While there is no regular In a North State Garden radio program this weekend, a this week’s feature essay is the follow-up to the special one-hour Call-In Edition of In a North State Garden that was aired on Thursday March 25th. The resources list was compiled with the help of my panel of guest experts and educators: Lisa Endicott of McConnell Arboretum and Botanical Gardens at Turtle Bay in Redding; Quinn Mendez, teacher with the Agriculture Department at Chico High School and Claudia Randall, an 11th grade Agriculture student at Chico High; and Adrienne Edwards, PhD., Botanist, Ecologist, Arborist, and education chair of the Mt. Lassen chapter of the California Native Plant Society. (more…)

Do you remember when you first realized you were a plant lover? Do you remember when you first became a ‘gardener?’ If you are reading this, chances are you became a love of plants at some fairly definable point: an interaction, a moment, a relationship, a summer, a winter, whether it was as a child or as an adult.

I remember this about learning to love plants - learning that I WAS a gardener: the sticky residue on my finger tips after dead-heading petunias; the peaceful, hushed fragrance and warmth beneath an old ponderosa pine; my mother paying me and my sisters pennies to weed the vegetable garden; my mother sending me at age 7 to the garden to pick spinach for dinner and my returning with a basket of swiss chard - “Do you not know what spinach looks like?” she asked incredulously; turning fuchsia blossoms upside down so that they became fairy dresses; hungrily sucking the sweet nectar from a honeysuckle blossom as we walked to the beach; my bed-ridden grandfather asking me to take his polaroid camera out to the garden to photograph the cherry tree in bloom - just as he had photographed it every year since he had planted it twenty years earlier. Those are some of the imagistic - formative - memories that accumulated into my - from childhood to adulthood - becoming a plant lover, a gardener. What do you remember? (more…)

Let’s face it - I am all about habitat and environmentally friendly and responsible gardening. I am. I love birds, bees, butterflies and the like. But, let’s also face the fact that we live in deer country. And Oh Deer! (%^&*^%$*!!), this can be a harsh reality for a gardener. What to do? Throw in the gardening towel? Set up a tree stand, get out your rifle, paint your face, put on your camo and look through your venison cookbooks while you wait for deer to venture back to your decimated garden? (Although your HOA and/or neighbors might object to this second option.) Photo: Hungry deer heading toward my garden.

Ask the question “How should I deal with ravenous deer decimating my garden?” in mixed gardening company and you will get some seriously interesting answers, ranging from little bags of human hair hung throughout your shrubs and trees, to sprinkling human urine all around your garden (again, maybe not the best if your neighbors are quite near), to bags of Ivory soap, to radios blaring soft rock or talk-shows in the garden all night, and on it goes. (more…)

Did you have to read William Butler Yeats when you were in school? I can’t recall too many things I had to read in school and can still remember, but this poem I remember and it continues to be one of my favorites: Photo: A happy black bee on a salvia.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 5
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 10
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

If you are a gardener, you have no doubt had the formative experience of a “quiet” moment working in the garden - trimming, weeding, harvesting - your head lost in the shrubbery, your hands in the dirt, your labor accompanied by the happy hum of bees at work on a nearby plant in bloom. Or the experience of being dive-bombed by hummingbirds trying to get to the plant you happen to be working in. Or of realizing that you’ve been standing stock still for several minutes completely riveted by the dance of the butterflies across the top of the flower bed. Photo a bee flying into the tubular flower of a California fuchsia. (more…)