TreePeople
Want to see how an average home in Los Angeles can save almost 100,000 gallons of water per year? Here is TreePeople member and volunteer Valerie Fontaine, converting her yard to a sustainable site. With a simple DIY project, Valerie transformed her garden in a weekend. Following Part 1 of our tutorial, here are your…
What is sheet mulching? Just the quickest, easiest way to go from a thirsty, outdated green shag carpet of a landscape to a sustainable garden in about the time it takes to mow the lawn. Follow these easy steps and you can do what fabulous TreePeople member and volunteer Valerie Fontaine recently did at her…
On January 15, 1990, three thousand people came out to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by planting 400 trees along the entire length of MLK Boulevard in South Los Angeles–seven miles in a single day. At this event, organized by TreePeople, each tree was named in memory of someone, and then adopted by a neighboring…
The term “food desert” describes an urban community that lacks access to fresh, healthy food in local shops and grocery stores. These are regions in our city where, for various reasons, neighborhood retailers can’t or don’t stock produce and healthful alternatives to processed fast food. In Inglewood’s “100 Seeds of Change” initiative, residents have taken…
Now is a perfect time to grow your garden green. While other parts of the world are snow-covered and frigid, Southern California’s mild, wet winters make this season ideal for planting climate-friendly natives that provide habitat for our native fauna. Here are two beautiful California evergreen shrubs to check out and add to your weekend…
Want to know how to survive the next natural disaster? Think community and good neighbors, not concrete barricades and security guards, as Eric Klinenberg recently recommended. Klinenberg says in an NPR interview, “In light of the risk we face with climate change, I sincerely hope that we invest in the social infrastructure. Because when a real disaster strikes,…
Starting January 9, students from 17 Los Angeles area middle and high schools will compete in TreeByTree, a social media campaign to win a field trip to help restore fire-damaged wilderness. You can support them by logging on to Facebook over the next five weeks and voting as often as once a day for your…
Legend has it that early residents of SoCal were so inspired by a lovely holly-like bush that they were inspired to call their new digs Hollywood. It’s easy to see why the legend spread even if it wasn’t true. The shrub that captured their imagination was the toyon, which grows throughout Southern California. During the…
In Los Angeles, we’re lucky we can get outside day and night, all year around. Celebrate our favorable climate by joining us for our last Moonlight Hike of 2012–tonight, Friday, December 28, at 6:30 p.m. It’s a family-friendly adventure that starts at TreePeople’s headquarters and explores the nighttime views and sounds of Coldwater Canyon Park….
Did you opt for a real Christmas tree this year? A lot of us grapple with the choice between real and fake, weighing the proverbial environmental impact of one vs. the other. One dilemma people face with a real tree is, what do I do with it after the holidays? Mulch it! While your tree…
Park operations director Jim Hardie calls it the “grasscrete circle”—also known as the TreePeople cistern, a 216,000-gallon underground storage tank, where we save rainwater filtered and collected from rooftops and the Parking Grove. The stored water irrigates TreePeople’s grounds in the warm months. For the past four years, the circle has been planted with wildflowers,…
Soil is as vital to environmental health as the plants that grow in it. If you watched the latest Ken Burns documentary, The Dust Bowl, or if your forebears settled in California because they had to flee the ruined soil of the Midwest, then you know what Burns means by “the worst man-made ecological disaster…