Gardeners

When the last Jungle Cruise boat docks for the night and lights fade to black on Sleeping Beauty's Castle, the real work begins. At lush Pixie Hollow, gardeners don miner's headlamps as they begin uprooting stubborn weeds. On Main Street, custodians scrape chewing gum off the sidewalk. And over at Mickey's Toontown, painters sand and recoat chipped handrails. Few see it happen, except perhaps for the dozens of feral cats that emerge from their hiding places to prowl the park after hours, stalking rodents.

The congregation was quiet — teary-eyed but smiling — as Bill Coburn, in a eulogy to his wife of 62 years, spoke of the passions of his beloved Marian. Travel. Walt Disney's Dopey. Elephants, both real and miniature. Reruns of "The Golden Girls. " Her church. And roses. Marian Stanton Coburn loved roses so much she planted 65 rosebushes in the North Hollywood home where she had lived since 1930. On a chilly, sunny Saturday last month, Bill Coburn managed a small smile as, true to her wishes, his wife's ashes were buried beneath roses in a memorial garden outside St. David's Anglican Church.

Joanne Clarke, a legal secretary in her late 50s, leads the way down a pale green hallway in her modest Costa Mesa home, past a small guest room on the right and a blue tiled bathroom on the left. At the end of the hall, she opens a door, pushes aside a thick black curtain and ducks inside. "Isn't this wild?" she says, gesturing to the high-tech marijuana grow room she and her husband recently installed. "This used to be my daughter's bedroom. " Wild is one word for it. Bright is another.

In Chinese, penjing means “potted scenery.” Beginning Tuesday (today) through May 10, you can see at least 20 penjing, the precursor to Japanese bonsai, during the Landscapes in Miniature exhibit at Lan Su Chinese Garden Portland, Ore.  “In the West, we understand 'garden' to mean plants, but a Chinese garden includes poetry, calligraphy, rock, water and plants,” says Glin Varco, the horticulture manager for the garden....

Every time a client calls, Martin Alamillo gets nervous. Since last summer, more than 10 of his clients have discontinued their weekly gardening service. Several are behind on their payments, including one woman who owes him nearly $1,000. Alamillo and his two crews are still out mowing lawns, blowing leaves and picking weeds, but he estimates that business is down as much as 20%.

Ask Genara Paxtor about her corn stalks, and her sun-baked face breaks into a wide grin as she tosses up her chin and gestures to indicate just how large they've grown. Six months ago, Paxtor began cultivating a patch of earth in the Francis Avenue Community Garden, a small, lush space in the otherwise densely populated Koreatown neighborhood. The 43-year-old is also growing tomatoes, peppers, onions and radishes.

Re the article "Era Passes From the Landscape--Japanese-American Gardeners Are Retiring, Yield Routes to Latinos," Column One, Dec. 21): My father started gardening after World War II because he had no job skills. He dragged his three little boys to work with him. All the while, he kept telling us: "This is the type of work you will be doing if you don't get an education! Study hard and make something of yourself!" The work ethic instilled in us has served me well. Now, I see a lot of Latino gardeners and it warms my heart to see some with their children helping out. I know that their kids will become successful from the lessons they are learning.

El Mirador in Montecito was once known as a special place not only because it boasted extraordinary gardens but because, despite the absence of a main house on the 70-acre estate, it became the site of spectacular soirees hosted by the daughter of Chicago meatpacking scion J. Ogden Armour. Now, decades later, the gardens have been refurbished and are again a lush retreat--albeit for a flock of Chilean flamingos, Australian cockatoos, African crowned cranes and other endangered birds.

Gardeners on Monday continued their hunger strike outside City Hall to protest the city's ban on gas-powered leaf blowers. Top, Abel Rosales of Reseda fills a cup with steaming water early in the morning. Above, the day's first rays of sun have yet to reach the gardeners' station at the bottom steps of City Hall. Left, Roberto Cabrera peers out from a sleeping bag in a tent on the South Lawn.

Gardening topics respondents want to learn more about, based on a random survey of 220 California households. Topic Percent Interested Insect Problems 52.5% Weed Control 45.0 Plant Diseases 41.0 Fertilizers 31.5 Irrigation 28.0 Safe Use of Pesticides 25.0 Bird, Animal Pest Problems 7.0 Other 17.0 SOURCE: R. L. Polk Co., University of California Cooperative Extension.

It's never been easier to feel like a natural woman. The 1960s mantra about getting ourselves back to the garden now applies to an increasing number of beauty products, with some small companies literally going to the garden and farm to bring customers fresh, natural, pure and organic ingredients in their hair- and skin-care items. These products provide an alternative to more mainstream offerings, which over the last half-century have become increasingly laden with synthetics that some would rather avoid.

Music producer Terry Lewis and his wife, Indira, have listed their Malibu estate for sale at $4.5 million. The one-acre property includes a Spanish-style house, open and covered patios, a sports court, a swimming pool with a spa and gardens. The 6,710-square-foot open-plan home, built in 2001, includes a media room, five bedrooms and 51/2 bathrooms. The ocean-view master suite features a sitting area and two walk-in closets. Lewis is part of a songwriting and production team with Jimmy Jam. The Grammy-winning Jam and Lewis have produced hits for singers including Janet Jackson, Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey.

GIVERNY, France - When James Priest is asked to strike a Claude Monet pose and stroll under the famous arched trellises lining the pathway of the painter's world-renowned garden, he becomes almost giddy, his excitement melting into a grin. "Compare me to Monet?" asks the 54-year-old gardener, standing between the lush strokes of yellow, pink and red tulips - nature's spring palette - that glow in the midday light in this preserved village 45 miles northwest of Paris. To Priest, no compliment could be higher, and, as he quickly insists with playful charm, undeserved: "Nobody can fill his shoes.

This post has been updated. See below for details. Makers of the defiantly ugly (yet quite comfortable) footwear Crocs are apparently making the leap into the modern art world this June with a limited-edition design in honor of the 100th birthday of painter Jackson Pollock. The makers of the rubbery clog-styled shoes favored by chefs, hospital workers and all sorts of people who spend hours on their feet will release a paint-spattered version that was inspired by a photograph taken of the floor of the late painter's barn in Long Island, N.Y. Named for the artist and his late wife, Lee Krassner, the Pollock-Krasser House and Study Center in East Hampton will receive a royalty from each pair, which will list for $50, according to a report by the Associated Press.

Gloria Cox may be a grandmother, but she's grinning like a little kid as she slips into a shady nook formed by twining juniper branches in the Japanese Garden at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Cox, a veteran Huntington docent, says she has missed visiting "my favorite spot" - which she discovered with her grandsons - and the rest of the garden, which closed for renovation last April and is reopening Wednesday in time for its centennial. The Japanese Garden is welcoming back old friends like Cox and hoping to attract new ones with $6.8 million in improvements that include the installation of a ceremonial teahouse and tea garden and restoration of the late 19th century-style Japanese House.

Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne have sold their oceanfront house in Malibu for $7.925 million. Listed at $10 million last year, the price had been reduced to $8.795 million. The three-story beach house features a walled garden, five bedrooms, five bathrooms and 4,500 square feet of living space. The master bedroom suite and a wood-paneled library take up the entire second floor. Songwriter Ozzy Osbourne, 63, was the lead singer for the heavy metal group Black Sabbath before launching his solo career.

Re "Gardeners Notion Blossoms at Pierce," Aug. 25. Your story about the efforts of the gardening staff at Pierce College to beautify the campus at their own expense really got me thinking about how the community could support this effort. What they have accomplished on their own is commendable and noteworthy, and I think it would be worth considering some additional avenues of support. It would seem that the adjacent West Valley Occupational Center might be able to grow some of the plants for Pierce as part of their landscaping program.

It all started about four years ago, when Duc Tran bought a few roses to speckle a bit of color around the entrance to Pierce College. Tran, a gardener at Pierce, paid for the flowers himself, inadvertently sparking a long-running but friendly competition among the gardeners to fill the campus with lush blossoms and neatly pruned shrubs.

Members of the Huntington this week got an early peek at a new hillside tea garden in the making. It's part of a $6.8 million spruce-up of the 100-year-old Japanese Garden that reopens to the public April 11. The centerpiece of the tea garden is a ceremonial teahouse that comes with a dizzying travel tale and a bit of serendipity. The teahouse named Seifu-an (Arbor of Pure Breeze) was built in the 1960s in Kyoto, Japan, and constructed at the Pasadena Buddhist Temple not far from the San Marino gardens.

Maybe it's Marilyn Hagerty working her magic: Olive Garden  is reversing out of a long slump with more visitors and better sales. A few weeks after the elderly North Dakota reviewer's piece on a new Olive Garden restaurant in Grand Forks went viral, the chain's parent company, Darden Restaurants Inc., said its fiscal third-quarter profit soared more than 8% to $164.1 million, or $1.25 a share, from $151.7 million, or $1.08, in the same period...