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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A small old ceramic bowl filled with little offerings sits on my desk. It reminds me of a monk’s alms bowl, but instead of being filled with food or money, my bowl is full of gifts from many of the people whose gardens I visited or who shared their gardening stories on In a North State Garden this year. The offerings include things like a lacy tomatilla skeleton, a sculptural spice bush seed pod, an owl faced walnut shell, the aerodynamic shape of a winged maple seed, a fragrant California bay leaf (Umbellularia californica), a white birch bark curl, silvery dried grandfather sage leaves, a plastic baggie of Humboldt lily seeds, a pinch of paprika, a small vial of lavender oil, a heart shaped pebble….and more. These offerings add layers of meaning, the ritual of giving and the creation of memory to my garden. And meaning, ritual and memory add depth and dimension to anyone’s garden and gardening.

My gardening this month will consist of finally finishing with the bulbs. I still have snowdrops and crocus to go. I’m also working on cuttings and starts of several plants to donate to various garden club’s Spring plant sales. I am working on Nepeta, 6 different scented geraniums (Pelargonium), one variety of true Geranium, as well as some hens and chicks and several varieties of sedums. I am raking the leaves from the lawn and pathways, making piles of them in out of the way corners so that I have leaves to add to my compost bin throughout as much of the year as possible. This kind of end of year work in the garden – along with the garden’s own seasonal decorations of remaining colorful leaves, bright red Toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) berries, snow frosting the mountains and foothills, yellow Meyer lemons and squat Mandarins – puts me in the seasonal mood.
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“One acre well compast, is worth acres three.” Ward Habriel becomes quiet and reverent as he quotes one of his heroes, J. I. Rodale, father of the modern day organic gardening movement. Quiet and reverent are clearly at the depths of their passion, but “gregarious and fun” are more accurate descriptors for Cheryl and Ward Habriel – Master Composters and avid home gardeners who have been visiting Paradise since the 1970s and have lived in upper Paradise full-time since 2004.

I first met Ward and Cheryl on the Paradise Garden Club tour earlier this summer – he was in charge of a home composting demonstration station. Their knowledge – and their senses of humor – became apparent almost immediately. In the handful of times I have gotten together with them, Ward generally has a Rot Hotline t-shirt on, their car has a bumper sticker that reads: Compost Happens. These people love compost. And they want us to love it too. “One of the great things about compost is that it happens whether you are part of it or not. Leave a pile of leaves and twigs and nature will compost it for you – it’s just the natural process of decomposing organic matter. That’s the science of it. The art and fun of it is when you decide to actively participate. I mean for heaven’s sake why buy what you can make for free and do a better job of it? You already have all the materials – no matter how large or small your estate or apartment might be!”

Ward and Cheryl are life-long home gardeners. In the mid-1990s, retired from the insurance industry and while still living in Castro Valley, Ward became interested in the idea of composting as way to save money and put his yard waste to work. He and Cheryl took an introductory class on composting by Alameda County and from there they were both accepted into the Master Composter program.

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If Spring in the garden is brazen – August in the garden is languid. I generally think of God as an energy, but when I lean toward personification, I like to think of God as a gardener – with broken fingernails, a stiff back, a sunburned neck, bramble-scraped and bug-bitten calves, a long-term plan of harmonious design, good intentions, and a happy heart. But absolutely positively unable to get it all done no matter how many hours worked or how much effort expended…and yet… still willing to try. And even God – like us gardeners – needed a day of rest. While many climates take their rest in the deep of Winter - the heat of August in the Northstate is my Gardening Sunday.

My war with weeds has come to some kind of stalemate – I have won a few battles, but the weeds have won their share. I have a bumper crop of bindweed and to be honest, I’m really liking the pale pink morning-glory flowers of it trailing through some intensely purple lantana – it’s as nice a companion planting as I’ve ever planned. I have resigned myself to the fact that the current state of affairs IS what all last winter’s planning and spring work led to and that my summer garden for this year is what I see before me. Fruits fatten on tree and vine, some are ready now and others are waiting for Fall. The Fall garden? Well, it waits for the heat to subside. As do I.

Not that there isn’t plenty to do – watering, harvesting vegetables, watering, weeding, watering, deadheading, re-mulching to cut down on watering, collecting seeds and watering again. My roses are still going gangbusters – especially if I remember to cut back the spent blooms. Crepe Myrtle – white, red, purple and pink - sings her siren song. I even had a few late-season sweet-peas - sweet pea, nasturium, very ripe melon or very ripe tomato are good seeds to be collecting now for next year’s garden. And you have to admire those plants that live for just August’s heat - my rudbeckia, gaillardia, and oregano have never looked better. I on the other hand, am all for the siesta attitude and feel the need to contract a bit each mid-afternoon. After all, a day of rest is a day of rest - or a month. Most everything can wait until the cool of early evening, early morning or even early October.

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The saying goes: Where there is smoke there is fire, but over the past month it could have easily have been reversed – where there is fire, there is smoke – and sometimes quite a lot of it. After trying to comprehend the loss of whole households or the idea of thousands of acres burned or burning, my mind has turned toward the plants themselves – the forests and gardens full of plants. Photo above: Smoky Sunrise in the Northstate.

I wonder if they too know somehow – can sense rather than smell or see the smoke through the increased particulants and pollution in the air? Do they know there is increased risk of damage or mortality and do they take measures to protect themselves or more specifically to protect their seed? It is well-known that plants under stress including drought and disease will, if at all possible, throw all of their reserves into flowering and setting seed in order to assure their next generation. Do plants that sense fire do the same? Some evidence also suggests that smoky conditions might be beneficial to plants in areas of otherwise intense summer sun and heat because the smoke reduces the intensity of the light. Furthermore, the increased carbon dioxide in the air is used by the plants to produce sugars and other foods. The larger scale climactic effects of the smoke are another story. Photo above: the magnificent Humboldt Lily in Bloom in Carolyn Melf’s Paradise Garden in mid-June.

Recently I walked the grounds of a home that burned to the ground in the Humboldt fire in mid-June. It was the home of friends. Right after the gut wrenching first impression of what an entire house burned to the ground looks like, I was immediately struck by what was not lost – or not lost entirely. The gardens. A fire that burned long enough and hot enough to diminish a washer and dryer to melted metal had not killed the blue oaks nearby, rather just licked their feet. The new green growth shooting up from the bases of charred cistus plants and Rose of Sharon brought me to my knees – to check for life in the crown and along the stems of all the gardens’ plants. The roses, which were grafted hybrid teas may not come back from above the graft, but still. The sight of bright new growth in the midst of a blackened landscape was a small but significant miracle in my eyes. Photo above: A Northstate Wildfire, late June.

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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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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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As a gardener, it is rare that I visit a nursery I don’t like. But frequently, I enjoy different nurseries for different things – one for their perennials, one for their conifers, one for their trees and shrubs, another for their interesting selection of containers and pots, and so forth. Mendons Nursery in Paradise (http://www.mendonsnursery.com/) is one of those nurseries that I find fully satisfying straight across the board. It is a nursery for hands-on, dirty finger-nailed gardeners: it is not too fancy in its main shop where a warm wood-stove greets winter shoppers looking over seeds and soil prep products; it is refined and relaxing in its home and garden gift shop, the Winding Vine; but most importantly, Mendons’ extensive selection of plants rivals that of any nursery, anywhere. Photo above, John and Jerry Mendon in front of one of Jerry’s favorites - a large Sago palm at the nursery.

Jerry Mendon started Mendon’s Nursery in 1973. He, his wife Joanne and their children had relocated to the Northstate from Southern California a few years earlier with the intention of Jerry retiring. Since 1948 Jerry had been working hard in the nursery and plant industry in Southern California, primarily working on big commercial landscaping, specializing in setting large palm trees. In that phase of his career he was responsible for setting such notable palms as the ones at Dodger Stadium and Los Angeles International Airport’s Tower. Jerry’s father had been a banker by trade, but an avid gardener at home, and it is to him that Jerry attributes his gardening gene.

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