Landscaping

Keeping that thick, verdant blanket of grass watered in these dog days of summer is about as economical and conservation-minded an enterprise as gassing up the family SUV for the weekly commute or a long-distance vacation. It costs a bundle, and pretty soon you have to do it all over again. But before yanking out the Marathon and replacing it with concrete or AstroTurf, it's best to check out the myriad landscaping rules, regulations and ordinances individual municipalities enforce.

POTOSÍ, Bolivia - A gentle breeze swept across Laguna Colorada, momentarily turning the magenta mineral lake water neon-orange as it rippled around the knobby knees of several dozen flamingos. Suddenly, a pair of frisky vicuñas trotted through the shallows, sending the flamingos aloft like a flock of hot pink pterodactyls. It was that kind of week. I tend to be lightheaded at altitude in the best of times, but road tripping across the Bolivian altiplano was downright psychedelic.

Foreclosed homes have plenty of issues, among which is blighted landscaping. The Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District hopes to rectify that problem. In an effort to keep those lawns from turning brown and further decreasing property values, it has proposed implementing a voluntary "green lien" on the abandoned homes. The lenders or other owners of the repossessed homes who participate in the program would allow the water board to keep the water meters running until the vacant homes are bought.

ARSAL, Lebanon - When Mustafa Ezzedine, a Sunni Muslim from this Sunni border town, wanted to buy some furniture, he undertook a clandestine trip into war-torn Syria rather than face harassment, or worse, from Shiite Muslim security officers or townsmen in nearby Lebanese communities. "Although geographically we are in Lebanon, spiritually we are with Syria," said Ezzedine, 66, who was recently freed after being held hostage along with 10 other Sunnis in reprisal for the kidnapping of a Shiite in Arsal.

YOU'D THINK it would be easy to murder a lawn, since many of us have had plenty of success without even trying. But finishing off that green sponge takes a smart strategy, or it may come back to haunt you. Removing lawn seems basic enough: Dig it up and haul it away. But it's best to subordinate reflex and forgo brute hacking, experts say. First of all, yanking out sod "can be back-breaking work," says Steve Gerischer, a Glassell Park landscape designer who gives talks on turf termination for the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants as well as the Los Angeles County Arboretum.

Here's an interesting fact: Only 100 feet divides Adventureland from Frontierland. While one land drips with banyans and bromeliads, the other sizzles with cactus and sage. It's within this great divide that perceptive visitors can find their own garden inspiration -- one of many masterfully conceived mini-landscapes at Disneyland whose design just might work at home. That's right. Now that the summertime crowds are starting to ebb, put on the mouse ears and head to Anaheim.

Blame it on "Edward Scissorhands." Ever since the release of that movie last December, Tom Feldner, a landscape contractor and owner of Green West Nursery in Orange, can't seem to keep up with the demand for his topiary animals. He calls the sculpted and formed shapes he creates "animated trees." "Of course, I was familiar with all the topiary animals you see around Disneyland.

CORONADO, Calif. -- The U.S. Navy has decided to spend as much as $600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications to obscure the fact that one its building complexes looks like a swastika from the air. The four L-shaped buildings, constructed in the late 1960s, are part of the amphibious base at Coronado and serve as barracks for Seabees. From the ground and from inside nearby buildings, the controversial shape cannot be seen.

PRUNING trees and shrubs to form hedges is as old as gardening. In the great estates of the past, hedges framed views, defined borders and marked transitions to wilderness. In modern Los Angeles, an average lot is a sixth of an acre. A hedge allows homeowners to soften the transition to the street or blot out an eyesore, be it an alley, a McMansion, a crack house, a neighbor's kitchen window, a jalopy or junkyard dog. Increasingly, hedges no longer frame views. They are the view.

One of the delights of gardening is gathering a basketful of fresh-cut flowers to fill the house with fragrance and eye-catching color. A well-planned landscape can yield ample flowers for enjoyment indoors as well as outdoors, say garden professionals. "We've noticed just in the last year that an increasing number of Orange County residents are turning away from the once-popular quick and easy, low-maintenance landscape designs.

We recently stayed at Dinah's Garden Hotel in Palo Alto. It's set in six beautifully landscaped acres, with a swimming pool, lake, ducks, blossoming cherry trees, Asian sculptures and large rooms with all the comforts you could want. Very reasonable rates and a helpful and gracious staff. Dinah's Garden Hotel, 4261 El Camino Real, Palo Alto; (650) 493-2844, http://www.dinahshotel.com . Lee Soskin Studio City

Martyl Langsdorf, the artist who created the widely known Doomsday Clock for the first cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, died March 26 at a rehabilitation facility near her home in suburban Chicago of complications from a lung infection. She was 96. Since its introduction in 1947, the drawing of the Doomsday Clock has kept watch as international incidents flared. The clock is a symbol of the Nuclear Age, whose minute hand moves closer to midnight - and presumed annihilation - with each major immediate danger.

Re "This landscaping is a crime," Column, April 7 As a Los Angeles taxpayer, this irks me no end. A $170-million cost overrun for the Los Angeles Police Department's new headquarters, with $1 million spent on failed landscaping? You have got to be kidding me. This doesn't even include the extra $400,000 on the latest "upgrade" to fix the grounds surrounding the building. Los Angeles should follow the example of many cities in Nevada and Arizona: Plop down some sand, boulders, native plants and cactus and be done with it. It looks great, it's ecologically sound and it's cheaper to maintain.

If the penal code had a section on landscaping crimes, the Los Angeles Police Department would need a full-time squad to go after everyone responsible for the ongoing fiasco on its own property. It's been 3 1/2 years since the new headquarters opened at 1st and Spring streets, and the city is still trying to get the landscaping right, with planter boxes empty, dead palm trees still standing, a scrubby dirt garden near the memorial to fallen police officers and piles of soil and sand blighting the landscape.

A new one-room permanent collection installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on view for the rest of 2013, raises provocative questions in skillfully astute ways. The subject is 19th century American landscape art, and the artists range from the relatively obscure to the celebrated -- Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, George Inness, John F. Kensett, Winslow Homer and more. The west wall has a spare lineup of all five LACMA paintings that show the American West, hung to create a continuous horizon line.

It takes only one word to describe the extra touch of lunacy in this year's March Madness. That word is: Gonzaga. With the NCAA men's basketball tournament set to begin this week, the small Jesuit university is the nation's No. 1-ranked team, ahead of traditional powerhouses Duke, Indiana and Kansas. The Bulldogs' lofty status epitomizes a season that has produced no clear-cut favorites. A dozen or more teams have a solid chance to win the championship. Lesser names such as St. Louis and Virginia Commonwealth rank as legitimate dark horses.

Labor costs are increasing for the landscaping industry as the minimum wage rises, the number of teen-agers and young adults in their early 20s drops and immigration reform restricts the availability of immigrant workers, industry officials and experts say. Wages now start as high as $7.50 an hour for unskilled workers in Massachusetts and Connecticut, said Edward T. Wandtke, president of All-Green Management Associates, an industry consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio.

Much of the time Los Angeles can feel like a huge, messy jigsaw puzzle, with pieces left out - a city that evolved by accident. Parts of it don't work, parts of it seem newly broken, parts are truly luminous - but hidden - and they all seem to have nothing to do with each other. But Christopher Alexander sees things differently. "There was this desire, this strategy, this intent to have Los Angeles evolve in a manner that was unlike any other city," says one of the curators behind the Getty's new Pacific Standard Time architecture initiative.

One of the great joys of being a fashion critic is the ability to observe how designers all over the world riff on and reinterpret the L.A. look. Watching the spring runway collections, whether I was sitting at a runway show in the crumbling Beekman Palace in New York City or at a 13th century convent in Paris, I was dreaming of California. It wasn't just homesickness, though after weeks on the road, that could have been part of it. I was thinking about how the clothes would play here, how they might have been influenced by the vision of casual luxe that California has exported to the world, and how they might have been inspired by the landscape, art, architecture and attitude of this incredible place.