Gardens

A former San Marino couple has donated $2 million for the second-phase construction of the Chinese Garden at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. The donation by Judy Yin Shih and Joel Axelrod, who now live in Oregon, will fund the Clear and Transcendent Pavilion, a traditional Chinese structure, which will be at the edge of the lake on the garden's undeveloped north side, Huntington officials announced. In a statement, Shih cited her experience as a Huntington docent in 2008 as helping to inspire the gift.

Kendall Brown, professor of Asian art history at Cal State Long Beach and one of the experts to weigh in on the Storrier Stearns garden in Pasadena ( see related article ), has a book coming out this month. It's titled “Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America ,” and for this edited Q&A, we asked about his fascination with Japanese gardens, how best to experience them and why our notion of Japanese gardens is not entirely Japanese. What do you find most intriguing about Japanese gardens?

By the time Jim Haddad inherited his family's Pasadena property in the mid-1980s, the garden was in a state of neglect. His parents had stopped maintenance on the nearly 2-acre Japanese-style garden a decade earlier, when Caltrans acquired about a third of an acre by eminent domain for extension of the 710 Freeway. Plants had died. The pond had gone dry. Garden ornaments had been sold or stolen. The teahouse, overgrown with moss and weeds, had burned to the ground. PHOTOS: Historic Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden revived in Pasadena "Every real estate agent around wanted to sell off the lot in parts.

If the phrase “native plants” conjures the image of a scrubby yard that looks more like wild parkland than lovingly tended landscape, then Lynnette Kampe asks for a little open-mindedness. “You can't typecast these gardens,” said Kampe, executive director of the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants, which holds its annual garden tour this weekend. The 42 featured properties include romantic cottage gardens, native gardens with clean lines and a modern aesthetic, and some pretty substitutes for traditional lawns, she said.

A former San Marino couple has donated $2 million for the second-phase construction of the Chinese Garden at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. The donation by Judy Yin Shih and Joel Axelrod, who now live in Oregon, will fund the Clear and Transcendent Pavilion, a traditional Chinese structure, which will be located at the edge of the lake on the garden's undeveloped north side, Huntington officials announced. In a statement, Shih cited her experience as a Huntington docent in 2008 for helping to inspire the gift.

If your bucket list includes traipsing through Voltaire's private library or visiting the Vatican after hours, Kensington Tours' new Elite Collection offers a chance to get beyond the standard tourist experience. "Creating extraordinary experiences, no matter the size of a client's pocketbook, is what Kensington Tours was built on -- and for those with extra means what could be more extraordinary than behind-the-scenes access to the sights, people and cultures that have shaped our world," Phil Sproul, president of Kensington, said in an email.

Architectural Record has published its 2013 Record Houses, the magazine's picks of top residential designs including a concrete beach retreat on the Argentine coast, a New York country escape that's "a cross between a Modernist skyscraper and a treehouse " and a minimalist Japanese house that is the equivalent of architectural haiku . But the place that grabbed our eye first was Patrocínio House , a 2,650-square-foot design in...

John Fendley, a.k.a. Farmer John, compiled for L.A. at Home a list of the top heirloom seeds that Southern California gardeners are ordering this season through his Sustainable Seed Co. Fendley, whose company is based near the Mendocino National Forest, was motivated to collect old varieties after he noticed that the number of broccoli seeds in the nonprofit Seed Savers Exchange catalog dropped from about 80 types in the 1980s to only four or...

Scott Daigre, organizer of Tomatomania!, expects bigger things from his annual pop-up sales, which last year sold upward of 50,000 tomato plants. He paused during Tomatomania! in Encino last week to talk about what's new this year: a growing buzz for blue tomatoes, the most novel novelties among about 140 varieties of heirlooms and rare hybrids that he sells. We asked Daigre to explain the story behind the new blues for this edited Q&A. What's with the blue tomatoes? It's just what people are talking about in tomatoes right now. It's novel, appearing more and more.

A 72-year-old gardener was found dead in the backyard pool of a Sunland home, and police believe it was a drowning. The renter of the single-family home in the 10900 block of Meseta Drive near Orcas Avenue came home around 6 p.m. Tuesday and saw his gardener's truck parked outside. Around 9 p.m., when he left for the store, he noticed the truck was was still there, but there was no sign of the gardener. He asked neighbors who also use the gardener, and they indicated they had not seen him. Authorities say the gardener's family was called, and his son and daughter rushed over to the house and started searching for him along with neighbors.