Sunday night was my annual Pumpkin Carving Extravaganza, and I must say my friends outdid themselves! Nothing makes me happier than seeing these crazy glowing orbs scattered around my front garden, and the costumed children on Halloween night love trying to figure out what is what as they run through the gauntlet of agaves and flaming tea lights...

All the pumpkins make quite an impact - I love seeing them from across the street or down the way a bit. Close up, the smell of the beeswax candles burning inside the hollow gourd smells so lovely, like a garden full of pumpkin pies! A friend of mine commented on how the sunjars are somewhat pumpkin-ish also ... they are! I officially have a fixation!

Pumpkins and gardens go together like chips and salsa - one really compliments the other. See, there is no reason to put the garden away after the flowers are gone; there is a whole season of leaves, grasses, and harvesty colors to enjoy.

I have my favorite pumpkin, but I'm not telling - do you have a favorite?

More pics if you click!

(Dexter shouldn't have to wear a respirator!)
So many people have lost everything in the Southern California fires this past week. Now that the weather has turned and the evacuees are allowed back to their homes, the real cost of the tragedy will be made clear. If you find it in your heart and budget to donate to help the victims, the Red Cross makes it easy online.

Animals are the other victims here - oftentimes those who have lost their homes have no place to go that will accept their pets. United Animal Nations helps out pet owners in crisis, and has mobilized an effort for those affected by the fires. Any tiny bit will help...

(getty images)

Why haven't I mentioned the FIRES?!?

As I'm sure all of you have heard, Southern California is engulfed in another FIRESTORM. This one is the biggest I've seen. Even though Eagle Rock is safe from the current fires, the situation is really bad - I suffer from asthma, and can't leave the house right now because of all the ash in the air. Last time we had fires, I ignored the warnings and decided to do some gardening. Within an hour, I was wheezing and couldn't catch my breath. After taking my meds I was fine, but I'll never tempt fate like that again. The sky is an eerie shade of gold, like sunset at 11am. The smoke hangs low in the sky, and it's everywhere you look, since the fires are in San Diego (to the south), Castaic (to the north), Running Springs (to the east), and Malibu (to the west). Los Angeles is surrounded by smoke and flames.

The temeratures are supposed to drop significantly tomorrow, which will help the firefighters (real life super-heroes, in my opinion) in beating back this yearly apocalypse. Cross your fingers for us!

For the past four months, my "Minions" - Minion J and Minion Z, have been tackling a series of projects around the garden with their trademarked enthusiasm, professionalism, and bad - ass design sense. Well, our time together has come to an end ... the boys have big lives to lead, and the graduate schools are calling. Jan and I couldn't be happier with the way things have turned out, and I'd like to show off their work now that it is all done and I can't jinx it. So please, check out:

THE BENCHES

These benches are made to fit together in a variety of ways as siamese twins, or to occupy opposite sides of the patio and be fraternal twins. They are painted slightly different shades of grayish blue (or bluish gray).

I LOVE the space between the male/female benches when they are configured this way ... the boys made them so that they don't fit exactly together, so that crack is always apparent.

They also spoon, and when they do they make a table. How versitile! How beautiful! How happy I am that these amazing pieces are MINE!

Aren't they the sexiest benches you've ever seen?

Okay, here it is, almost Halloween, and it is 87 degrees out. I thought that maybe, just maybe, we were actually going to have a real autumn, but no ... it was a fake, a bait and switch, a tease. I want so much to wear sweaters while carving pumpkins, but no - it's shorts and t-shirts. Again. Heavy sigh. This is the dark side of California's 'Outdoor Living All Year Long' weather - where's the cuddling? The bundling up? What is the use of having a wonderful fire pit if you are sweating every time you use it?

On the bright side (literally!) is the garden. Plants are acting like it's spring all over again. In a regular fall season, cannas would have bloomed themselves out and their leaves would be brown and crunchy, ready to be cut back for winter dormancy. In my garden, Canna 'Pretoria' is popping up like it is the first day of June and it has a whole summer in front of it. My Hawaiian striped Bamboo, Bambusa vittata 'Vulgaris', which only sends up new shoots in the spring, has gone wild and busted out with a big ole sprout!

So I'm ambivalent. I want sweaters and fires and cuddling, but I love fresh growth and pretty leaves and a lively garden. And of course, I can't have both.

Can I?

(I love the smell of fresh dirt in the morning...)

No matter what kind of garden you have - a mini - Versailles in Dallas, a suburban yard in Portland, a community plot in Brooklyn, a tropical patio in South Beach, or a pot on a windowsill in Chicago... you have to deal with your dirt. Actually, the proper term is soil, but if you want to call it dirt, by all means, go with it. Anyway - as the medium that all plants grow in, soil gets depleted over the course of a season, and needs to be replenished. And guess what? Now is the perfect time to do it. If you mark your calendar and make it a yearly task to 'do dirt duty' in mid-October, your pots and beds and borders will love you.

Do you ever notice that the soil in your pots seems to disappear? Where does it go? Does the plant eat it? Well, sort of; but some of it goes down the drainage hole, some of it is carried away by wind - and soil never stops breaking down, so the particles get much smaller and the nutrients in those particles get bound up with soil microbes and those microbes make the nutrients available for the plants. What gets me is that so many of us just let that soil in the pot disappear without replenishing it ... it's like buying groceries once and never re-stocking your fridge!

Once a year, do it ... re-pot your containerized plants; give them fresh soil with a scoop of organic fertilizer (unless we're talking succulents and drought tolerants - they can do without the fertilizers). If we're talking beefing up the soil in your garden - well, compost away, babies! Apply a two inch layer over all soil; you don't have to dig it in, the colonies of earthworms that live below ground will do it for you - isn't that nice? Remember, your plants are only as good as your soil is, so forget trying to make your plants beautiful - make your soil beautiful and the rest will fall into place!

On your feet, everybody! I'd like to give a big shout out to Eco- Warrior Al Gore, my hero! Way to go, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and all ... it couldn't have gone to a nicer guy, or a more important issue. As a gardener, global climate change is #1 on my list of Apocalyptic Worries, above rogue states with nuclear weapons and one more year of George W. Bush in the White House. I can't believe that there are still people out there who think humans have nothing to do with Global Warming. Well, they'll be feeling the heat along with the rest of us when the world heats up from betwen 7-20 degrees in the next century. I'll be out of a job (in the event I live 100 more years), and the impact on society will be devastating (without me designing gardens and writing cheeky commentary).

In Al's honor, I am changing all of my lightbulbs that aren't on dimmers to compact fluorescent ones! Anybody else have an Al Day Pledge?

Whew! I've been working on a garden installation for Elysian Landscapes the past few days, and it was a doozy. It was a front yard, a hillside, and practically vertical. There I was, in the blazing sun, pointing to the places on the hillside where the plants were to be placed. It was hard! Michael, our wonderful Project Manager, was running up and down that hill so fast I could swear he had a dormant billy goat gene that got activated. That was harder! And our incredible planting crew, consisting this day of Victor and Carlos, had to dig deep holes into that steep-ass hillside without causing a landslide and plant without falling and rolling into the street - that was hardest!

There is a secret to hillsides - use a limited number of focal, attention - getters ( Phormiums, Agaves), and then the rest should be groundcovers and root knitters, i.e. plants that root as they crawl across the soil and knit it together, adding a layer of stability to the potentially loose hillside. You'll notice that we've draped the planting area with jute - a landscape fabric that will decompose over time as the plants grow in, but helps to keep the hill stable until then. Because the worst thing that can ever happen to a vertical garden is for that hillside to fail and the entire thing end up in the street, or the pool, or the neighbor's yard (big lawsuit), or on top of your house (big drag).

As soon as the finished product grows in a bit, I'll give you a peek. Until then, just imagine how great it will look!

Shark Skin Agave - wow

Pam at Digging inspired me with a post about her love for Agaves, and I had to follow suit. I have yet to meet an Agave I don't love, one that I don't covet, one that I won't make room for in my fairly small garden. I even have three examples of Agave franzonii, a silvery-gray curly armed fellow that will eventually grow to 12 ft tall! What am I thinking??? I can't pass them up ... the stranger and sharper, the better. My favorite variety right now might be Agave fernandi -regis x scabra, otherwise known as the Shark Skin Agave. It is a rich gray color with black, fingernail-like terminal spikes and thin black margins - it's super cool.

Agave weberi - who can pass one up?
Or I might be more into Agave weberi, a truly handsome variety with a form that will knock you sideways. Or my heart might be forever bonded to Agave victoria-reginae, the "Queen of Agaves", who looks like a big, sexy artichoke. The variety I plant the most in client's gardens is Agave attenuata, because this wonder succulent looks at home in all styles of gardens - modern, tropical, dessert, cottage, ... you name it, I can put an A. attenuata in it.

Agave attenuata - at ease in all settings
Okay, I'm fickle. My passion for Agaves runs too hot to limit myself - my goal is to have them all, to experience their sharp, powerful intensity in my garden; to see how they affect the plants I put next to them with their hard, thorny nature. My desire for Agaves has no boundaries! Right now, I have fifteen examples of this amazing plant in my garden -

jump with me to see snaps of them all -

The Minions are building the most beautiful benches I've ever seen in my life - I can't believe they are going to be MINE! I can't show them to you until they're finished - a direct order of MJ and MZ, but they're almost done. A couple of days ago, they guys had one of them upside down to drill or sand or glue or whatever it is they do ... and MZ found a Lone Termite gnawing away at one of the legs.

The bench isn't even finished and the termite was already getting busy! What kind of an overachiever is this little guy? He's an insect! And what was he doing by himself, anyway? Don't termites travel in hordes? Is there a special name for what a bunch of termites are? (You know - a pride of lions, a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows...)Don't get me wrong, I was very happy not to see a termite posse in the vicinity ... but where there is one hungry termite, it stands to reason that somewhere nearby, lurking in a tree stump or in someone's chewed-up sub floor, the hoard or swarm or whatever is waiting for the signal to come on over and eat my benches.

So this termite was executed, hopefully before it sent a message to its comrades!

When upgrading a garden, you have to be brutal, and sometimes there are casualties. I will not mourn this termite. And neither should you.