Do you know what an herbarium is?

We have at least two here in the North State. Did you know that?

I did not know either of these things – at least not precisely or with complete confidence, and nor did most of my gardening friends when asked this question.

An herbarium is to plants, what a library is to books. If you love plants (and if you’re reading this essay, you’ve already raised your hand) AND you love the idea of preserving and expanding knowledge about them – then you will love the idea of an herbarium. An herbarium is a catalogue, a collection, a record, a repository and a protectorate of plant life and knowledge about plant life. Photo: A new plant specimen is carefully examined before it is accessioned into the collections at the CSU Chico Herbarium.
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Every year – about this time in the North Valley - the big spring bloom begins. And every year I think – it’s even more miraculous – even more lovely this year. Narcissus, hellebores, daphnes, camellias, magnolias, the first of the fruit trees – the beauty is abundant. And now that we’ve had some real rain and snow, I can actually enjoy the bloom with less worry. Close to 11 inches of rain – that’s how much rain I measured in my home garden in the month of February. The rain was so inspiring to me that some days I had to go check my rain gauge 2 or 3 times. I then ran inside, reported the newest numbers to my family and rushed to record the numbers in my journal. I know one good month of rain and snow will not reverse the past seasons’ unusually low precipitation. I know we are still in a drought – but this one good month sure doesn’t hurt. And when the March mountains are decked with snow and the valley is greening and damp, life in my garden feels just right. Photo: White Hellebores.

Although the first official day of spring is March 20th – hurray! - average last frost dates are still a ways away for most of us (early-April for the earliest of us) so don’t get too excited too quickly. Now is a great time for continuing to sow cold hardy vegetable seeds or planting out cold hardy perennials and shrubs to begin establishing before true spring. Now is also the time for feeding a balanced fertilizer to your trees, shrubs and lawns that are starting to show signs of growth. March 1st is a traditional date on which to feed citrus trees. And don’t forget that March 8th, we spring our clocks forward one hour. Photo: Looking across snow covered mountains from Mt. Shasta in mid- February.
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New Year’s in the garden is the same as in the house, same as in the heart. It is full of renewed purpose, determined resolutions and good intentions. For me – and for many – this resolve is all about setting things in order. Not from any grandiose hope for perfection, but simply as a way to at least start things off on the right foot. Before the winter pruning of roses, grape vines and fruit trees, before top-dressing vegetable beds or herbaceous borders with fresh compost, before the spraying of dormant oils, “starting off on the right foot” for me means sorting out my tools.

Late December and January will include cleaning, sharpening and - as needed or if possible - mending my favorite tools. We gardeners are particular about our tools and every gardener I know has their own set of favorites. Mine include the following:
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Warm, smoky, mouth-watering and full-bodied. That was the dominant sensory experience on a walk around Nancy Heinzel and Brian Marshall’s market garden, Sawmill Creek Farm, in late summer. The entire garden was scented with the heady aroma of Hungarian peppers smoking over hickory chips at one end of the garden.

Nancy Heinzel and Brian Marshall are truly avid gardeners. That love and passion became much of their livelihood, “like all good things, by accident!” says Brian, “about 10 years ago,” when they decided to allow their 1-acre garden to continue on its ever-expanding way and become not just their garden but an outstanding market garden. Today, Nancy tends to the farm as her full-time job and Brian pitches in half time, his other half-time is spent as landscape designer and installer. Much of the goods from the farm are grown to sell at various markets around the area – including the Chico Thursday night Market and the Saturday Market in Oroville, April to November.
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Teresa Wolk Hayes, is the Executive Director and founder of the Little Red Hen Nursery and Gift shop in Chico. The Little Red Hen is a 501c3 non-profit corporation whose mission is to serve children and adults with developmental disabilities (DD), which it does through a variety of hands-on learning and employment opportunities for the developmentally disabled in a retail nursery (for absolutely ANYONE who loves to garden), greenhouse and potting facility, and a home and garden oriented gift shop. Photo Above: Teresa Wolk Hayes, The Little Red Hen, standing in the front row with employees Alan Jackson, Kevin Dzerigian and Brandon Shoop, who are working the coldhouse crew under the supervision of Jim Belles, at back.

To meet Teresa Hayes in person is to encounter a remarkable combination of the legendary Little Red Hen of childhood storybook fame and a garden Angel: If she has to, Teresa gets things done ALL BY HERSELF, but mostly she likes to work together with others and she loves sharing the results of her hard work with everyone and anyone. And many of her results are made possible through the beauty and wonderfully therapeutic aspects of gardening.

Teresa started adult life as a trained Registered Nurse having graduated from Chico State. She had always loved to garden. But when her eldest son was 3 1/2 and diagnosed with broad DD, her life as she knew it tilted somewhat on its axis. During the next phase of her life, in response to her son’s diagnoses she truly called on the therapeutic aspects of gardening for herself. “Gardening at that time helped me to heal.” It also helped her to move her life to its next amazing phase.

One of the things that Teresa quickly discovered all those years ago was that not a lot of programs existed – interventional, educational or therapeutic or employment – within a reasonable distance, to help her or to help her son. But one thing she knew was that he loved to swim and be in the water. As time went on, Teresa developed a playgroup of other parents with children that had similar diagnoses and who also seemed to benefit from the experience of swimming. Swim therapy, more precisely. “It was a self education for me,” laughs Teresa, shaking her head, remembering. “It was parenting, networking, sanity, support and friendship - for the parents and the kids!”

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Recently I visited the McConnell Arboretum and Garden at Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding. In a North State Garden last toured the park with Lisa Endicott, Horticulture Manager, in February of this year when she talked to us about the history, layout and mission of the mature 20-acre cultivated display garden and 200-acre arboretum. This time, however, I was talking to Lisa about the damage caused to the gardens by a wildfire that started in the City of Redding and ran through the Arboretum and Gardens on August 26th.

The fire started in town and ran swiftly through untended green belts. Heavy winds of up to 30 or 40 miles an hour that day, coupled with extreme summer heat and dry conditions, allowed the the fire to rapidly burn more than 130 acres in downtown Redding. The area of the McConnell Arboretum and Gardens most affected was on the sundial side of the Sundial Bridge but across the main walkway running perpendicular to the bridge.”

Fire is devastating and destructive. The 2008 Northern California fires burned many acres and homes and negatively affected much of our region. If a silver lining can be found in the fire at the McConnell Arboretum and Gardens, it is in the fact that with the fire here also comes the opportunity to learn: to observe and draw conclusions about the nature of fire in a garden setting and how most efficiently and effectively to respond and go about with restoration. “Oh yes, the fire presents us with an opportunity for research we wouldn’t otherwise have had,” says Lisa, with something of an ironic laugh. “This is the first fire we’ve had since I’ve worked on the grounds (more than 10 years now) and we will be collecting information about various plants’ response to the event – short and long term. For instance how did the Mediterranean plants fare versus the native plants? How did the well-established fare compared to the juvenile or young plants?”

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Life is good. Really. November in the Northstate Garden sums up everything I love about living and gardening here – rich colors, abundant flowers and edibles, perfect weather – yes, even the rain - and nice people. After this past season of fire, economic chaos and seemingly endless politics – November in the Northstate is nothing short of a miracle.

On a crisp November morning, stand with a warming sun shining down upon you –in the middle of the Sundial Bridge in Redding watch the anglers and school children indulging in the beauty of one of our mighty rivers. Walk through the dappled sunlight beneath the sheltering trees of Chico’s Bidwell Park bikers and morning parents with children going this way and that. Walk the Feather River Fish Ladder in Oroville to see the salmon and steelhead struggling to make their way home. Hike Mount Lassen or the Trinity Alps. Take the drive to Lake Almanor. The greater Northstate Garden is one of the best inspirations by far for our own Northstate Garden.

In my garden – the leaves are beginning to change, some further gone than others. Persimmons hang fat and iridescent on the branches – sweetening up with the cool nights. I am cutting back the dead and the spent, top-dressing my beds with compost mulch. Some of the compost is from my own compost bin and spreading that always feels satisfyingly self-sufficient. Some people are sad at this particular cutting back of the year, but for me it feels freeing, things have gotten a bit overgrown and it’s time. And while we Northstate gardeners get to enjoy all four seasons we also get to enjoy the fact that while some things are now entering winter dormancy, others are just breaking their summer dormancy. Don’t be too quick to cut back plants that are still actively flowering – on these cold-morning/warm afternoons days the pollinating bees, butterflies moths and hummingbirds are still very active and they will reward your patience.
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Since 1917 a plant nursery has lived on the site where Native Grounds Nursery & Garden Center in Mount Shasta City now thrives. For 91 years people of the Northstate have journeyed to this same pine-tree-sheltered spot on Mount Shasta Boulevard as you enter the small mountain town of Mount Shasta City to buy their plants, their soil, their seeds. Dating back to the original nursery, a hefty, gnarled old Wisteria vine winds its way through one of the tall pines and blooms its heart out every spring. “People stop and ask us what that purple flowering pine is,” say Native Grounds Nursery owners Lori Oliver and Terez Maniatis. A little stone house, once home to the original nursery’s founding family, sits just to the left of the Wisteria festooned pine stand and at the heart of the bustling Native Grounds site. The site is actually home to three businesses owned and run by Oliver and Maniatis: the year-round Mt. Shasta Florist, as well as the Native Grounds Nursery Garden Center and Native Grounds landscaping.

Oliver and Maniatis began their business life in the gardening world in 1993 with a small landscape design and build company also called Native Grounds. When the old Mt. Shasta Nursery & Florist came up for sale in the late 90s, the women jumped at the chance. “It has always been a dream of ours to own a nursery,” Terez told me. “We wanted to be able to grow a lot of our own plants to our own high, organic and sustainable standards - to be able to provide our clients with a wider selection of interesting plants - to model and keep educating our clients and customers about the benefits of organic and sustainable gardening products and practices. To be even more involved in the gardening cycle.”

The modeling of more sustainable practices started right when Oliver and Maniatis took over the nursery in 2000. They had to safely dispose of “truckloads” of older, toxic chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. At the same time, they brought a full-line of organic soil supplements and plant foods into the garden center. They moved their design/build and maintenance landscaping business onto the nursery grounds and renamed the nursery Native Grounds. While they also own and run the florist business on the same piece of property, they left its name as the Mt. Shasta Florist. Mt. Shasta Florist, which now carries many organic or sustainably grown cut flowers, and Native Grounds Landscaping remain open year-round, while Native Grounds Nursery & Garden Center closes from the end of October to the first of April.

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Gardening, and the planted environment, is part of our cultural literacy – I am convinced of this. And local independent nurseries are the equivalent of the local library for this particular (and in my mind critical) aspect of our literacy. Local nurseries are gathering, learning and socializing places that help us live productively and happily in our communities.

Recently, I was visiting the Prickly Pear Nursery in Orland, chatting with Diane Stout, the owner, when three local Garden Club Ladies came by. Their hands were full. One had a large fresh green stem from what looked like a shrub, another had a pot with a small dead-or-dying specimen and the other had black plastic plant pots to recycle. Diane knew the ladies by name and they were hoping she could help them identify the first item, diagnose the second item and make use of the third. She was able to do all three, and the ladies stayed a while, chatting with us and comparing notes on what their gardens were up to just now. Two of the ladies bought something and they said good-bye. The interaction left me with this powerful feeling – the feeling you get when an experience transcends itself and comes to represent something larger. Photo Above: Diane Stout and her dog Bullet.

Diane Stout and her husband, Dave, moved to Orland from Carpinteria, near Santa Barbara, in 2003. Diane had for many years owned Hollyhocks Gardens, a small independent nursery in Carpinteria. When she moved north, she knew she wanted to continue in the nursery world, but was not sure she wanted to dive right in to owning. She spent her first few years in the Northstate working at the Red Bluff Garden Center, followed by Mendons Nursery in Paradise. “Suzy Brooks and Jerry and John Mendon were all great people to work with and learn from,” says Diane. But eventually, she was ready to start again at a place of her own – and in her home-town of Orland. September marked the one-year anniversary of the nursery.
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Donna Bayliss grows lavender – acres and acres, rows and rows of multiple varieties of certified organic lavender – and rosemary, lemon verbena, scented geranium, lemon balm, chamomile, sage and clary sage, to name a few – for the organic botanical industry. But in my mind, Donna grows those fields of lavender for me and for the views her fields offer to me as I drive up or down Highway 99. Those fields make me dream and their fragrance – or the thought of it - makes me happy.

Which is exactly why Donna Bayliss grows lavender – because lavender – its sight, scent, and taste makes people happier and healthier. “There are curative powers in lavender oil. The scent of the oil is relaxing and the active elements in the oil are healing. If I had not experienced these qualities myself, I would not be so sure. But I have and I am,” Donna tells me passionately. “My goal for this ranch is to continue to offer the opportunity for consumers to experience the real essence – not cheap synthetic imposters – of these plants. I also wanted to protect my son’s legacy and raise the bar environmentally on our ranch - to use less water, no pesticides or herbicides. Growing these naturally drought tolerant and relatively disease free herbs, I am able to do all of that – and be surrounded by their beauty year-round.”

Grown as a culinary and medicinal herb throughout the world, throughout time, lavender (Lavandula) is a genus comprising multiple species and hybrids. Bayliss Ranch grows many varieties, including Lavandula angustifolia ‘Hidcote’, “which keeps its dark blue color much longer;” Lavandula x intermedia ‘Grosso’ and Lavandula x intermedia ‘Provence,’ “which have longer stems for arranging.”

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