Gardening is a full contact sport – we all know that. We know not to expect glamorous fingernails. The ground-in dirt along our fingers from dead heading and weeding and squashing aphids – we don’t expect this to come off. We hold no shoes as sacred because it’s always when we walk past the garden in our dress shoes that we see the dead head or the weed and we tromp through the dirt and stones anyway. We expect scrapes, bruises, bug bites, aches and festering thorn tips in the pads of our thumbs. And most of the time we love our gardens and our work in them anyway. But here’s something I don’t love. Poison oak. I had my first round of the year in January. May brought my next round. The swollen, weeping, red rash spread across the left side of my face, my neck and both shoulders. I must have walked right through it. Photo above: Poison oak in bloom.

I can generally identify poison oak. But I clearly have more to learn. When a friend asked me what poison oak was and I responded with: some evil variety of oak. Another friend, Ray Barnett, corrected me by saying that it was not an oak at all.

Here’s where the more to learn comes in. Poison oak’s botanical name is Toxicodendrun diversilobum. Although it used to be considered a member of the Rhus genus, Toxicodendron is now its own genus and consists of woody trees, shrubs and vines in the Anacardiaceae or Sumac Family and that produce the skin-irritating oil urushiol, which causes the rash – also called contact dermatitis. Poison ivy and poison sumac are also members of this genus. Photo above: California Buckeye (Aesculus californica) in bloom.

One of the tricky things about poison oak, ivy and sumac is how variable they are. The leaves may have smooth, toothed or lobed edges, and all three types of leaf edge may be present in a single plant. The plants grow as vines, shrubs, or small trees. While stems of Poison ivy and poison oaks usually have three leaflets, sometimes there are five, even seven. The common name poison oak comes from the leaves’ resemblance to the leaves of the white oak (Quercus alba). Photo above: a blue oak in early summer. All parts of the plant contain the irritating oil – the leaves, dormant stems, even the roots and the dried leaves. Poison oak is deciduous in the Northstate and one tell-tale identifier is the plant’s rusty-red new growth in early spring. Poison oak grows throughout the Northstate’s foothills and valleys, and while some people are less susceptible, most people will develop the rash if they come in direct contact with the oil. Some say that you can develop immunity, other’s say that you can lose resistance or immunity with repeated exposure. The native people of the Northstate are thought to have eaten the berries of the plant in order to build immunity. Photo above: June salad greens.

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Gardeners’ activist is the only phrase that really fit when I was trying to describe Carolyn Melf to someone else recently. I first met Carolyn when she slipped me a business card during a local rose society meeting. It was not her card, but rather someone else’s card on the back of which she had written her name and phone number and the fact that she had a “fabulous” Iris garden in Paradise. “I am infected with the Iris virus!” she had written. A few days later when I was reading through a recent edition of “insideout” magazine, I saw two article written by Melf . A few days after that, I went out to Paradise to see Iris Spring – her home garden featuring more than 650 different varieties of Iris, which was fabulous and in full bloom the day of my visit. Carolyn and I had had a good long gardener’s chat as we walked among her beloved Iris (and peonies and roses and azaleas), and that very day she sent me an email letting me know that she was also a member of the Paradise Garden Club and that she would love to have me attend the upcoming regular meeting that would feature a daylily grower as the speaker, and “Was I interested in the upcoming annual Paradise Garden Tour?” Finally, I noticed at the end of her article on fuschia in InSideOut magazine that her credit mentioned she had founded a group called the Potting Ladies. Photo above: looking across a blooming Iris Spring Garden.

Whoa. And I thought I was an avid gardener.

Carolyn Melf is a happy ball of fire about anything to do with gardening – the fire getting even more heated when the subject of deer in Paradise comes up. A retired academic advisor from the California State University Chico’s College of Business, Carolyn says she had an appointment with a new or continuing student about their transfer courses, current course choices or their future careers every twenty minutes of every day. No wonder retirement left her with energy to spare. Photo above shows Carolyn and good friend Dolores, also an avid iris collector and grower.

Carolyn and her husband have been building their garden in Paradise for the past 30 years. At first, they fought an uphill battled against the persistent deer. But on a hot August day of that first year in the garden, she purchased a whole load of iris rhizomes at an Iris Society sale in the Kmart parking lot because the sign said that deer would not eat them. Carolyn found her garden’s niche. Well, its first niche. With the beautiful bloom of those iris the next spring, Carolyn was irreversibly infected with the Iris Virus. Since that time her home garden has been named Iris Spring, which is sort of a play on both her love of spring blooming iris and the year-round spring-fed creek that decoratively divides the garden into two parts.

Carolyn adds iris to her collection almost every year. She orders from other small growers and hybridizers, from catalogues and nurseries. She currently has 650 different varieties in bloom from early March to early June. The rhizomes are drought tolerant, they need a minimum of a half-day of sun and to be fed with a tomato fertilizer in spring, and they need to be divided every 3 to 4 years to keep good consistent bloom. Thus the birth of the Iris Spring sales form: while Iris Spring is open for visitors from 10:00 – 4:00 Thursday through Sunday during the bloom period, it is also open for sales of the dormant rhizomes in late summer and early fall. “Most people come to see the iris in bloom and then order their plants right then, after having seen them in bloom. I call them when their plants are ready as I divide the rhizomes in July and August,” explains Carolyn. “I had to divide them anyway, and one day early on a man stopped and asked me if I would sell him a division of every iris I had. I thought: why didn’t I think of that sooner?” The iris sales help to support Carolyn’s iris habit and she is considering broadening her specific addictions to include peonies as well as iris.

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Ruth Roberston was born in Orange, California. She is since lived in many places around the world, but for Ruth home is where the oranges grow. And the lemons, limes, mandarins, grapefruit and kumquat. While Ruth and her husband Jeff enjoy growing many kinds of edible plants in their small Chico garden, it is the many citrus varieties that enjoy pride of place.

Besides being an enthusiastic home-gardener, Ruth is also the Office Manager for Lifescapes, A Landscape Company in Chico, and Jeff is an educator. It was in the Lifescapes offices that I first started talking to Ruth about her citrus trees. Ruth and Jeff returned to California and settled in Chico in the early 1990s after living in Australia and South America for work. Their first Chico address was on Citrus Avenue. When they moved to their current house in 1991, Ruth began planting what she now half-jokingly calls her very own Citrus Lane – referring to the side of her garden dedicated to growing citrus.

On the day I visited her garden, Ruth mixed me a glass of homemade iced lemonade to sip as we walked. The lemonade had that very particular ‘Meyer’ lemon fragrance, which always makes my eyes close and my mouth water. Lemonade in hand, we started at one end of the lane where Ruth has a ‘Bearss’ lime that is hedged into a box shape (taller than me) against the house. Continuing from there is the dwarf grapefruit on one side of the walk, and the satsuma mandarin orange on the other. Just past those, the path is dominated by the iconic citrus-tree globe shape of a ‘Robertson’ Navel orange tree, which is the dwarf form of the Washington Navel. Past that is the ‘Meyer’ lemon – a big bushy tree, more squat in stature than the orange. “That poor lemon lived in a box on my patio for 12 years,” admits Ruth. “he’s been in the ground for 4 years and he is much happier.” The only potted citrus in Ruth’s collection is a shoulder-height kumquat tree just outside her kitchen door. Even in late spring it is still decorated with the cheerful, tangy little orange fruits.

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I love clematis. My grandmother had the most amazing old vine at her house outside of Boston. It climbed up her grape arbor and its large purple flowers bloomed with fervor in June. I have been reading about Chalk Hill Clematis since the mid-1990s when the nursery’s existence came to the attention of the gardening press. While living in Washington State, the UK and then Colorado, I regularly visited the Chalk Hill Clematis website (http://www.chalkhillclematis.com/) and indulged in the photos of their vast selection of plant varieties. This past February I visited the garden and met Kaye Heafey (owner, with her husband Richard) and Murray Rosen, Nursery Manager. Even in its winter dress, Chalk Hill Clematis lived up to my expectations. Rosen cheerfully walked my husband and me around the 5 acres of cut flower plant stock, of nursery greenhouses and finally around the beautifully conceived and designed Mary Toomey Clematis Garden, where every garden structure or plant other than clematis serves to showcase the central star.

For the record, there are two accepted ways to pronounce clematis. I was brought up saying CLEM-uh-tis, and so I will continue to do. Others pronounce it clem-ahh-tis (equal stress on all 3 syllables and a flat rather than short A in the middle), and most sources agree that both pronunciations are correct.

Kaye Heafey first hatched the idea of growing clematis for the high-end cut flower industry (think the lobby at Bergdorf Goodman or The Carlyle in New York City or Los Angeles) with her Oakland-based floral designer, Carrie Glenn. While the original idea included growing all kinds of interesting and hard-to-find cut floral materials, by 1993 the business had shifted almost entirely to growing clematis for its long stemmed, twirling naturalistic interest and dramatic bloom size and color. Rosen, born and raised in the northeast, joined Chalk Hill in 1993. A friend of Glenn’s and an artist by education, he had been working at a rare plant nursery in Berkeley specializing in roses and clematis. With Rosen’s involvement, it was not long before Chalk Hill Clematis developed their nursery for growing and selling clematis plants as a complement to the cut flower business.

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Hurray Hurray the first of May - When I was a child, my mother (of British persuasion) would sing this bawdy rhyme on the first of May. And Bawdy is a very good description of the garden right now – all decked out in blossoms of extravagant colors and scents trying to attract pollinators so that it and we can move on into the fullness of summer and towards the possibility of fall harvests. The birds and bugs, flowers and weather are exuberant. Even with some cold fronts moving across the high country and bringing late, spring snows, it feels easier than winter rain and snow.

You can understand why May celebrations around the world and throughout time are centered around the riotous abundance of this time of year, with music and dancing and many, many flowers representing the obscene riches. May-poles and maybaskets, spring lettuces, asparagus and strawberries, fill gardens and markets; poppies, roses, lemon blossoms and mock orange branches scent the very air around us. Photo Below: Carolyn Melf’s exuberant Iris Spring garden, in Paradise. Iris Spring boasts 650 different varieties of iris, which are in bloom now and open to the public to see from now until May 25th or so. Iris viewed now can be ordered or purchased now mid-June pick-up. Besides iris, the garden has a lovely display of azaleas, dogwood, peonies and roses just now. For more information on how to get there call 872-7771.

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