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.

Get to Know Natives

Glendale News Press. May 19, 2010. By Riley Hooper: Karen and Peter Veloz are living in sustainable luxury in the hills of Glendale. About two years ago, with the help of FormLA, a Los Angeles landscape design company that focuses on sustainability, they ripped out their back lawn and put in hardscapes amid a landscape of California-native plants.

The concept behind the design was to create outdoor living spaces, Karen Veloz said, and so the backyard features outdoor seating areas, a fire pit, barbecue and bar, wine cellar and infinity spa pool, or “spool.”

Travel the World at Home

Home Wizards. May 14, 2010. With Cindy Dole: It’s the next best thing to being there – bringing Australia, Chile, South Africa and the Mediterranean to your garden and your world! In Southern California, plants from those regions are ideal because of the similarity in climate.

Habitats for Humanity

Form Magazine. July/August 2011. By Editor in Chief Caren Kurlander: Given the temperate climate of Southern California, it’s not unusual for people to spend as much time outdoors as they do inside. For a project in Glendale, California, FormLA Landscaping gave their clients even more reason to linger outside by intgrating ten distinct living spaces into their hillside lot. Excerpted with permission of Balcony Media.