeway (well, two, in fact), an and a time when I had a car, a commute and a full time job. I got to write an essay about all of it over at GOOD: The Fake Freeway Sign that Became a Real Public Service. That’s part of my weekly column for GOOD, Design is a Verb.
In the magazine this month, GOOD celebrates sloooooooooowness, and they asked me to do a piece about how urban environments are designed for the speed at which we move through them. The concept was to contrast a block in New York with a block in L.A. I happened to be in New York at the time and walked to Greene Street, in SoHo, where I looked at and listened to how people—mostly pedestrians—interacted with the street. And when it came to a part of L.A. that was built for reading quickly, it was obvious to me there is no building better suited than Randy’s Donuts. You can see that piece in the Slow Issue or online at Reading the City.
Finally, GOOD’s just launched a project with Pepsi called Refresh Everything where they’re giving away grants to worthy projects—some $20 million worth of funding, which apparently is normally what they spend on the Super Bowl. Check out the site where you can learn more about how this works. They tapped a bunch of writers to contribute stories about projects already in motion that fit with the kinds of ideas they’re looking to fund, and I got to write a piece about the awesome sculpture park in St. Louis, Citygarden.
Look familiar? We had a whopper of a storm sail through here last week, and the succulents have suddenly exploded.
Some of them grew so fast they made a quick right turn to take the fastest route possible to direct sun.
I’ve actually never seen these guys bloom before.
Nor these guys. This one is now so big he is closing in on three feet, and pushing up into the trumpets of the datura tree.
This one had gotten scorched in the summer and I had left it for dead, but the rain helped it summon enough strength to flower. Just your average garden-variety miracles.
