Lifestyle
She turned an empty L.A. lot into a gorgeous mini flower farm as a 'win-win'
Kathleen Ferguson grabbed a pair of pruning shears from a mailbox nailed to a garden bed and leaned down to cut bunches of Orlaya grandiflora on the flower-filled hillside.
“This property has a pulse,” she said as she placed the white lace flowers into a bucket of water. “The wildlife is incredible here. I’ve caught bees napping in the sunflowers.”
With limited land for green space in Los Angeles, many people are growing flowers for sale in surprising places — under power lines and in their front and backyards. In Ferguson’s case, the landscape designer is propagating flowers on a vacant lot offered by a friend, screenwriter Dalan Musson, whom she met while volunteering at the North Central Animal Shelter in L.A.
The vacant hillside, before Kathleen Ferguson transformed it into a flower garden.
(Kathleen Ferguson)
Ferguson’s lush garden now.
“Just being able to walk outside and see monarch butterflies and bees flying around my backyard is amazing,” Musson said of Frogtown Flora’s effect on the wildlife on his 1.5-acre property in Eagle Rock. “It makes me feel viscerally connected to the natural world.”
It’s magical for Ferguson too, who over the last 11 months has built a colorful farm on the half-acre with flowers, including Agrostemma, irises, zinnias, cosmos, roses, sunflowers, sweet peas, French dianthus and ranunculus. White marigolds and green onions are planted to help deter the skunks, raccoons and squirrels that like to pull out her dahlias. Volunteer tomatoes and cilantro that materialized from the compost are left to bolt and blossom. “I like to mix it up,” she said of the variety of plant life. “If something comes up, I’m OK with letting it grow.”
Outside the farm’s perimeter and at the top of the hillside, she is experimenting with drought-tolerant California native perennials, including fragrant pitcher sage, buckwheat, mallows and the native rose, Rosa Californica. She also grows native poppies — Matilija and California — penstemons, lupines and many different salvias.
Like many landscape designers used to working outdoors, Ferguson struggled with cabin fever during the COVID-19 pandemic. When she began listening to podcasts about locally grown blooms while tending to her own garden, she became “obsessed with flowers.”
“I would listen to podcasts all day long: ‘On Being,’ ‘Slow Flowers,’ ‘Cultivating Place’ and [‘Field & Garden’ from the Gardener’s Workshop] among them,” she said. She was struck by the environmental effect of imported flowers regarding pesticides, water and shipping, and her journey into urban flower farming was a natural progression. With a degree in horticulture from Cal Poly Pomona and a passion for the environment, she decided to grow what she describes as “climate-appropriate flower species” for Los Angeles.
A Sharp Dressed Man iris in Ferguson’s garden.
Ferguson tends to her flowers.
She learned a lot from the local flower growers she contacted on Instagram: “I noticed that all of the flower farmers, who happened to be women, are so passionate about what they do and so generous with their knowledge. I can reach out to any of them and ask, ‘What has been your experience with germination?’”
The flower growers hosted rotating potlucks at their farms and attended the San Fernando Valley Iris Society, of which Ferguson is a member.
Her first venture was a small plot at Jardin del Rio on Riverdale Avenue in 2022. But as her interest and knowledge grew, so did her ambitions. When Musson listened to how passionate she was about growing flowers locally, he offered a portion of his property as a new canvas for her urban flower farm.
“People are good,” Ferguson said of Musson. “People are generous; they want to help others realize their dreams. It’s a win-win for both of us.”
The challenge for Ferguson was the site. “I was excited,” she recalled, “but when I saw it was a slope, I knew it would be a lot of work.”
Once she understood how it might work, she built 12 four- by 10-foot raised beds on either side of a stairway with wood leftover from a construction project.
“My husband and I loaded the wood in a truck and brought it here,” she said. “Now, when I get extra wood, I can’t help but think about what I can grow here. We’re going to put in a greenhouse and add more beds. Everyone my age is into pilates and strength training, and when they suggest I go, I tell them, ‘Do you know how much strength training I do on this slope?’”
Ferguson’s good luck continued when she realized the soil didn’t need a lot of work because the land had never been developed. “We used what was here,” said the designer and certified arborist, who avoids chemicals. She started with a weed barrier, on-site soil, worm castings, compost and organic fertilizer. She tops the soil with her rabbits’ bedding when it’s time for it to be replaced and has been experimenting with sheep pellets to enrich the soil and help deter slugs, snails and weeds. She installed a drip irrigation system and pays Musson monthly for water, although she said she doesn’t use it much. “The natives don’t require any once established,” she added.
Calendula. Koko Loco roses. Penstemon.
Ferguson carries zinnias she grew from seeds up the stairs of her hillside garden.
She is a big fan of using rabbit waste as fertilizer because it doesn’t require composting like chicken manure.
“Rabbit poop is amazing and so good if you are trying to close the loop in your garden,” she says, “as you can feed them a lot of greens, and then what they produce goes straight into the garden.”
While some farmers choose what is trendy, Ferguson prefers to plant flowers she likes. It’s a strategy that is working.
“Kathleen’s flowers are dazzling,” said Lauri Kranz, who sells Ferguson’s flowers at L.A. Homefarm in Highland Park. “When Kathleen pulls up in her car with buckets full of just cut flowers, our customers start making a line to pull from the bounty that awaits.”
For Ferguson, a Los Angeles native who grew up in Koreatown, flowers are about more than just beauty.
Frogtown Flora bouquets. (Kathleen Ferguson)
Zinnias in Ferguson’s garden. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
There’s the feel-good aspect. “It brings so much joy,” she said. “Flowers have been in our culture for as long as humanity. Flowers symbolize so many things. It’s the whole cycle of life. They mean so much to so many different cultures. I love growing. I love the challenge. I also love that I’m making people happy.”
And then there’s the wildlife aspect.
During a recent visit, the contrast between the roar of the nearby 2 Freeway and the sound of birds chatting in the garden was startling. Over in a dense patch of sweet peas, Ferguson pointed out an example of her “nature first” philosophy in the way she strategically cut the flowers to preserve the privacy of a bird’s nest. “The flowers have brought so much additional life to this property,” she said. “I leave that section of sweet peas alone.”
In addition to selling flowers to Kranz and Gather Flora at the Original Los Angeles Flower Market in downtown , Ferguson recently started bouquet subscriptions and organized a tour of eight flower farms in L.A. She expected 50 people to show up. “We had to shut down our reservations when it hit 800,” she said, noting the interest in locally grown flowers.
According to a 2023 National Gardening Assn. Survey, 63% of respondents indicated that locally grown blooms were important when purchasing cut flowers and arrangements, while 59% indicated that blossoms grown in the United States were important when purchasing cut flowers and arrangements.
Like the slow food and slow fashion movements, consumers want to know where their flowers come from, said Debra Prinzing, founder of the Slow Flowers Society.
“I think people want to engage more deeply with nature as an antidote to the general stress and chaos of life,” Prinzing said. “Locally grown flowers, like those from Frogtown Flora and other Southern California flower farmers large and small, provide the sensory connections we crave. They reflect the season, moment in time and location when we commemorate special occasions or everyday gestures.”
Dawn Creek Blush in Ferguson’s garden.
Ferguson smells a rose in her hillside garden.
Ferguson, 55, also sells mixed vase arrangements and buckets of blooms to customers interested in fresh flowers but not necessarily a designed arrangement. “This is a great option for DIY weddings and celebrations and for those who just want beautiful, pesticide-free, fresh and locally grown flowers,” she said.
Walking up to the garden from the street along the long driveway, it’s clear why Musson is delighted with the plot’s transformation.
“Some days, when I’m exhausted, I’ll come up here and see a new flower that I’ve never seen before,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t believe I’m living in L.A. A Target is within walking distance, yet I have mature coastal live oaks, toyon and Catalina cherry trees. There are bats. I hear owls at night…. It’s amazing to have a place for the bees and butterflies to go.”
I’ve always loved mystery novels that take me inside different cultures. While lots of English language crime writers are good at evoking other lands — think of Philip Kerr’s Nazi Berlin or Cara Black’s Paris — the richest portraits come to us in translations of books by homegrown writers. These have the revelatory tang you get when novelists know their culture from the inside.
As it happens, two terrific novels of this kind have just come out from Bitter Lemon Press, a small London publisher that specializes in translated mysteries. These new books could hardly be less alike, except for one thing: Each is, in its unconventional way, quite brilliant.
The End of the Sahara is a kaleidoscopic murder mystery by the Algerian writer Saïd Khatibi, a rising star who just won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Superbly translated by Alexander E. Elinson, the book’s set in a provincial city on the edge of the Sahara in 1988 Algeria, a troubled time when the ruling socialist government has clearly failed. But you don’t need to know Algerian history to get sucked in by the plot, which centers on the murder of Zakia Zaghouani, a nightclub singer at a local hotel called The Sahara.
Burning with urgency, the story is told by a big cast of characters who all speak to us in first person. There’s Ibrahim, a college grad who’s been reduced to dealing in illegal videos. There’s the hotel owner, Maimoun, a shifty wheeler-dealer who fancied Zakia. There’s Zakia’s fiancee, Bachir, a decent guy found with blood on his shirt. He’s the top suspect of Inspector Hamid, a corrupt, womanizing cop who also fancied Zakia. Bachir’s represented by his cousin Noura, a good-hearted lawyer who’s constantly derided for reaching the age of 30 without a husband.
As we move from suspect to suspect, Khatibi not only makes us feel the textures of these characters’ everyday lives — the looks and smells, the food shortages and emerging Islamist militancy — but he deftly unveils how they are all are trapped together in a spiderweb of lies and betrayal that began in the past.
Using 1988 Algeria as a mirror for present-day Algeria, Khatibi gives us an X-ray of an entire social structure. Even as we learn who killed Zakia, we realize that no one escapes the bone-deep misogyny that underlies her murder and the repressive, post-colonial politics that leave Algerians spinning in circles. As one character thinks bitterly, “It was as if this country’s history just repeats itself rather than moving forward…”
Not surprisingly, life is far cushier along the prosperous Tuscan coast. That’s the setting for An Enigma by the Sea, a new edition of the 1991 novel by the legendary Italian team of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini. Witty, erudite and socially astute, they play with the mystery genre as they explore the many sides of Italianness.
The place is the Gualdana, a pine-protected seaside enclave where the well-off have holiday villas. “A certain air of secrecy hangs over it,” the opening tells us enticingly.
The time is winter, when only a few residents are around. They’re an assortment of Italian types that includes a rich, disaffected Roman couple; a philandering count who’s arrived with his latest conquest, a fame-hungry model; an old woman addicted to reading Tarot cards; and a smug politician stewing in paranoia. You get a whiff of Upstairs, Downstairs in the relation between these moneyed folks and the locals who service their many needs — the security guards, the wry police commander and the village handyman, who is also, everyone knows, the village cuckold.
Deliciously translated by Gregory Dowling, An Enigma by the Sea starts off like a gently acerbic comedy of manners, as these self-absorbed characters go about killing time — chatting, flirting, bickering, having tea. Then suddenly the story shifts. Three residents inexplicably disappear. Could they have been murdered? Here? The question unleashes the sleuthing instincts of their neighbor, Signor Monforti, a pessimistic depressive who’s a born detective: He spends his life scrutinizing every single thing for clues to impending disaster.
Masters of the light fantastic, Fruttero and Lucentini roll out their mystery with the slyest of touches, weaving discussions of the Greek cynics and the nature of depression into their droll evocation of a gray, chilly off-season resort with its wind storms and dire pizzerias. If Khatibi shows us characters caught in the tragic flames of history, Fruttero and Lucentini look at human folly with a cool, almost ancient amusement at what strange, funny creatures we all are.
French aviator Roland Garros pictured in the cockpit of an aircraft in 1911.
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Branger/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
The second tennis Grand Slam tournament of the year is underway in Paris: the French Open, as many English-speakers call it.
But the official name of the tournament — and the complex where it takes place — is Roland Garros. Many tennis tournaments are named after famous players, like the Davis Cup and the Billie Jean King Cup.
Roland Garros, however, was an aviation pioneer and World War I fighter pilot with no known connection to the racquet sport.
“He’s an important figure in early aviation, both as a record-setter before the war and as a wartime pilot,” says Christopher Moore, the curator for World War I aircraft at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “He’s considered the first person to shoot down another aircraft with a gun firing forward between the propeller.”
So how did Garros become synonymous with tennis?
The short answer: In 1928, a decade after Garros was killed in action, Paris’ new tennis stadium needed a name. Emile Lesueur, president of the Stade Français rugby club, suggested Garros — his former business school classmate.
“I guess he was a national hero, and that kind of tells you how people thought about him,” Moore says.
Here’s the (slightly) longer version.
Roland Garros is both the name of the tennis tournament and the Paris facility where it is held.
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Dan Istitene/Getty Images
Garros’ high-flying career set records
Garros was born in 1888 on Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean. The island’s main international airport now bears his name, too.
He grew up playing soccer, rugby and cycling — but “was not an avid tennis player,” as the tennis tournament’s website explains. Garros was not originally drawn to aviation either: He graduated from business school and founded a car dealership.
But everything changed when Garros, then in his early 20s, attended the first major international air show in the Champagne region of France, in August 1909.
“He decides that he wants to be a pilot, so he basically goes out and buys his own plane, teaches himself to fly … he earns his pilot’s license,” says Moore.
Roland Garros, in the dark suit, poses near the plane he flew across the Mediterranean in Tunisia in September 1913.
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In September 1911, Garros broke an altitude record, soaring to nearly 13,000 feet (without the extra oxygen that modern planes have above 10,000 feet, Moore points out). He then set another record, breaking 19,000 feet in 1912.
At this time, Moore says, aviation was considered a daredevil sport, and successful pilots, especially in France, became celebrities. Garros’ dazzling performances in air shows and races earned him awards and notoriety.
“Aviation was made up of … people who liked to push the limits in sports and other ways, so they were using exhibitions, doing acrobatics, death-defying feats and races … and breaking records,” Moore explains.
Garros’ profile increased exponentially in 1913, when he became the first person to fly across the Mediterranean Sea.
He flew south from the French Riviera to Tunisia, landing after nearly eight hours with less than two gallons of gas left in his tank, according to a September 1913 edition of Foreign Aviation News.
“So confident was Garros in his Morane-Saulnier machine … that he did not deem it necessary to accept the Government’s offer to be consorted by a cruiser, but the French naval authorities nevertheless took the precaution to have a number of torpedo boats cruising along the line of flight,” the publication wrote.
Garros revolutionized aerial combat in multiple ways
When World War I broke out in 1914, Garros enlisted in the French army with an obvious skill set.
There were no independent air forces at the time, but pilots could join a designated air branch of the army. Even so, Moore says, the military viewed airplanes merely “as a way of being higher to look at things.”
Pilots were there for observation, not offense — at least at first.
“They would be flying over and they would see airplanes from the other side, doing their thing, and sometimes they’d wave at each other early on,” Moore says. “But as tends to happen, they decided that maybe they should try and stop the other guys from doing the same thing they’re doing, and so they started firing at each other.”
That was easier said than done, as early planes couldn’t accommodate anything larger than a pistol or a rifle. There was also the problem of propeller blades in front, obstructing a clear shot at German enemy aircraft.
Another Frenchman, engineer Raymond Saulnier, had recently patented a mechanism that would allow a machine gun to shoot between the spinning blades. Moore says it wasn’t adopted during the war because of significant flaws.
But Garros went to Saulnier — seemingly of his own accord — to inquire about using the technology in his own planes. Moore says there are varying claims about whether he tried it, but ultimately the two ended up with an alternative: screwing wedges onto Garros’ propeller blades to deflect bullets.
“And it works,” Moore says. “Garros shoots down his first German airplane on the first of April 1915 … within the next two-plus weeks he shoots down two more.”
Before the end of the month, however, Garros’ plane crashed — he said due to engine trouble — and he was taken captive by German forces. He spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp, with his health and eyesight deteriorating.
Meanwhile, the Germans studied his wedge-workaround and developed what Moore describes as “a synchronizer that will allow a machine gun to shoot between the propeller blades, and that sort of changes aerial warfare from then on.”
Garros and another soldier eventually managed to escape, disguised as German officers. While the French government urged him to stay home as an advisor, he told The New York Times in March 1918 that he intended to get back to the front lines as soon as possible.
He said he was looking forward to confronting more enemy forces: “Remember, I have a big score against them to pay for the last three years.”
Garros’ legacy of persistence lives on
Crowds watch the action on Court Philippe-Chatrier at the Roland-Garros Complex in Paris over the weekend. Chatrier was a French tennis player and former president of the International Tennis Federation.
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Julien De Rosa/AFP via Getty Images
Garros was killed in action in October 1918, the day before his 30th birthday and a month before the war ended.
By that point, he had shot down a fourth German aircraft, so he was not technically a flying “ace,” which is defined as a pilot who shoots down five enemy aircraft or more. But the word, which caught on in French newspaper accounts of WWI, has come to have a much broader meaning.
Incidentally, “ace” is also used in tennis to describe a serve so good it goes untouched by its receiver.
While Garros didn’t have a direct connection to tennis, Moore says aviation was considered a sport — and he was one of its biggest faces at the time. That, plus historical context, may explain why his legacy is so closely tied to the clay-court tournament nearly a century later.
“WWI was very traumatic for the French. It was mostly on their soil that it was fought and a lot of Frenchmen died,” he says. “I think that in the postwar memory he was considered a national hero, for the fact that he had died for France, plus his pre-war fame.”
The tournament’s website sees a fitting connection too, in a quote attributed to Napoleon I that Garros inscribed on his planes’ propellers: “Victory belongs to the most persevering.”
That phrase, it says, “could also be applied to the winners of the Roland Garros tournament.” It runs through June 7.
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