Instead of Lippia, Try These Lawn Substitutes

Los Angeles Times. November 9, 2013. Cassy Aoyagi: Question: When I moved to Northridge in 1951, every nursery carried flats of lippia, a cheap, tough, drought-resistant ground cover and lawn substitute. When I ordered it at a nursery, it took months to get, in spite of the fact that it is grown in Northern California, and it was expensive. Do you know why it has disappeared?

Santa Monica Workman’s Cottage and Garden Tour

Santa Monica Conservancy News. September 2013. By Sherrill Kushner: Historic places can range from the grand to the humble and all contribute to a city’s unique history if preserved. A humble yet creatively renovated Victorian cottage of the late 1890s was the site of a recent Conservancy tour August 18. The home and gardens of Hilda Weiss and Wayne Lindberg revealed how a 130-year-old structure can be expanded and updated into a comfortable space adapted to today’s living standards while incorporating its historical features. (Page 4)

Dwell on Design: Top 10 Talks

Land8Lounge. July 13, 2013. FormLA’s Cassy Aoyagi and Wendy Proud of Mountain States Wholesale Nursery discussed the beauty, appropriateness, and water-wisdom of installing California native plants into the residential landscape. FormLA has trademarked a lawn mix called “IdealMow” that can be formulated specifically for a general region, vicinity, or a specific microclimate, while MSWN’s “use of desert-adapted plants as landscape materials” has been on the leading edge of landscape architecture in the arid west for more than 40 years.