Latin and the other languages used to designate botanical names can make the mundane seem compelling, and the unpleasant sound appealing. ‘Nasturtium’ certainly sounds better than ‘nose twister’, which refers to the reaction to the unpleasant fragrance of the flowers. Horticultural professionals can use such language to our advantage, and for more than designating real genera and specie. ‘Necrodendron’ certainly sounds more interesting than ‘dead tree’, and is less likely to offend tree huggers.
‘Pseudodendron’ is a euphemism for ‘fake tree’. Brent, my colleague in Southern California, sometimes points them out in interiorscapes, or worse, in real exterior landscapes. We sometimes analyze them as if they are real. We both are amused to see fake bananas or fake pineapples, or both, hanging from fake cocoanut palms. Sometimes, someone who overhears our conversation feels compelled to inform us that the pseudodendrons that we are so intrigued by are fake. Sometimes, someone…

Although relevant to the same disdainful weed that I wrote about earlier in https://tonytomeo.com/2018/10/24/horridculture-weed/ this article is about a completely different topic. That is why it is not a sequel. Nor is it a rant. It is instead an explanation of why so many of us choose to not use marijuana. It was written by an admired colleague who has much more experience with such matters than I do, and is therefore much more qualified to write about it. So, for today, I will deviate from standard procedure by refraining from my typical Wednesday rant, and by posting an article written by someone else. In fact, you can ignore the title above. This article below already has one.

Should the followers of Christ use Cannabis?J.S.Wilkinson 2016

Cannabis seems to keep coming up in conversations people around me are having. Watching the current trends of well-meaning people giving themselves to…

The big wide medians of San Vicente Boulevard in western Los Angeles had been lacking trees since the Red Car Streetcar rails were removed decades earlier. My colleague, Brent Green, had been wanting to add trees to the medians since he was a little kid, and then became intent on doing so after he became a renowned landscape designer in the region.

At about the same time, I was a nurseryman. In my work, it was not uncommon to dispose of a few items that were unsaleable. Sometimes there were entire crops of unsaleable plants; and in 1997, I needed to dispose of a group of coastal redwoods that had very minor kinks in their trunks.

That gave Brent an idea.

He wanted me to bring some of the trees to Los Angeles to plant them in the medians of San Vicente Boulevard just south of the Miracle Mile District…

Those of us who work in public landscapes find litter in the strangest of places. It gets everywhere. It is not necessarily put everywhere. It just has a sneaky way of getting everywhere. By nature, litter blows about and gets washed into creeks and rivers that flow out to the bays and oceans.
Of course, there is much more litter in public spaces with the most traffic, such as city parks, than there is out in remote places where fewer people go, such as hiking trails in state parks. People are not necessarily slobs, and most put their trash into the appropriate receptacles. There just happens to be more litter where people are because that is where most of the trash that becomes litter happens to originate. Most litter that accumulates on the sides of roadways was blown there from the open beds of pickups. Not much is discarded out…