Outdoortimez in the City

Dear Cities,

You know, I love living in a bustling city filled with people from all over. But lately, I’ve been feeling cooped up. All I do every day is drive around searching for stuff. Which is fun. But sometimes I just want to get away from everything. Normally, when I feel this way I go visit my parents in the forest where I grew up. But work has prohibited getting away lately so I’ve been craving some time away from the crowds, outside in nature. This week, Emily is hosting some web shows for HGTV so I’ve been helping her plan and execute some outdoor makeovers. Luckily, this has provided us the opportunity to play together outside, which is the next best thing to taking a vacation in nature.

Our first stop was a nursery in North Hollywood. Basically, we needed enough plants for two backyards, but our budget was only $1000 so we needed a cheap place to get a boatload of plants. Cut to Emily googling “cheap plants in the valley.” We found a place called Los Pinos Nursery not far from our favorite vintage shops. It’s a beautiful, HUGE nursery filled with big, healthy plants. A word to the wise, if you go to this place you should probably learn to speak Spanish first. Communicating was done primarily by Emily speaking convincingly in Spanish that may or may not have been gibberish (sidenote: her Spanish is 500 times better than mine).

The nursery was so big you had to drive through it. It felt like Jurassic Park.

We used lavender for one of our makeovers. We found it here for $5 a pot. Steal!

We decided to buy some of these beautiful grasses for one of the backyards Emily is decorating. Until the guy working there was all “why are you buying so much garlic?!?” I had no idea garlic looked so much like grass. Lesson learned.

Being around so many plants made me want to sing out loud. But I didn’t. Because that would have been totally gay. Almost as gay as getting excited about going to a plant nursery.

I wore a denim shirt to make it seem like I was ready to do manual labor. (I wasn’t).

Emily named these plants “Dr. Seuss Plants.” We are both noted botanists, renowned for our understanding of plants.

Palm trees and power lines always make great silhouettes. It’s a fact of life.

In case you are in the market, Los Pinos Nursery also sells huge piles of dirt. Yay!

One of the backyard makeovers Emily designed involved using stumps. We found stumps at Alpine Firewood in East Pasadena. Pictured here is Emily looking adorable in front of a huge pile of logs.

This wood yard had piles and piles of firewood. Each stump was $5 – $10. The guys working there thought we were total freaks for caring what the stumps looked like. Also, those stumps weigh about 700 pounds. Luckily we had help launching them into our production van.

So I got my outdoor fix in a weird way this week. It’s not quite the same as stargazing under Yosemite Falls, but for now I’ll take it.

Yay?
Orlando