MySoCalGarden
Find places to visit, learn the plants and ecological relationships that shape them, and bring those observations home to your own garden.
Garden Guide
Gardens, trails, waterways, and public landscapes to experience through their plants, habitat, history, and design.
Trail · Eagle Rock
Above the Eagle Rock neighborhood sits the large boulder that gave the community its name. Under the right lighting, shadows on the rock create a shape resembling an eagle. The Eagle Rock Canyon Trail is a short, relatively casual hike that climbs around and above the landmark. Despite its modest length, it offers broad views and an unusually good opportunity to examine the native coastal sage scrub growing around the neighborhood.
Demonstration Garden · Santa Monica
Not one, but three demonstration gardens are arranged side by side at Santa Monica Airport, just across the street from the soccer fields at Airport Park. They use a mix of California native plants and other drought-tolerant plants while demonstrating three garden functions: Play, Relax, and Entertain. The City of Santa Monica created the Airport Avenue gardens as part of its environmental and sustainability work. The gardens are located across from the park and directly next to The Cloverfield.
Pocket Park · Los Angeles
Sunnynook was the first park we visited. It functions less like a conventional destination park and more like an access point and pause along the LA River path. A small walking path leads toward steps, a pedestrian bridge, and a sitting area overlooking water, trees, and thick riparian growth in the river channel.
From the field
Visits and photo essays connecting plants with water, habitat, history, and ordinary public landscapes.
July 16, 2026
The theme of the day was change. When I began this project five years ago, photographing public spaces, demonstration gardens, and native preserves, m...
July 7, 2026
A morning visiting the LA River pocket parks in Frogtown and Elysian Valley became a lesson in how small public spaces, restoration, graffiti, and civ...
May 22, 2026
The abandoned cages of the Old LA Zoo are a reminder that progress is real, but rarely moves in only one direction.
At home
Gardening advice grounded in Southern California rather than generic rules.
April 13, 2026
Most seed catalogs do not really prepare you for it. They tend to show the more attention-grabbing forms, like the birdhouse gourds. Those can be drie...
February 8, 2022
If live in a house in Southern California there is about a 50% chance you already own at least one citrus tree. Here is everything you need to know to...
January 26, 2022
Hemp is an ancient crop, but there are a lot of myths about it. After about 100 years of oppression, the U.S. finally fully legalized the farming of h...
