Diane Stout loves Prickly Pear (Opuntia spp.) cactus - all kinds of them. She likes them in artwork, she likes them in pots, she likes them in all shapes and sizes all around her Orland garden. She likes them so much she named her nursery in Orland after the plants. The home garden that she shares with her husband Dave is home to nearly 40 individual Opuntia plants, comprising 16 different species or varieties. Opuntias are quite hardy, very low-maintenance and, extremely drought tolerant. In general, they prefer full sun, lean rocky soil with sharp drainage, and once established, they need almost no supplemental water.Photo: Diane began her colllection in earnest by asking for cuttings from mature stands of Opuntias in the area, for instance from old farmsteads or churches. Here an established stand of Prickly Pears complement the side of an old industrial metal quonset hut in Los Molinos.

Opuntia is a genus of close to 200 species of cacti originating to North, Central and South America and the West Indies. The genus can be divided into what some people call the Prickly Pear cacti – with round but flatter pads, and the Cholla or Teddy Bear cacti – with heavily spined, oblong sausage-shaped pads. California beavertail cactus (Opuntia basilaris), Teddy Bear Cholla (O. bigelovii), Pancake or Dollar Joint Prickly Pear (O. chlorotica), Silver or Golden Cholla (O. echinocarpa), Old Man Prickly Pear (O. erinacea), and Buckhorn Cholla (O. acanthocarpa), are all considered native to California – mostly to the desert scrub and desert woodland regions of the state. Photo: A purple-fruited Opuntia.
(more…)

Until I moved to the North State, I had never belonged to a garden club. My mother was never in a garden club, nor was my father, for that matter. I am not sure why, but in my own mind garden clubs were – well – ‘clubby’, sort of stuffy and a bit exclusive and not my cup of tea. But I had aunties – and not stuffy ones – who were very involved in their local garden clubs. My aunt in Virginia was one of these. When my cousins, her daughters, were married (at different times), the garden club ladies who had been long-time friends with my aunt came out in force - dressed in dirty jeans and muddy shoes, with their clippers and their beat-up cars full of garden stuff. They picked masses of flowers from their own gardens and spent the better part of the day before each of the weddings arranging. Finally, they arrived at each of the weddings cleaned up and flower-proud. This was not stuffy or clubby – this was a sisterhood of good gardeners doing good things. Photo: The new Cone & Kimball Plaza Clock Tower on the same corner in downtown Red Bluff where the historic clock tower stood.

Lorna Bonham, a retired educator, and Cathy Wilson, a retired nurse, are just such garden club ladies. Both are members of the Red Bluff Garden Club, a very active garden club dating back to the 1950s. Lorna’s mother was a charter member and her father was a well-known regional horticulturist. Cathy on the other hand has lived and gardened throughout the west and was a Master Gardener in the Yuba City area before moving to Red Bluff fairly recently. She has been a member of the Red Bluff Garden Club for a little over a year. But lifelong member or new member notwithstanding, Lorna and Cathy are both excellent examples of what garden club members for the most part actually are: good gardeners doing good things. Photo: Cathy Wilson (left) and Lorna Bonham (right), are members of the Red Bluff Garden Club and instrumental in the club’s part in the Cone & Kimball Plaza restoration project.

My copyright 1936 Taylor’s Encyclopedia of Gardening has this to say about garden clubs: “Second only to the experiment stations, the garden clubs are the greatest single agency of the advancement of gardening in America. Their lectures, test gardens and influence for better standards of the art of horticulture are of incalculable value.” According to the National Garden Clubs (once known as the Federated Garden Clubs), Inc website: “The first garden club in America was founded in January 1891 by The Ladies Garden Club of Athens (Georgia).” Originally garden clubs were often Ladies clubs or Men’s clubs, but in this day and age, they are men and women, young and old. Here and now, the North State is a region of active and dedicated garden clubs, the Red Bluff Garden Club being just one. See below for contact information on other garden clubs in our region.
(more…)

For a gardener, one of life’s peaceful pleasures is a mid-winter walk in the park (or garden as the case may be). We as North Staters are lucky to have so many outstanding parks to choose from for just such a walk. While the University of California at Davis Arboretum might seem a bit south of us, and we actually haven’t had much of a winter yet, the Davis Arboretum makes for a great walk. Photo Above: A view down the waterway that runs through the center of the UC Davis Arboretum and its gardens and collections.

Recently, Ellen Zagory, Director of Horticulture at The UC Davis Arboretum, enthusiastically walked and drove me around a good portion of the 2 mile-long, 100-acre, 73 year-old Arboretum – where we paid the most specific attention to the individual ‘Demonstration Gardens’ within the larger park.

Under the leadership of staff horticulturists Warren Roberts, Emily Griswold , Ryan Deering and Ellen, this “public garden, living museum and out-door classroom and recreation area” has undergone significant renovations and additions that are of special interest to home gardeners. Restored areas include several of the 10 distinct demonstration gardens. The largest of these renovations was completed in 2008 on The Ruth Risdon Storer Garden, famous for its “Valley-Wise” plant and plant-care principles. Photo Above: Beautiful and helpful new signs were pat of the Aboretum’s renovations completed in 2008.
(more…)

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!”

(more…)

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?”

(more…)

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.
(more…)

George Winter is a soft-spoken man with a large presence. “When he speaks, people listen,” one of his long-time staff, Sherry Rosen, said to me when the three of us met to walk through Wyntour Gardens in Redding earlier this summer. And for good reason, George Winter has been one of the most knowledgeable, smiling and constant faces of the Northstate gardening world for the past 30-plus years.

George grew up on a dairy farm in Gridley and his father went into the nursery business later in his life. After graduating with an Industrial Education degree from CSU Chico, George thought he would like to be a teacher. It didn’t take him long to realize that the nursery business was his calling: “I thought the kids were going to eat me alive,” he recalls laughing.

When his father was ready to retire in the 1970s, Winter took over the family business, the Red Bluff Garden Center, and when the opportunity arose for a second nursery, he jumped at the chance. On April 4, 1992, he opened Wyntour Gardens in Redding, on Airport Road near the Redding Municipal Airport. Every April Wyntour Gardens holds an Anniversary Event in celebration.

Winter attributes the success of the two nurseries to a couple of things – most importantly, his excellent staff who “love what they do and are knowledgeable about it,” and he has always made it a point to provide the best plants possible for our region.

In time he realized that one of the best ways to provide the best plants was to grow them himself. In the early 2000s, Winter started the wholesale propagators, North Valley Growers, based out of the Red Bluff Garden Center and managed by longtime horticulturist Jeff Brooks. Besides supplying plants to Wyntour Gardens and the Red Bluff Garden Center, plants with the North Valley Growers’ tag can be found at nurseries up and down the valley. And, in part on principle, plants from other local growers can be found at Wyntour Gardens and Red Bluff Garden Center.

“Plants that are grown locally are acclimated to our climate and soils, they travel less, need less packaging and ultimately are better, more successful plants that cost less for the nurseries and the customer,” explains Winter. “Growing plants ourselves allows us to more easily and swiftly follow plant trends, or help to inspire those plants trends – for instance by getting more varieties of drought tolerant or native plants into the industry.”

That impulse to inspire and lead the way in horticultural trends does not stop with the plant propagation, it is what led Winter to make both of his nurseries part of the Master Nursery association, to carry the widest possible selection of organic and sustainable plant and soil fertilizers and amendments, and to re-use or recycle all plastic nursery pots. Wyntour Gardens also boasts one of the largest selections of glazed pottery you will find in the Northstate.

George and his wife Carol are both avid gardeners at their home in the foothills of Redding. “We started with bare ground, nothing but brush!” George tells me. Carol designed the landscape (which includes several different gardens). They terraced the grounds and developed and installed an irrigation system. Last Fall they planted over 1500
narcissus bulbs on their hillsides “which were just spectacular this past spring!”

While having successfully been in business for more than 30 years, Winter still has goals for Wyntour Gardens: “I would like to improve our water gardening and pond plant selections, I want to see our events and classes continue to expand – and to work toward even more focus and clarity,” he says. “Customers are what make our nurseries great and I am honored to have served some local families for several generations now,” Winter continues. In order to better serve those customers, in the past few years, Winter has developed easy to use websites for both nurseries, on-line newsletter subscription services, and free monthly classes at both sites so that gardeners can learn and engage in the life and community of the nurseries.

While soft-spoken, Winter is a born communicator. In the past he has done a Garden Spot for the Channel 7 news, he regularly contributes to InsideOut magazine, and he writes a column for both nurseries’ websites entitled George’s Almanac. For more information about events, classes or newsletters from Wyntour Gardens or the Red Bluff Garden Center, visit their websites: www.wyntourgardens.com and www.redbluffgardencenter.com. Both the real and on-line nurseries are worth a visit.

Denise Kelly always wanted to own The Plant Barn (www.theplantbarn.com) Denise spent her early childhood in Southern California. Her family relocated to Susanville when Denise was in the 8th grade and she moved to Chico to attend CSU Chico. After graduation, Denise stayed in the area and worked variously as an event planner, wedding consultant and landscape designer, all the while raising her children and home gardening herself. Each corner she turned for work seemed to bring her back to the Plant Barn for flowers and plants. “I have always been a plant nerd, and it just made me so happy to be there and chat about plants with the owner Ilona Cronan. I always thought, that is what I really want to do. I want to own the Plant Barn and make other people feel this way all day.”

She failed, however, to mention this fact to Ilona and one day about 5 years ago, she realized that without the business ever going on the market, the Cronan’s had sold it to one of their employees. Denise was devastated and felt as though she had missed her one chance, but she did not make the same mistake twice. Without delay, she told the new owner that if she ever wanted to sell, Denise would be interested. Sure enough, almost two years ago, Denise got a call asking if she was still interested. YES! She said immediately and with the help of family was able to make her dream come true. What she did not know at the time, was that two other buyers had also lined up to purchase the long-time nursery. One of them, however, wanted to tear down the iconic barn for which the business is named and the other was not able to get their financing. “Good things always happen for me in threes,” laughed Denise showing me a tattoo of a key and the number 3 on her inner wrist, “I have three great kids, I was the third owner in line, I am the third owner of The Plant Barn. 3 is the Key.” She got the tattoo shortly after securing the purchase and it’s a constant reminder of how she is making her dream come true.

Ilona and Dave Cronan started Chico Propagators wholesale plant greenhouses and The Plant Barn over 27 years ago. When they sold The Plant Barn, they kept the wholesale growing business in the greenhouses behind the retail nursery. This is a great arrangement that spreads out the work and responsibility of two such big businesses, which are related and yet very different. “There’s a great symbiotic relationship between Dave Cronan, the owner and Sally Greenwood, the head grower at Chico Propagators and myself at the Plant Barn,” Denise says. “I am learning as I go here, about plants and about the business (Although she clearly knows a good bit about both). When a customer comes to me and asks if I have a certain plant, I can call Sally on the walkie-talkie and ask if we can grow it.”

This capability in turn allows customers a remarkable opportunity to learn about and explore new plants as well. It also helps the staff at The Plant Barn, including full-timer Rebecca and part-timer Nancy as well as Denise to stay on top of what they do best. One of the things The Plant Barn is now known for is its fabulous array of custom planted containers – the plants they put together and they containers they put them in will make you take note and consider amping up your own home container plantings.

One of the other things The Barn does really well is to set customers at ease. The staff are always cheerful and never seem to mind if you buy something today or not. The site is not too big and so is not overwhelming, but it has lots of ever-changing interesting vignettes made up of gifts, pots, furniture, fountains, and loads of interesting plants tucked into the main display space. The greenhouses are also available to walk through, and walking into a warm, moist, plant filled greenhouse on a cold grey winter day is just short of heaven. And for me one of the best draws of the plant barn is how many of their specialty perennials are available in 4 inch pots rather than just gallons – as a plant-aholic myself, this takes some of the financial sting out of trying out some new plants, as well as allowing me to buy three or more so my garden runs less risk of becoming a cluttered mess of one of every kind of plant on the planet.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)