Environmental News

A curated set of environmental news stories brought to you by the Gottlieb Native Garden team.

Backyard gardens can help save the monarch butterfly

Local gardeners set an example with their certified wildlife habitat.

Tony Tomeo: Cultivars of California native plants

Native plants are obviously happy with local climates and soils. Otherwise, they would not be native. They had been living here long before the first landscapes. They survived without irrigation, fertilizer or any maintenance. 

Are California oil companies complying with the law? Even regulators often don’t know

Hot crude and oily waste bubbled up from underground, filled an apartment building basement, oozed out of manhole covers and buckled sidewalks. More than 130 low-income tenants were evacuated.

Your own yard could help reverse global insect declines

Non-native plants are one of many factors driving global declines in insect populations – but you can help

Over the Garden Fence: Adding Native Plants in Spring

Although autumn is generally the best time to add native plants to your landscape, spring is the next best time.

Why this Southern California botanical garden is unlike most others

If you walk briskly, you could traverse the winding path that runs through the Manhattan Beach Botanical Garden in a very short time. Yet the fact that the garden is small makes each plant that much more precious to behold. 

Why this Southern California botanical garden is unlike most others

Unlike most botanical gardens, where one day is never enough to appreciate everything there is to see, it’s different here. You can take long looks at each specimen on display and not feel you might be missing out on something if you linger more than a few moments over any particular plant.

How Californians Are Weaponizing Environmental Law

And how to fix it.

A Famous Wildflower Hotline Is Back to Add Zing to Spring

Follow this path to the hotline page now, and get all of the information you need to find dazzling displays, be they big and bloomful or small and stunning, during the spring of 2021. And that hotline voice you hear? It’s Emmy Award-winning actor Joe Spano, “the Voice of the Wild Flower Hotline.”

Something is killing California’s songbirds

Officials are urging people to take down their feeders, where birds are congregating and spreading a bacterial infection.