The Attack of the Designosaurs

Speaking of monsters (see “Garden Wise Guys” below), the time has come to talk of some of the design practices that ought to go the way of the Stegosaurus. Just as this ancient dinosaur became extinct when conditions changed around it, the changing conditions of our present world are making lots of formerly accepted gardening [...]

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Garden Wise Guys News

Learn about sustainable landscaping the fast, fun way. Join Santa Barbara landscape architects Owen Dell and Billy Goodnick as they host the popular sustainable landscaping sitcom Garden Wise Guys on City TV channel 18, County TV channel 20, or on the web.  In the current episode, “Lawn and Order,” the Wise Guys end up in [...]

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Getting Started in Your Own Landscaping Business

OK, so this is me hard at work at my drafting board, designing a new garden for one of my first clients. This photo was taken a few years ago; I’ve been at this a long time. When I first started doing landscaping, I didn’t realize it would become my life’s work. But here I [...]

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The Incredibly Stupid Water Thing

I’m not going to mention any names, but there’s a town in San Diego County that just did an incredibly stupid thing. Towns do stupid things all the time, of course, but for sheer obliviousness this one really stands out. Some time back a developer with a plan for developing a blighted property in the [...]

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Wonderful, Rotten Compost: An Introduction

WHAT’S COMPOST? Compost is nothing more than plant parts broken down by microorganisms into stuff that looks like soil. It’s the most natural, and the most common, recycling program on earth and it’s happening in your yard right now whether you do anything about it or not. In fact, here’s a case where benign neglect [...]

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