Pasadena Showcase House of Design Revealed

ABC 7. By Adrienne Alpert: A cactus older than the villa stands at the entrance of the Robbins House, a Spanish-style retreat built in 1927 for a family that traced its roots to colonial times. Only the third owner lives there now.

It’s this year’s Pasadena Showcase House of Design for the Arts, bringing in dozens of designers who show off their very best ideas. (Clicking to watch will launch ABC sound.)

Garden Features Beyond the Gnome

eHow. March 7, 2012. By Kendra Osburn: No green thumb? Check out these fun, no-grow garden features.

Consider something other than the traditional hardscape patio. “Permeable patios and walkways require less maintenance and can add to the sensory experience of seeing, smelling and walking through your garden,” Aoyagi says. “Striking permeable materials include criba, mulch, gravel, decomposed granite, and reclaimed tumbled glass.”

Pasadena Showcase House of Design 2012 to Open

Los Angeles Times. April 13, 2012. Show houses are often more about aspiration than inspiration, more an exercise in overindulgence than in practicality. This year’s installment of the annual Pasadena Showcase House of Design, however, does contain ideas that could translate in the real world.

When the stunning 1927 Spanish Colonial Revival home in La Cañada Flintridge opens Sunday…

Landscaping Plan for LA City Hall Is Slow Going

Los Angeles Times. January 1, 2012. By Dalina Castellanos: The lawn at the site of the Occupy L.A. encampment is gone, but the park-restoration process is moving at a bureaucratic pace. Some would prefer to watch grass grow.

Occupy L.A. protesters planned to leave their mark on City Hall’s park with graffiti declarations and treehouses when they were evicted in late November. Instead, they left behind a park stripped of its lush north and south lawns, creating a financial and planning burden for the city and a waiting game for the displaced farmers market that has held sway every Thursday.

Growing Your Business by Growing Your Heart

Ten-Fold Marketing: Growing Your Business by Growing Your Heart. Copyright 2012. By Marianne Carlson: You’ve heard it said that when you do something good for someone else, it will come back to you tenfold. Ten-Fold Marketing tells the inspiring stories of successful business leaders across America who attribute their successes, at least in part, to the generosity they’ve shown.

Craving Gray on a Sunny Day

USGBC Green Home Guide. August 17, 2011. By Cassy Aoyagi: Earlier in the year, we looked at the benefits of putting our limited rainwater to good use with water catchment and infiltration strategies. Now that LA’s picture-perfect weather makes it tough to keep our gardens picture-perfect without irrigation, our teams field plenty of questions about graywater..

Unlike the other water harvesting strategies we’ve covered, graywater is always “re-watering” with already used water.

10 Ways to Keep Mosquitos Out of Your Yard

iVillage. By Sadia Latifi: Thanks to warmer than usual winter and spring weather, mosquito outbreaks are expected to be pretty bad this summer. We asked experts for their go-to tips to keep you bite-free

Plant foliage native to your region, says Cassy Aoyagi, president of FormLA Landscaping. Mosquitos and other pests are often attracted to environments created when non-native plants require the use of excessive water and fertilizers. “We can also import mosquitos from other areas when we import their habitats,” she said.

Grass Begone!

Arroyo Magazine. January 25, 2013. By Bettijane Levine: Grass is good. But could gravel be better? That was the question for Jeanie and Terry Kay, whose charming country French chateau straddles a small rise on a street of custom homes in La Cañada Flintridge.

Their white brick mini-villa — with its tall welcoming windows and elegant sheltered door — looks like it might be a centuries-old transplant from some nobleman’s estate in Southern France.

Cassy Aoyagi: Going Native

Los Angeles Times. December 11, 2010. By Patt Morrison: Once upon a time, California wholesaled its fabulous flora. The searing brilliance of poppies and lupines and the pale greens of grasses spread themselves like titanic picnic cloths over a seemingly endless landscape. Now, of course, much of this vast plant menagerie has been plowed or paved or plucked away to the margins, even toward extinction. Horticulturist Theodore Payne saw this unhappy prospect when he came here more than a century ago from England as a teenager; in his 70 years in Southern California, he crafted native plant legacies in gardens from Santa Ana, Exposition Park and Caltech to Descanso Gardens.