Flower shows have a long and illustrious history for American gardeners - The Philadelphia Flower Show was the first official American Flower show in 1829. I have my grandfather’s 1936 edition of The Garden Encyclopedia published by Wise & Co. My grandfather was a keen gardener and especially loved collecting and caring for camellias and roses in his South Carolina garden. The entry in the encyclopedia about Exhibiting begins with: “Why Exhibit? It is perfectly natural if one has grown a beautiful rose or dahlia, a fine egg-plant or a good bunch of grapes to enjoy showing in competition with similar products grown by others. It is a game of skill, and has all the amusement and interest (of such).” Angie Handy, Vice President of the Butte Rose Society and this year’s Rose Show Coordinator, assures us this “game of skill” is competition of the healthy and fun-loving kind.

Between now and the first week of October, the Northstate will host two regional rose shows with longstanding traditions: On Sept 20th The Butte Rose Society will hold its (www.butte-rosesociety.org) 14th Annual Butte Rose Show at The Newman Center 346 Cherry Street in Chico. Entries will be accepted from 6:30 – 10:00 am the morning of the show, and the show will be open to the public from 1:00 – 5:00 pm.

From October 3rd through the 5th, the Shasta and Humboldt Rose Societies will co-host our American Rose Society NCNH District conference and show in Redding. The District includes all of Northern California, Nevada and Hawaii. The conference will include speakers, seminars, and the rose show itself. It IS necessary to pre-register: for registration and info visit: http://www.ncnhdistrict.org/conference/2008-conference-regform.pdf, or www.ncnhdistrict.org. You can also call Gail Trimble at 415-472-6228.
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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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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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John Whittlesey is the founder and owner of Canyon Creek Nursery (www.canyoncreeknursery.com) outside of Oroville. John grew up outside of Sacramento and was drawn to plants and gardening from an early age. In his early adulthood, he worked at a mail order nursery in Spokane, Washington. Between 1984 and 1985, John and his wife, Susan, bought their 10-acre property outside of Oroville in a rural canyon dominated by native Oaks and grassland plants. After a plant-buying trip to England, where they purchased some of the hardy geranium, salvia and euphorbia plants that would form their base stock, they started Canyon Creek Nursery and their life in the Northstate. Photo at left: John and family dog, Rigel, at Canyon Creek Nursery. His other constant companion, the mobile phone, can be seen in his shirt pocket.

In the twenty-three years since, John - and his entire family in some way or another - have been providing “quality plants of uncommon perennials” to gardeners all over the world through what quickly became a top-notch mail-order business. The nursery is known for interesting and often heirloom selections of violets, dianthus (also known as pinks), geraniums (true and pelargoniums), abutilons (also known as Flowering Maples), salvias, agastaches, euphorbias and many, many others. Photo below and right: Abutilon nabob blooming in the greenhouse.

John is deservedly proud of the fact that theirs is a family owned and operated nursery in a day and age where small independent nurseries are up against the likes of Lowes and Home Depot, Monrovia and Proven Selections agribusiness-nurseries. Susan, a kindergarten teacher, is also a botanical illustrator and her sketches of plants and animals around the nursery have graced the pages of the all of the Canyon Creek Nursery catalogues. John has named some of his own plant introductions after his two children – son Reid and daughter Elicia. (Elicia’s middle name is Wren and wren illustrations are often included in Susan’s illustrations.) John’s mother, who is in her late eighties, still helps to take cuttings for plant propagation several days a week.

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Roses are without question one of the most iconic, storied, loved - and sometimes hated - flowers of the garden. Roses grow with tremendous success in the Northstate and rose societies in the state date back to the early 1900s. The Butte Rose Society, which meets at the Chico Branch of the Butte County Public Library at 7:00 pm the last Tuesday of the month January – May and August – November, was founded in the 1994 as a joint effort of Mendons Nursery and one of its employees, Joseph O’Neill. The current President, Bill Reynolds, joined the society in the mid-1990s. Angela Handy, the current First-Vice President, joined shortly thereafter. The society is made up of just-under 100 total memberships and at any given meeting about half of those plus a handful of guests might be present.

Bill Reynolds, (on right in photo to right) the current president (who has been president before), is a life-long lover of roses. His maternal grandfather, a German-born avid rose-grower from the Gridley area, got Bill started by middle-school or earlier. The garden he shares with his wife Patricia (also a member of the BRS) boasts nearly 1200 rose plants. “It’s the amazing diversity of color, fragrance, habit, and size that gets me about roses,” he says. With a background in education and home-care, Bill is a naturally enthusiastic and patient teacher of rose care.

Angela Handy, (on left in photo to left) the current First-Vice President (who has also been president before), is a professional plant propagator and Nursery Manager for Chico Propagators. She, an ebullient, funny and expansive personality, is another self admitted rose-addict who came to loving roses through hating one. As a young adult at her family’s farmhouse out in almond-growing-country, she was forced to park near a “ratty-old monster rose,” which clawed her one too many times and she axed it to the ground. She’s not sure why her father handed her the axe without question, but after such a violent pruning, that rose bush grew into a beauty. A rose lover was born.

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