Grateful for Gardeners who keep the garden alive
November is a month for Thanksgiving and we celebrate it with a feast of food symbolizing the harvest celebration. Gardens, and those who tend them give us much to be thankful for throughout the year.
Category: Garden Articles
Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades, CA
Too hot to garden?
Furnace Creek Inn, Death Valley, CA
As the summer heat wears on I wonder if I might feel cooler thinking of places that are hotter and drier than where I am. So Death Valley National Park and Furnace Creek CA spring to mind. Just the names sound hot and years of record high heat support its reputation of the hottest, driest, and lowest place in the U.S. Though Death Valley was set aside as a protected area in 1933, it didn’t become a National Park until 1994. Always curious about this fierce sounding place I was completely surprised by the flowers of the park and the oasis garden at the Furnace Creek Inn. Travel really does break apart our preconceived notions of a place.
Plant People
San Diego Botanic Garden
Just before the killer cold snap last January I had managed to prune my torch bougainvillea into a heart shape topiary. It made me smile and I eagerly looked forward to it as part of the landscape for a Valentine celebration in February. Then nature changed my plans and the shape was lost in the freeze damage. A topiary is a fanciful thing, it isn’t a garden style that appeals to everyone. It is a living work of art that requires a vision, patience and an artist using the medium of plants.
Is This A Garden?
“What makes gardens especially interesting is that making one constitutes creation of a new world–our own world.” – American Eden, Wade Graham
Garden of Fragrance
“Stumbling on new smells is one of the delights of traveling.” – Diane Ackerman
In a small conservatory built of red brick with huge copper framed windows and an interior graced with a pair of white doves in an ornate wire cage, pots of fragrant white lilies perfumed the air. A woman walked in followed reluctantly by a tween age girl. “Ewww!” the child cried out, “what’s that smell?” Her mother, perhaps by now frustrated at her daughter’s lack of enthusiasm for this day in the garden, replied, “It’s fresh air.” The daughter’s reply, “Well, I don’t like it!”
Counting Plants
Not everything that can be counted counts, Not everything that counts can be counted. – Albert Einstein
Winding uphill through the streets of Berkeley, we arrive at the University of CA Botanical Garden in Strawberry Canyon. There we are faced with a decision of paying the parking meter for the number of hours we need to explore the garden. The garden holds over 12,000 plants including many rare and endangered plant specimens. Director Paul Licht does the math for visitors. “If you allow only 2 hours, a 120 min. visit would require that you see 100 different kinds of plants per minute to experience our entire collection.” Obviously we will need a full day, even then we won’t truly see all of the plants. Those we do see will be only a glimpse of life of the plants. A plant today may be dormant, budding, blooming or declining.
Contemplating Trees
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is now. – Chinese Proverb
Arbor Day in the U.S is celebrated on the last Friday in April. In Arizona, we have many good times to plant trees scattered throughout the year so this date is a bit arbitrary in our region. Still it is a significant day to contemplate trees. The Arbor Day Foundation’s mission is to encourage us to Plant, Nurture and Celebrate Trees.
Gardeners Change the World
A Small Garden
The Anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world.” Substitute “committed gardeners” in this thought and the results DO change our world in immeasurable ways. Master Gardener Park in Port Townsend, WA demonstrates the power of passionate committed gardeners. The city’s smallest park, a small triangular shaped patch of earth bordered on all sides by intersecting streets, is now a beautiful garden.
Our view of nature
A Sense of Place
When our neighborhood was new a family relocating from Virginia moved in next door and quickly put in lawn for their entire landscape. Another family relocated from MN and installed a pool and planted pine trees all around it. Longtime desert gardeners cringe at these home garden stories. Today a strong campaign for regionally appropriate plants fills the garden news. Advocates raise a chorus of voices that sing, “If we live in a desert it is only common sense that we live with desert plants.” Einstein said, “common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.” Our common experience of “place” isn’t so common.