Plants

Looking to grow a garden but have zero outdoor space? Italian company Microgiardini produces novelty growing kits in cans. Each can includes growing compound and seeds, so you just pop it open, find a sunny spot for it on your kitchen counter and add water. No need to buy planters and peat. It's an all-in-one instant mini garden. The cans are wrapped in attractive labels and contain a variety of herbs and plants, such as rosemary, lavender, mint, basil, chili peppers, tomatoes.

Amy and David Messinger's home in the Hollywood Hills posed vexing problems common to many properties in Los Angeles. The steep front and rear slopes were difficult to navigate, much less landscape. One side yard opened to the top of yet another embankment. The other side yard was flat lawn reduced to a muddy mess by sprinklers and poor drainage. For help, the Messingers hired landscape designer Joan Grabel of Park Slope Design in Studio City. Grabel, an artist-turned-gardenmaker, is known for creating functional, sustainable outdoor rooms with painterly flair.

LAS VEGAS -- If plants at the nursery scream when they see you coming, a maker of wireless speakers and smartphone-guided quadracopters thinks it has a solution for you. Parrot's Bluetooth device Flower Power aims to make the experience of gardening more fruitful and less deadly (for the plants). It's a new area of exploration for them: "eco-geek" products. The device, which looks kind of like a tuning fork or dowsing rod, sticks right into the soil. Using wireless sensors, it measures the sunlight, humidity, temperature and fertilizer level and transmits its findings over Bluetooth to the companion app on the user's iOS device.

Luster Leaf is best known for digital monitors that check the pH and moisture levels of your soil, but the company's SunCalc targets a different variable: light. The "sunlight calculator" measures the amount of sunshine that actually reaches a specific spot during a 12-hour period -- key to determining which plants should go where. A University of Maine global warming monitoring station put the SunCalc through its paces, and it ultimately performed on a par with the school's radiometer.

Nestled between two boulders on a low rise in the Jurupa Hills of Riverside County, a good 30 miles from its nearest living relative, lies the ultimate survivor -- an oak bush that researchers believe is 13,000 years old. That's 1,000 years older than a previously identified Palm Springs creosote bush that was thought to be the oldest plant in California, 8,000 years older than bristlecone pines and 10,000 years older than the redwoods. While it is one of the world's oldest living plants, it is probably not the oldest.

Plastic is anathema to many among the eco-conscious — but what if manufacturers could stop making so much of it from oil and start making more of it from plants? In a study in the journal Science, researchers in the Netherlands say they have developed a class of iron catalysts that help turn plant material — such as fast-growing trees and certain grasses — into the chemical building blocks used to make plastic products, drugs and even cosmetics. Plastic typically is made from a crude oil derivative and therefore depends on Earth's finite oil supplies.

When a wildfire swept into the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden last May, it left behind a smoldering mountain of debris. Except for one shovel, flames destroyed every tool the gardeners had accumulated over 83 years. Thousands of plants were gone, and thousands of botanical volumes too. A century-old, 9,500-square-foot house, eight of the garden's nine vehicles, the director's home, the split-rail fences lining tranquil paths -- all were turned to cinders. Until a Los Angeles nonprofit, ART from the ashes, saw a transforming opportunity, it was rubble without a cause.