HGTV

How did I get on HGTV's "Landscaper's Challenge"?  This is an embarrassing question to answer.  I am a humble person reader, but since you asked....

It is a well know fact all people on television are there because they're superior human beings. We are the chosen ones.  Some are selected for their superior genetics - the shocking blue eyes, the chiseled cheeks; some the unique ability to skip meals and avoid sweets; and some, like myself, for having a crap-hole of a backyard in need of a new fence.  One day, I opened the Home and Garden section of my local paper The Larchmont Chronicle and discovered a one inch add that read: 

"Searching for gardens in the Larchmont area to renovate for Home and Garden Television Network new show "Landscaper's Challenge"."  

All television personalities are called to their destinies by the Fates, as directed by Zeus. Little known fact: the Fates are big into personal ads.

The second awkward question strangers ask me about my HGTV garden renovation is:  Did they do it for free?  

Free?  Free?  Free?!  The marketing genius behind HGTV "Landscaper's Challenge" is you can sell commercial television time to sponsors; and then, find an eager, naive homeowner to pay for the product of the show.  In short, I paid a television station to renovate my garden.  You can practically smell their profit, can't you!  And, yes, I spent double what I had budgeted.  No, I wasn't paid to be on their television show.  Nor, do I, or my garden, receive residuals.  (I guess they feel all the wonderful days and evenings spent in my spendid garden is benefit enough.)  I did receive some free sod.  Also, a low quality rainbird sprinkler-timer which my water-guy (He has a masters degree in h2O; go figure.) said wouldn't be useful in the long-term for my garden.  I'm pretty sure the contractor walked off with the rainbird sprinkler timer.  

It was the really good kind of sod though.

I Become a Reality TV Star

Eventually, we will all take our turn on a reality television show.  I hope when your turn comes you dress better than me.

Larchmont Village

This blog is about my garden and about the little village I live in.

I grew up in a house surrounded by forest, but we never had a garden.  The two rose bushes we planted one Easter disappeared by summer.  We suspected our neighbor Tony.  (Tony was notorious as a plant thief among the neighborhood.  We had no evidence to support our claim - just the coincidence of disappearing plants reappearing in his ever-growing garden.)  Those disappearing rosebushes broke our hearts.  After that failed attempt at gardening, we never tried again.  I guess we thought it was useless to invest time and effort in something that you would never get to see bloom, that could just run off one night.  I still feel that way about dogs and teenagers.  

I live in Los Angeles now.  I've lived here a decade.  I own a 1912 Craftsman house that I've recently renovated top to bottom.  Most of the houses in this neighborhood were built in the teens and twenties.  This is one of the oldest neighborhoods of Los Angeles.  These houses were built as middle management homes for studio employees.  Paramount Studios is just a bike ride away.  Watch an old silent film and you'll see local street signs as Buster Keaton is chased by the Keystone Cops or tries to make off with someone else's furniture.  

Larchmont Village is one block of shops; not really a village at all.  People are always looking for places to gather in Los Angeles, a sprawling isolated city connected by agents that promise, "I can get you work if you move out here," superhighways and subways that like so many dreams - go nowhere.  Larchmont Village, with four coffee shops and a dozen restaurants, is a place to gather, a place to stroll with your baby, take a yoga class, buy a six dollar ice cream or two hundred dollar t-shirt.  We live adjacent to Larchmont Village; It's just an eight block walk. And because the weather is sunny here three hundred and sixty-three days a year, I have a garden - a fenced in garden with a locked gate. 

It's home.