LETTERS FROM THE GARDEN

Everything is a Resource w/ Lynn Fang

Everything is a Resource w/ Lynn Fang

This interview with Lynn Fang, MS has been edited for length and clarity. (AJPJ)

Lynn Fang is a soil scientist with over 10 years of experience in ecological landscape design, soil science, community composting, and regenerative farming. She centers on soil health as the foundation of thriving and abundant gardens. She is an adjunct professor at Pitzer College and works with LA Compost and ECOFARM. She has also worked with Metabolic Studio, Studio Petrichor, the LA County Arboretum Crescent Farm, CropSwapLA, Buena Vista Community Garden (now Gente Community Garden), and Huerta del Valle.

AJ: What is your background in soil science and how did you get interested in it? I know it’s a hot topic in the era of climate change. But I suspect that when you were starting out, it was not.

LF: Right? I didn’t really think about soil or gardening growing up. I didn’t come from a farming family or anything like that. I had a pretty conventional suburban upbringing in the Bay Area.

I didn’t start thinking about soil and related topics until the very end of college! Honestly, it was probably the last course that I took at UC Berkeley – a general education class that I took just to fulfill my last requirement. I was trying to get into some other class, but it was waitlisted. So it was totally random that I ended up taking this class “International Rural Development.” 

The class ended up being about Monsanto, chemical agriculture, and green revolution policies.

I was already on this path of activism and thinking about whether I really wanted a corporate job. I wanted to make a difference in the world … and that class really opened my mind… read more…

Annual Appeal: Our Shared Landscape

Annual Appeal: Our Shared Landscape

image courtesy of Scott Oshima

On a recent Fall day, I walked in Arlington Garden’s afternoon sunlight. The light flowed from behind oaks and buckwheats. Lizards followed it along paths. A hawk glided silently through a sunbeam. A chatty family walked by the wish trees, yellow in the waning light, curiously reading through the hopes of fellow garden-goers. 

The previous day during a Pasadena Unified School District field trip, I had helped grinning students flip over logs to identify soil creatures underneath. Their excitement rubbed off on me, so I had to continue flipping a few logs on my afternoon walk. I hit the jackpot with some pinkish split gill fungi! Arlington’s soil, teeming with life, is the foundation of the aboveground beauty we all enjoy. read more…

Announcing the Departure of our Executive Director, Michelle Matthews

Announcing the Departure of our Executive Director, Michelle Matthews

Dear Arlington Garden Community, 

As some of you might know, Michelle Matthews has stepped down as our Executive Director. We encourage you to take a moment to read her announcement below.

Michelle became Executive Director in June of 2017. Since then, the garden and its place in our local community and the wider world have grown dramatically. We are grateful to Michelle for her years of service and many contributions to the Garden.

Among those many contributions, we celebrate Michelle’s focus on equity and community building, which created a vibrant network of organizations with which the garden collaborates and from which it continues to benefit and grow. Michelle has a unique and wonderful ability to engage folks with the garden, and this expanded community continues to enhance Arlington and advance our mission in important new ways. read more…

Inside Arlington: AJ

Inside Arlington: AJ

AG: What are your responsibilities at Arlington?

AJ: I am the part time Communications Manager and Volunteer Program Manager. I am also an occasional event producer, very infrequent emergency gardener, regrettable emailer, etc. etc. etc. I write and edit our newsletter and other publications. (Did you see our Botanical Guide? I wrote that.) I also facilitate our Volunteer Committee and put together some extra special volunteer events.

AG: How did you discover Arlington?

AJ: I had been trying to volunteer at local botanical gardens and had been finding it rocky terrain to travel – some gardens near me (not naming names) made volunteering with them difficult. You have to know someone already on the inside, or so it seemed to me, in order to get off the waitlist.

At that moment in my life, I had never heard so much as a whisper about Arlington Garden. read more…

Natural’s Not in It

Natural’s Not in It

(AJPJ)

Spring in urban Southern California is … well, the word “unnatural” comes to mind, but it’s prudent to avoid provocation. Safer words might be “novel” or “anachronistic” or “cosmopolitan.”

Spring in Southern California is novel. Like last year, we are enjoying a quite cosmopolitan season of growth.

The proper place to say this is at a VIP luncheon, wearing a blousy floral number. At heart, though, these are just euphemistic ways of saying that SoCal spring is … unnatural.

What is unnatural about our urban spring? Like its human population, most street trees and plants sprinkled throughout the yards of Southern California did not originate here. In fact, they are from climate regions quite unlike our own: they evolved in temperate or tropical climates and follow cycles of growth appropriate to those regions. Many of these species are waking up right now, at the end of our rainy season, in the spring. Since the rains will soon stop, they are undoubtedly grateful for the endless irrigation systems of Southern California. read more…

Garden Winter Update

Garden Winter Update

Photos courtesy of Tahereh Sheerazie.

This past week, Pasadena received (“received” as in a blessing) 8.1 inches of rain. According to the local paper, that is 40% of our average seasonal rainfall. A representative from the City reported as of last Wednesday that there were a few “trees compromised … and a few small power outages” but that is all. Arlington Garden’s trails flooded, of course, but that went according to plan – more on that topic below. 

The detrimental effects of rain showed up less in Pasadena than other areas. Woodland Hills, for instance, was soaked with 12.6 inches of rain. That neighborhood has become used to extremes. In the summer of 2020, it reached an appallingly hot 121 degrees F. Your editor was driving to the beach that day through Woodland Hills and remembers feeling a crawling unease when he looked at the dashboard thermometer.

Woodland Hills is a stress point where the climate changes of the past decade are felt especially keenly – but Pasadena is not immune. As the planet continues to warm, forecasts show Southern California will have increasingly volatile weather patterns. The fall and spring seasons will have fewer precipitation events, but the storms are likely to be much larger, bringing curtains – rather than showers – of rain, like this storm.  read more…

What’s in a Name? The Hummingbirds of Arlington Garden: Charles Hood

What’s in a Name? The Hummingbirds of Arlington Garden: Charles Hood

Pictured: Allen’s hummingbird. Credit: Charles Hood.

(Charles Hood) This special place is an urban oasis, as we all know subjectively, but that can be shown with quantitative data too, if, for example, we look at the resident and migrant hummingbirds.

Six species show up here during the birding year, and in alphabetical order, they are the Allen’s, Anna’s, black-chinned, calliope, Costa’s, and rufous hummingbirds. (Some bird books would capitalize all of those names, making it “Rufous Hummingbird.”) We are blessed by this abundance. Los Angeles may not be a rainforest, but it sure has a lot of birds. In the Eastern US, there is only one hummingbird species (the ruby-throated), and Africa has none at all—all 350 species of hummingbirds are found only in the New World. read more…

End-of-Year Reflections: Michelle Matthews

End-of-Year Reflections: Michelle Matthews

2023 has been a year of transformational growth and loss. 

We received a $100,000 unrestricted grant from the Harold and Colene Brown Foundation in support of our education mission and for the second year welcomed 5th grade students from Pasadena Unified. The students learn about watershed, compost, and habitat, and they are often in awe when I show them what our community has accomplished over the past 18 years.

We celebrated the garden (on an unusually hot fall afternoon) by raising a record $45,000 at this year’s Autumn in the Garden gala. We honored Ground Breaker Cynthia Kurtz and Constant Gardener George Brumder with a poetry reading by Leah Thomas (founder of Intersectional Environmentalist) and gorgeous harp music by Nailah Hunter. Artist, actor, and Advisory Council member, Billy Zane painted during the event and you can have a chance to bid on his gorgeous artwork here! read more…

Landscape Share: Late Fall

Landscape Share: Late Fall

Life on Earth is faced with incredible ecological challenges. In response, we can devote a portion of our personal landscapes to the natural world — a horticultural sacred share: a portion set aside in our yards or balconies for life on Earth.* In our newly-revived native plant gardening advice column, we ask different gardeners (including Arlington’s experts) for their seasonal advice on habitat gardening in our shared landscapes.

(AJ) Winter is coming, which (contra HBO) is Southern California’s magical season of abundance. What should gardeners expect to see, for instance, between now and the new year?

(TS) Native plants will be soaking up winter rains for robust, healthy, deeply rooted growth in preparation for the dry summer months. Wildflower seeds will germinate and begin to show a light green fuzz. Winter food for birds and bees like toyon and manzanitas will be blooming. And we can enjoy the initial lull of winter before the burst of spring booms and the wildflower show begins.

(AJ) Can gardeners also take a rest right now? Or should we be hard at work?

(TS) Assuming that you aren’t planting a new garden or hand-watering, the gardener can also take a break from sheet mulching, planting, seeding, and so on. Simply sit back and wait for it to warm up again!

(AJ) I have a lawn *well, my landlord has a lawn* that I have planned to get rid of — can I start that process now? What method(s) have you used to kill lawns?

(TS) Nine out of ten times, when I’ve sheet-mulched lawns, I have [managed to] remove them. I take the long road beginning by turning the water off in late spring and sheet-mulching directly over the grass. I irrigate a few times a month after mulching, so that whatever needs to grow will poke its head out, and I can pull it by hand. I turn the water off completely by July, however, and just let the grass roast for the rest of the summer. It’s toast by October – the soil enriched and ready for planting natives.

(AJ) So sheet mulching should wait for the summer months … is there anything that a gardener can do now, if they want to get started with removing a lawn? read more…

Inside Arlington: William

Inside Arlington: William

Inside Arlington are the folks who keep us growing. In this column, we interview William Hallstrom, Garden Ambassador, who reflects on gardening, Arlington Garden, and himself.

(AG) What are your responsibilities at Arlington?

(WH) Too many to list in a short format interview? Okay, but for real, I was hired to sell marmalade, answer questions and interact with garden visitors, as well as keeping an eye on things in general. But I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot more. My favorite thing is that I get to have conversations on many different levels with folks coming to the garden, from casual chats with first time visitors just discovering us, to having more in depth discussions with our volunteers. 

(AG) How did you discover Arlington Garden? 

(WH) I grew up close to Arlington, so it’s maybe tricky for me to say for certain. I probably rode my bike through here when I was a kid. But I definitely rediscovered it in becoming a volunteer mid-pandemic. 

(AG) What appeals to you about gardens or gardening?

(WH) Gardening is the easiest way that almost anyone can connect with the natural world around us. Gardening is something that I feel like I can do regardless of how I’m otherwise feeling. read more…

Follow us on Instagram

arlington_garden_closeup5

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our team.

You have Successfully Subscribed!