Water. One of the basic elements without which we cannot survive. Pretty much the same is true for our gardens. While the general perception is that we as residents of the North State have plenty of water – good, clean water – the actual fact is that water – specifically good clean water – is one of the world’s most rapidly diminishing resources. Photo: A fountain at the McConnell Arboretum and Gardens at Turtle Bay in Redding tells the tale of water and how it is used in the United States.

Few gardeners among us, I believe, do not think about water conservation in relation to our gardens – whether we think of it in a semi-guilty way as we set our sprinklers or increase the watering time on our irrigation clocks in the searing heat of our North State summers, or we make concerted conservation efforts with drought tolerant plants and recycled gray water for our irrigation. But generally speaking, our guilt and sometime lapses in our conservation efforts are by and large offset by the knowledge that the rains will arrive eventually.

Right?
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Lynette Gooch loves lavender. All kinds of lavender for all kinds of reasons. In the United Kingdom the gardening world has things known as National Collections, wherein when a specific garden has more species or varieties of any one kind of plant than any other garden, they can become designated a National Collection. Private gardens and gardeners are as likely to hold National Collections as larger public botanic gardens. In the United States, we do not have such a scheme, but if we did, Lynette Gooch and her husband Richard might well hold the National Collection of lavender with their 207 different named varieties of lavender at the display gardens in Whitmore: Tuscan Heights Lavender Gardens.

Grown as a culinary and medicinal herb throughout the world, throughout time, lavender (Lavandula) is a genus comprising multiple species and hybrids. Species of the genus originate from the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia, and the genus thrives in the Mediterranean climate of the North State.

The Tuscan Heights’ story started in 1999 when Lynette and Richard, farmer/gardeners at heart, were looking around the North State with possible re-location in mind. Living in Roseville at the time, Lynette is from Calaveras County originally and of strong Italian descent, with fond memories of the large family production garden she grew up helping to tend with her father. “Of five kids, I seem to have been the most gardening inclined, which I think has helped me out here!” she tells me the warm summer day I toured around the gardens. “We were about to leave and head home when Richard by chance picked a local discount classified paper and happened to read about land in Whitmore. ‘Where’s Whitmore?’, he asked me. So we drove up, I got out of the car, looked around, breathed deeply, kicked at the dirt with my foot and said - This is it. Let’s write the check.” Although the sloping land was covered in poison oak, manzanita and blackberry, Lynette knew she was home. The Fern Fire had devastated the area 12 years earlier, and Lynette could see that the soil had begun to recover and was ready for any garden she might want to grow. Neither she, the land nor Richard knew just what that garden would become.
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Sometimes as a garden lover you just want the sight of a beautiful garden – that sweeping view of plants and space and color and form all working together to create that ephemeral thing we call a beautiful garden. Could be a cottage garden, could be a Japanese garden, could even be a kitchen garden – doesn’t matter – it just has to be lovely to look at in your eyes. Yes, we want healthy soil, yes, we want healthy plants, yes, we want sustainable and regionally appropriate gardens, but let’s face it – what most of us gardeners are after is pure beauty. Which in gardens as in people, is much more than skin deep. Photo: A view down a long Mixed Border at Skylake Gardens in Durham. The border works together as a whole unit with colors and shapes repeated through the trees, shrubs and herbaceous perennials that Christy has chosen. The most noticeable repetitions change throughout the year as different combinations of plants come to the fore, and then fade back. The rounded Carolina Cherry shrubs form the protective and aesthetic backdrop for the border.

One sure way to get that killer Cover-of-a Glossy-Garden-Magazine effecy is with a well-designed Mixed Border. A Mixed Border can be a gardener’s best friend in terms of garden design elements. Done well – it will give you pause for admiration over and over again throughout the gardening year.

Mixed Borders are perhaps a bit more difficult to implement than glossy magazine photos of good ones might suggest, but they are also not so difficult that you should not consider one in your next garden, or your next garden make-over. Where an Herbaceous Border relies almost completely on herbaceous perennials (flowering plants that die back to the ground in winter, but return again each spring) and is far and away strongest in the peak summer months, and an Annual Bedding relies on fresh annual plantings each summer, or even two or three times a summer, a Mixed Border is just that: a section of the garden which consists of a mix of all kinds of garden plants, including trees, shrubs, sub-shrubs, vines, perennials annuals and bulbs, that are designed to work together as a whole. Photo: A small planting combination in the formal White Garden and patio area just off the back of Gail Brown’s house. This garden was planned not only to be predominantly white: featuring white flowers or white foliage, but to also be especially fragrant. The structural backbone trees and shrubs include a white treed-up Wisteria, and white-edged holly leafed Osmanthus, and many, many white roses. Here white Watsonia is center and pops beside the red foliage of a Berberis.

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Some things are just meant to go together: peanut butter and jelly; Acorus gramineus minimus ‘Aureus’ and Alchemilla mollis…..what??? Well, Grassy-leaved Sweet-Flag (Acorus gramineus minimus ‘Aureus’) a short, mounding, strappy leaved plant with a gorgeous lime-green color planted next to the ruffled-edged, saucer-shaped dark green leaves and the spikes of foamy-white flowers of Lady’s Mantle (Alchemilla mollis) – might just be a perfect plant combination. And finding new and great plant combinations is the goal of the new companion planting trial beds at the McConnell Arboretum and Gardens at Turtle Bay, says Lisa Endicott, Horticultural Manager at the gardens. Photo: One of the companion pairs intended by the McConnell Arboretum and Gardens is this between Carex barbarae (dun colored grassy plant at back) and Lysimachia c. ‘Atropurpurea’ (pale purple flower at bottom), however, plants (like people) have a way of forming their own companions no matter what the gardener intended. Here, the dark purple head of a Verbena adds a third and striking element to the combination.

Companion Planting as a concept is as old as mother nature – who routinely puts plants together that work well together and for the most part, they look good together, too. Companion Planting as handled by mortal gardeners is a technique used to see which plants that you might not expect to see together actually make great companions anyway. The success of their companionship is based on a variety of criteria: (Photo: Rosemary planted against a backdrop of
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Like gardening itself, the field of Botanical Illustration dates back to ancient times and is a combination of both art and science. Surviving examples of ancient botanical drawings include detailed sketches of plants dating to 1500 BCE found on Egyptian temple walls. Until the advent of the camera, microscope and other instruments used for copying and storing information, botanical drawings served all manner of purpose for the fields of Botany, Medicine, Pathology and Geography among others. Early botanical drawings served as teaching tools for students of these fields and drawings were often compiled into “herbals” or collections cataloguing the medicinal uses of plants. Today, Botanical Illustration continues as marriage between art and science and is becoming increasingly interesting to gardeners. Classes in Botanical Illustration specifically for gardeners are offered at display and botanic gardens, nurseries, and herbaria around the region. Photo: Susan Bazell in her studio.

Susan Bazell is a Botanical Illustrator who lives and works in Paradise. While she says she is not a “professional botanical artist,” Susan’s work can be seen in several books, including the newly released Cacti, Agaves and Yuccas of California and Nevada (Stephen Ingram, Cachuma Press, 2008), Conifers of California (Ronald M. Lanner, Cachuma Press, 2002), and The Life of an Oak (Glenn Keator, Heyday Books, 1998), among others. Photo: Books in which the work of Susan Bazell appears.
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Several weeks ago, when I wrote “Let the show begin!,” I certainly did not intend to invite the aphids. Nevertheless, the show has begun and the aphids are here to enjoy it along with us. So are the weeds. I am not much of a believer in death-by-chemical, and so I am once again enjoying my spring morning ritual of pulling a few weeds and squashing as many aphids as I can. The aphids are mostly clustered along the stems and young flower buds of my clematis vines and rose bushes, so I am able to squash quite a group with one gesture. Soon enough the beneficial bugs (Aphid wasps, assassin bugs, lacewings, ladybugs,praying mantis, etc.) and who feed on the aphids will be along to help me in my work and until then the morning squashing is oddly satisfying. If I lose my zeal for squashing, I can always pull out the hose and give the plants a strong spraying,w which helps to dislodge a large portion of the aphids as well. Photo: Aphids very happily covering a clematis stem and bud.

To escape our spring gardening reality of aphids and weeds, (and other gardeners’ reality of late-winter snow and frost), we have spring Flower & Garden Show season followed closely by Early Summer Garden Tour season. Unlike aphids, garden shows and garden tours at their best are all about fantasy and possibility. They are - dare I say it - sexy and seductive with the garden temptations and promise they hold out to us.

In the past two weeks I have attended two good garden shows: The world-class San Francisco Flower & Garden show this year was in its new location at the San Mateo Events Center. I was duly impressed with the display gardens and duly overwhelmed with the plant and garden vendor booths (every garden thing you can think of from books to orchids to garlic presses) and next year I hope to go for two days so that I can take advantage of some of the speakers and seminars offered. The Soroptimists Home, Garden & Antique show in Chico last weekend had some nice floral competition displays and several very good plant vendors sales and demonstrations - regional plant groups including the Iris Society, the California Native Plant Society, the Orchid Society the Bonsai Society, the Audubon Society and Chico Horticultural Society were there with displays, information and even plants for sale. Several other regional Home & Garden shows and the first of the regional garden tours are coming up in the next few weeks. Photo: while my home garden does not have space for a fountain quite like this one - I so admired the design of it, I had to take a picture for my files.
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Ok – and be honest now – how many plants have you killed? As a gardener, the most reassuring (and funny, because true) advice, I have ever heard was from Panayoti Kelaidis, Senior Curator and Director of Outreach at the Denver Botanic Gardens, when he said something along the lines of “If you have killed 100 plants, you are a beginner gardener, if you have killed 1000 plants, you are an amateur, and if you can no longer keep track of how many plants over 1000 you have killed, you are an advanced gardener.” Hallelujah, I’m advanced. Photo:Vine Hill Manzanita (Arctostaphylos densiflora ‘Howard McMinn’) is one of the UC Davis Arboretum All-Stars shrub selections.

But in all truth, I would rather not kill plants, even in the name of experimentation and learning through trying. When I first began gardening in the northern Central Valley – I had a high mortality rate in my garden: some things died because I planted them too late in Spring and the heat got them, some things died because I planted them too late and the frost got them, some things that said “full-sun” did not really want full CENTRAL VALLEY sun, others things got too much water in winter and rotted, others too little water in summer and died of thirst. HOLY COW! Why even garden here, you might ask. Well, as you know, we garden here because it is in our genes to garden no matter where we are and because if we are pointed in the right direction we do actually learn quickly how to manage with our specific region and climate. Photo:Island Alumroot (Heuchera maxima), is one of the UC Davis Arboretum All-Stars native California perennial selections.
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