Eden's Need for Green

from: Waldie, D.J. "Eden's need for green," Los Angeles Times, 2 October 2005.

AUTHOR LAWRENCE Clark Powell remembered his mother arriving in Pasadena at the turn of the last century with her horticultural triumph: a geranium. It was a hard-to-keep exotic back East, a tender plant for middle-class women to hover over in the parlor. She kept her geranium on her lap on the long, transcontinental train trip, Powell recalled. And when she stepped off the platform in wintertime Los Angeles, she saw geraniums in bloom in every vacant house lot. They were as common as weeds. In humiliation (and perhaps with some relief), she threw away her pampered plant.

You might say that we've been tossing out the geraniums ever since. In its abundance, Los Angeles is a kind of garden, after all. Why would anyone need or care for more?

This is the paradox of nature in this city and among the reasons that lush L.A. also is park poor. . . .