On March 5, what has amounted to a year-long birthday party will conclude with a gala at Descanso Gardens. Everyone with $75 and a love of native plants is welcome to attend a shindig marking the 50th year of the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers & Native Plants.

Celebrating the stoic glory of our native flora is a great cause, but this isn't just about the birthday of an organization affectionately called Teddy Payne by KPCC radio host John Rabe. It's not even about the English seedsman for whom the foundation is named. It's about the foundation's special projects coordinator, the homegrown horticulturist Lili Singer, who turns 61 on Saturday and whose nearly four decades of garden teaching in Southern California has much to do with the rise of not only the Theodore Payne Foundation, but also the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden, the Southern California Horticultural Society, the city of Santa Monica's sustainable landscape program and many independent nurseries and private gardens.

Singer has done so much on so many fronts that she has more hats than a Stetson salesman, all western. Some will remember her as a 23-year-old who joined her father's Northridge succulent nursery, Singers’ Growing Things, in the early 1970s, or from the now-gone Merrihews nursery in Santa Monica, where she and a customer started the Southern California Gardener, a newsletter that ran from 1991 to 1999. It had thousands of subscribers and earned her a cabinet full of Quill and Trowel Awards.

For many it wasn't the newsletter that made Singer a familiar name but "The Garden Show," public radio broadcasts on KCRW between 1982 and 1996. That Friday program's heyday ended with the death of her father. At its most popular, Singer would simply chat live with gardeners. "It was live call-in, no producer, no computers," she said recently. "Sometimes I brought a Sunset book in, but it took too long to look things up so I did it all out my head."

She is so good at answering questions out of her head that when the city of Los Angeles launched its watering restrictions years ago and Angelenos were up at arms, insisting that their plants would die, public radio station KPCC asked Singer to field live calls alongside then-water chief H. David Nahai. Burbank and Pasadena water companies have since hired her to speak to their customers.

Community Gardens Dispatch No. 16: Fountain Community Gardens, Los Angeles

Only a few years ago, the tale of the 20,000-square-foot lot at the corner of Fountain Avenue and St. Andrews Place -- a stone's throw from the 101 Freeway in Hollywood -- was just plain sad.

Since the 1970s, it had been used as a city-owned parking lot for trailers offering temporary housing for the homeless and families in transition, mainly poor single mothers. That program ended in the '80s, but the trailers were left behind, and local gangs and meth cooks moved in, gardeners here say. After a fire that began on the lot burned down a neighboring house, the community demanded that the city take action. A higher fence was built, and the site was slated for a community center.

The recession shelved that project but in 2009 led to another solution: the Fountain Community Gardens, Hollywood's newest and largest collection of community plots.

Artist Alex Alferov, pictured at right, the site's first garden master, grew up in the neighborhood and was an altar boy at the landmark Russian Orthodox church down the street. He has seen the area's population shift from Eastern European and Italian to largely Central American, Mexican, Thai and Armenian, and the community garden, he says, has helped to bring back an invigorating, multicultural energy.

The vibe starts at the distinctive front gate, metal cut in in the Mexican folk-art style of papel picado. The work was done by east L.A. artist Michael Amescua, whose art also adorns Solano Canyon Community Garden.

Fountain Community Gardens has 67 immaculately tended plots, most 5-by-15-foot raised beds. (That's Michael Mapel cleaning up his parsley in the photo at top.) The land is nearly ringed by 25 native species and a few young citrus. Mature pines are scattered around the lot, and though the needles are left as mulch, the cones are gathered up neatly and arranged decoratively here and there.

The plots reflect the mix of gardeners: Chinese greens rise next to Italian basil; sugar cane and chayote grow next to artichoke and asparagus. At $10 a month, a plot here isn't not cheap compared with some other community gardens. Being Hollywood, the location attracts some gardeners who work in entertainment, some are homeless, and still others are in halfway houses.

Planting season in Southern California is rarely busier than midwinter, when nursery lots crammed with Christmas trees give way to displays of fruit trees and roses. If you're haunting stores to select an apricot tree, a flowering bramble, a hedge or even a specimen tree, plant pathologist Jim Downer has a message for you: "Good gardening starts with good plant selection."

By which he means: If the stock you find is root-bound, walk away.

The advisor for the UC Cooperative Extension in Ventura County further warns that bad plants can look good in nurseries. Constant watering and pruning can conceal a multitude of problems. If you see, say, a Santa Rosa plum tree three times the size of the new bare-root stock, or a big ficus tree in a small pot with a low price, it is probably root-bound. Rather than throw it away, less scrupulous nurseries might leave it around to see if they can sucker you into buying it.

One way to check if a plant has outgrown its pot is to look down at the root ball and feel along the side of the pot to see if circularized roots are creeping up in search of space.

Another method is to ask staff to gently tilt the plant and briefly slide it from its can. A thin film of feeder roots lining the bottom can be acceptable. A coil of thick roots growing in a corkscrew around the side means that the plant is a dud.

Spare time being short and freeways being long, many of you may be tempted, as I was recently, to buy last year's bare-root trees because of their size. More plums! Faster!

As soon as I got them home and found most of them to be dramatically root-bound, I was reminded of the real bottom line: more problems, sooner.

Community Gardens dispatch No. 15: Norman Harriton / Franklin Hills

Location is not everything. Just look at the Norman Harriton / Franklin Hills Community Garden, perched at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, west of the landmark Shakespeare Bridge in one of Los Angeles' lovely neighborhoods. The garden sits on land owned by the Lycee International de Los Angeles school, near the classrooms and soccer field of Lycee's Los Feliz campus. It has an eye-popping view of the city, spanning  the foothills of Silver Lake west to the hump of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The view within the garden, however, is less evocative. Bougainvillea and grapevines do their best to camouflage a chain-link fence. Although the rules call for year-round maintenance, it's obvious that some plots haven't been visited since summer, possibly earlier.

For a city where gardeners may wait two years for a plot to open, the waiting list here is surprisingly short, though given the condition of the place, perhaps the bigger surprise is that there's any waiting list at all. Membership to the tiny garden -- 7,000 square feet divided into 26 plots, six reserved for Lycee gardening classes -- costs $50 a year. Plots with active gardeners are easy to spot: You actually can see the soil. Everywhere else you'll see a carpeting of pine needles or an equally thick layer of invasive Johnson grass.

The garden is named after its founder, the late Norman Harriton, a local resident who worked with the Franklin Hills Residents Assn. and the Lycee to tear up asphalt, cut down mature palms and put in watering stands. Some of the earliest supporters were local real estate agents who recognized that community gardens are great for property values. The result was a secret garden that few newcomers know exists. But Harriton passed away in 2004 and things have not been the same since.

Nowadays when garden coordinator Michele Flynn stops in to tend her plot, the one thing she notices is neglect. 

"There should be one main rule: Once you get a plot, you have to use it," she says, admitting that she's frustrated by the lax enforcement. "If you don't use it, you're out. You're supposed to garden all year, but most people don't."

There are no restrictions on watering timers — verboten at many community gardens — and during the downpours last month, timers in the garden were still operating as usual, irrigating plots in the rain, Flynn says.

Emily Green, who blogs "The Dry Garden" for us every Friday, recently wrote about the imaginative low-water landscape at the Valley Performing Arts Center at Cal State Northridge. Photographer Anne Cusack took some additional photos, which we've combined with Green's to create a photo gallery of landscape architect Stephen Billings' creation.

Photo Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

RELATED:

More than 100 California home and garden galleries

The former librarian at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden doesn't remember exactly when the visitor wandered into her office and let drop that he was a descendant of George Engelmann. What Joan De Fato does remember is telling him that there was a grove of rare oaks on the site that had been named for his ancestor.

You don't have to be a descendant of one of the fathers of American botany to share in what De Fato recalls as his pleasure and amazement. The arboretum's grove of Quercus engelmannii, pictured above, is one of the last local stands of a native tree once so common to the foothills that an alternate common name is the Pasadena oak.

The first thing that strikes you upon reaching this group of roughly 200 trees is how much more animated it is by birds, butterflies and scampering lizards than the more cultivated parts of the garden.

The second is that it is drop-dead beautiful.

Better than beautiful. Engelmanns are the oak lover's oak. At least this is the case with Bart O'Brien, plantsman at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont, who has long argued that the arboretum's stand deserves special status.

Although other Engelmann groves are in Riverside, San Diego and Los Angeles counties, according to O'Brien, molecular studies have shown that the arboretum's Engelmanns are clearly distinct. The stand is their largest expression, with trees that were probably once part of the population also found at Santa Anita Park and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

In case you've missed Jeff Spurrier's weekly dispatches from community gardens -- the people and the plantings, the experiments and the solutions -- let us help you catch up:

Dispatches No. 1 and 2: Our kickoff feature on dynamo Milli Macen-Moore and the follow-up on the Milagro Allegro garden's uplifting history

Dispatch No. 3: For those waiting for a plot, garden sharing proves to be a good alternative

Dispatch No. 4: The Main Street garden in Santa Monica, a pioneer in the movement

Dispatch No. 5: A smart design for wheelchairs at Park Drive in Santa Monica

Dispatch No. 6: At Solano Canyon, gardening in the shadow of Dodger Stadium

Dispatch No. 7: On Skid Row, ingeniously gardening by the bucket

Dispatches No. 8 and 9: Ocean View Farms, true to its name and composting like crazy

Dispatch No. 10: How raised beds have made the Rockdale garden in Eagle Rock

Dispatch No. 11: In Silver Lake, community garden as pocket park

Dispatch No. 12: Veteran seed savers at the Altadena Community Garden keep their harvests going, and going, and ...

Dispatches 13 and 14: At the Learning Garden in Venice, Spurrier checks out the Seed Library of Los Angeles and watches a grafting master in action

Stay tuned for new installments every Wednesday. Bookmark L.A. at Home and join us on Facebook, where we have a page dedicated to gardening in the West.

Photo: Eagle Rockdale Community Garden, better known as just Rockdale. Credit: Ann Summa

The online seed store Tomato Fest is extending its annual heirloom tomato sale, which had been scheduled to end Jan. 11 but is now running through Jan. 18.

More than 120 varieties from around the world -- yellow cherry tomatoes from eastern Germany, purple beefsteaks cultivated by a Cherokee tribe in Tennessee -- are discounted. Most seeds are nearly 50% off, at $2 per pack; others are discounted 30%.

All packs contain 30 seeds unless otherwise noted and are certified organic. Free seeds come with every order of at least $15, and seeds will last three to five years if stored properly.

-- Lisa Boone

Photo credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

RELATED:

The Dry Garden: Heirloom tomatoes by trial and error

Master in Training: 60 tomato plants later

The potential for gardeners here to conserve water while glorying in the California experience is as big as the state. Yet most of us don't seize it. According to local water managers, the problem is "capacity."

By capacity, they refer to the ability of chain home improvement stores to stock drought-tolerant native and Mediterranean-climate plants alongside water-hungry turf. Building native-plant capacity in big-box stores is tough. The inventory get watered to death by untrained staff, who don't know what the plants are much less what they need. So "capacity" tends to be code for "forget about it" when the subject of water conservation comes up.

Well, water managers, reality check. Nursery capacity for native plants is increasing, albeit slowly. A network of independent specialist nurseries is emerging. Most of these not only have trained staff to sell native plants but also offer courses on how to design gardens and how to tend those new Edens.

To see a fine example, glance west of the 101 freeway near the Telephone Road exit in Ventura County. There you'll see the year-old Nopalito Native Plant Nursery, above right.

Its owners, cousins Richard Sanchez, left, and Antonio Sanchez, right, joke that the idea for Nopalito came when they "got drunk one night and thought, 'What's the least profitable business we can get into?' "

Yet slightly more than a year after opening during the darkest days of a national recession, Nopalito is still there. The reason is the Sanchezes' cocktail of energy, vision and experience.

After studying sustainable agriculture at Santa Rosa Junior College, Antonio worked for the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants in Sun Valley. He emerged conversant with the habits and needs of dozens of cultivars of the region's best loved plants.

In the final days of its fifth annual Eternal Gratitude Sale, the Atwater Village home and garden store Potted is discounting everything  -- including hoop chairs, plants, pots, fountains and outdoor rugs called Mad Mats -- by at least 20%.

Holiday ornaments and candles are 50% off, as are seconds of Potted's own Circle Pot, shown above. The planter is regularly $75, but the seconds are $37.50 each. And for the first time, fire pits will be on sale.

"We're going to place a big order next week," co-owner Annette Goliti Gutierrez said. "People who pre-pay can order any dimension, size or quantity they like at 20% off." 

The sale runs through Sunday at 3158 Los Feliz Blvd. Store hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. (323) 665-3801.

 -- Lisa Boone

 Photo credit: Potted

Community Gardens dispatch No. 14: The Learning Garden, Venice

Grafting -- the joining of two plants to make a single new one -- is a complicated procedure, a mixture of surgery and carpentry for the gardener attempting the procedure. The nutrition-gathering roots of one plant play host to the scion, usually a year-old stem containing buds that's attached on top. When it's done right, the results can be downright inspirational, as David King learned in the 1980s, when he visited the former Montecito mansion of chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr.

The architect positioned the house around two large oaks, but in the 1940s, one of the trees began to die, said King, who was studying plant propagation at the time. "He planted two young oaks on either side of the dying oak, and after about 10 years, he grafted them onto it," King said. "And more than 30 years later, it was still alive. I get goose bumps to this day -- what skill."

This month, King will start cutting back the trees and vines at the Learning Garden at Venice High School, gathering scions and cuttings for his classes in plant propagation. He has some rootstock already prepped in the greenhouse and more on order from Raintree Nursery in Washington state.

Preparations call for the sharpening of knives, the cleaning of pruners and inspection of the Thompson seedless grapevines blanketing a rebar trellis in the Venice garden. Some of those vines soon will be pruned away in King's UCLA Extension class. Older cane will be cut into four-node-long sections, heavily deleafed and planted in cactus mix -- two nodes in the soil, two nodes out. Grapevines are satisfyingly easy to propagate as long as the cuttings are kept moist by regular misting for the first few months, until new leaves appear.

"Water loss is the big enemy when a plant has no roots," he says.

Grafting cuts vary: simple splice, saddle graft, cleft and wedge, whip and tongue. The key to successful grafting is making an even cut on both sections of plant, King says. It's possible to do this with just a box cutter, rubber bands and a plastic bag, but special grafting wax and Parafilm (a type of medical tape that stretches, seals to itself and eventually withers away) help to achieve a tight fit. Keep reading for more on King, his garden and upcoming classes open to the public ...

Dwindling monarch butterfly populations have prompted some gardeners to pepper their landscapes with milkweeds, the various plants in the Asclepiadaceae family on which monarchs lay their eggs. Chubby, zebra-striped monarch caterpillars gorge themselves on the plants' milky alkaloid sap, which makes them poisonous to birds.

The question for many isn't whether to grow milkweed, but how -- and which kind.

In Connie Day's Santa Monica garden, a tiger-colored monarch spars with another butterfly, chasing it from a patch of milkweeds.

"The challenge is keeping the food here," Day says, noting that a few monarchs can defoliate a plant in a couple of weeks. Day favors South American blood flower (Asclepias curassavica), right, because it's leafy all year, unlike native milkweeds, which are dormant in winter. The South American blood flower catches the eye with brash little flowers in smoldering colors, including ember red and orange-singed yellow.

But some scientists recommend the natives. These experts suspect that the supply of exotic milkweeds is prompting some monarchs to loiter in California, and those that don't migrate seem to be more vulnerable to parasites, according to entomologist Brent Karner. And, true to their name, the nonnative plants are a bit weedy. 

The loveliest of the California natives is showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa). Its carnation-scented blossoms are two-tiered: Five-fingered pink coronas are backed by petals that blush a rosy mauve. Velvety leaves glow in soft light. Alas, monarchs seem to prefer speciosa's homelier cousin, the narrow-leafed milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis).

So what to do with a spindly, often-bare plant? Scatter it among low-growing native shrubs, says Mike Evans, president and co-owner of Tree of Life Nursery in San Juan Capistrano.

"Place it behind some native grasses or irises," says Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanical Garden Curator Jill Morganelli. "That way you can still see the flowers but you miss a lot of the 'skeletonization' that happens because the caterpillars don't eat all the way up to the flowers."

Look for a sunny place -- away from pets and traffic -- where the butterflies can spot the plant from above. After seeing and smelling a plant, they come to it and test it, biologist Bob Allen says.

"The female takes her front legs, which have chemical receptors, and scratches the leaf, tasting it with her feet to confirm it's milkweed," he says.

The aforementioned South American blood flower is widely available, as is butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa); but for the California species you'll have to visit a native plant nursery or troll ButterflyEncounters.com.

Start from seed to avoid systemic pesticides that some growers apply. To encourage leafy growth, cut milkweeds back after they bloom. Adult monarchs need nectar, so entice them with plantings of flat, upward-facing flowers.

There's no guarantee you'll be graced with monarchs, but Southern Californians have a good shot. Plus, milkweed flowers feed a variety of butterflies.

-- Ilsa Setziol

Photo credits, from top: Los Angeles Times; Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles Times