If my articles start to seem somewhat deficient, it is all Brent’s fault. Really. I will need to be spending more time with GREEN; Greening Residential Environments Empowering Neighborhoods. It is a much more important project than what I am doing because it involves planting more street trees and trees in public places in Los Angeles, maintaining trees of the urban forest, and enforcement of tree preservation ordinances within Los Angeles. Brent has been very active with GREEN since we were in school, and it has really make a big difference in the parts of Los Angeles that have benefited from it.
I will need to be writing for the website and other social media outlets for GREEN, and consulting with others doing the same. To make matters more confusing, I will be working on yet ANOTHER projects later in January as well, but I can explain that a bit later.
When I started my writing here, it was initially intended as an outlet for my weekly gardening column. After a while I started recycling articles from last year as well. The space in between is filled in with my ‘elaborations’, which are supposed to be related to horticulture, but are sometimes about other funny but unrelated topics.
I hope to continue in such a manner than no one notices that I am also working on other projects. In fact, I believe that the other projects might be interesting topics here, which means that the different projects may actually compliment each other. We will find out as we go along. I will post updates about GREEN, which will soon be known as something else. I am sorry that the Facebook Page for GREEN has been deleted while we develop a new one. Otherwise, I would post a link to it.
Tony Tomeo 
Will look forward to your continued posting, and especially to those posts on the Green project!
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Love your tongue in cheek humor and your horticulture knowledge. I see why you don’t like snow. LA is lush!
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LA!? It is only lush because people keep planting too many trees there. We like it that way. it is naturally a desert. I only go there about once annually, so I can see how it has changed since the 1980s, and is more lush not that it had been. A very long time ago, people who lived there appreciated how they could grow so many things that could not be grown elsewhere in America, although it does not get cold enough for some of the fruit trees that everyone else in America enjoy.
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Ok. I enjoyed your hort posts but see I missed the part about you not living in LA. Hope you continue to blog…
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Oh my! I could not live there. It is too weird. However, I do consult with my colleague there almost daily, and I go there every January to plant street trees. I write for the Canyon News of Beverly Hills, which is an adjacent town to Los Angeles. (It is actually surrounded by Los Angeles.) I am actually almost four hundred miles to the north, between San Jose and Santa Cruz.
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I see! That’s a long distance. I’m guessing a whole different hardiness zone up near San Francisco. I can see you enjoy what you do.
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The funny thing is that almost all of the newspapers I write for just happen to be in similar zones. Only the Canyon News is in a very different set of zones. I don’t know how it worked out that way. There are more climate zones between Santa Cruz and San Jose than there are in the entire state of Kansas!
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Fascinating! Do keep up your writing!
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Thanks Tony. A related streetscape design system is Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (- SUDS – there are a number of good examples in one small area below Elysian Park in LA – I spent an afternoon wandering around there in 2011. basically the whole block from Glendale Freeway to where the 5 crosses the river lower down.
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Most of the areas where GREEN has been planting street trees are in parkstrips where SUDS would not fit, although some happen to be temporary planting where such systems and other systems will eventually be installed. For example, the median of San Vicente Boulevard was planted temporarily with fast growing white gums, even though we knew that the area would be getting landscaped in the future. It was nice for almost thirty years before new trees were finally planted to replace the ‘temporary’ trees. Some of the parkstrip trees will undoubtedly be removed when SUDS get installed, but we do not want to wait. Such projects can tale a very long time in Los Angeles.
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What a good project you are involved in Tony. We need the beauty of nature in our urban areas
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It has been a lot of fun. Back when we were in school, and shortly afterward, Brent and I started smuggling ‘flawed’ trees from the farms here I worked to Los Angles to plant in public places. We had no idea it would be going like this all these decades later.
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Well done
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