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.
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In 2003, Shasta College in Redding became a host college for the California Extension Master Gardener Program. Leimone Waite, who has been a Horticulture Instructor at the college since 1998, is the administrator of the very successful Master Gardener Program there. At Shasta College, a member of the California Community College System of schools, the program is a collaborative venture between the college and the University of California system’s Agricultural Extension offices, which officially oversees and is responsible for the Master Gardener program throughout the state of California. Butte County began hosting a Master Gardener program in 2008 and will run the training every other year.

The Master Gardener program was originally conceived and started in Washington State in 1972 by David Gibby, Ph.D, a horticultural Extension agent for the University of Washington.
But wait. To truly understand the Master Gardener program, you need to understand a little bit about the history of the agricultural or horticultural Extension Agent system, and to understand that, you need to understand a little bit about American history.

If that sounds almost Epic - it is. The rigorously trained, enthusiastic volunteer corps we now know as Master Gardeners are at the end of one thread of the history of Westward Expansion, the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions, and the subsequent suburbanization and even more recent Technological Revolution of the United States. In my humble opinion, the Master Gardener program is one shining example of a good and effective marriage between government resources, educational institutions and those of us at home on the farm – or in the garden as it were.
According to what is now known as the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service:

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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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Friday October 17th In a Northstate Garden hosted a one-hour call-in special edition entitled:Landscaping Against Fire. Guest experts Calli-Jane Burch, Executive Director of the Butte County Fire-Safe Council, and Glenn Nader, Natural Resources Advisor, University of California County Extension and co-author of a UC publication entitled “Home Landscaping for Fire,” joined us for the program.

The whole idea of landscaping against fire is a complex and yet important one. In the face fire – the likes of which Butte County saw in the Humboldt fire, for example - not many plants (or houses) stood a chance if they were in the direct path of the fire storm or the burning embers that preceded it. And short of planting your property knee deep in concrete – very little landscaping is 100% Fire Proof. When we talk about landscaping against fire, we are really talking about strategies for diminishing the chances that your landscape will make a wildfire worse and diminishing the chances that your landscape will help to lead a wildfire to your house.

We all garden and landscape for our own set of reasons: we like to garden, we want to creat a wind break or shade our house, we want privacy from neighbors or a sound break from a busy road, or perhaps we want o create habitat for wildlife. For most of us, living in Northern California is as much about the beauty of the region as anything else and, frankly, Northern California is prone to fire. We have a well established and serious fire season and so in moving here we tacitly agree to a certain amount of risk from fire. For most landscapes of the American west, fire has been an important part of the ecological cycle and as such is critical to the health of the ecological balance of things. Rejuvenating and cleansing, fire is a long-time part of the culture of native peoples. However, fire is also incredibly destructive to the people who live here.

A great deal of research and data has been compiled by a variety of sources to help people who choose to live in fire prone areas make decisions about how to diminish their risk of total loss of house and home from seasonal wildfires. When making designs and decisions about how to plant - including the Defensible Space, the Ignition Zones around your home- what to plant and how to properly maintain your grounds, it is absolutely worthwhile to do your research and make educated choices.

In doing my own research, one of the things that struck me as so heartening from a gardener’s perspective is that the health and “hygiene” of our garden is every bit as important - and perhaps even more - important than how or what you plant - within reason. So simple seasonal clean-up of dead leaves in and around your garden as well as in gutters, and pruning of dead branches - especially lower branches of mature trees, seasonal mowing of dry grasses and regular water on garden areas immediately adjacent to your house are good places to start!

For more information on the history and work of the Butte Fire Safe Council, links to other local Fire Safe Councils, and access to many fire related publications, please visit their site: www.buttefiresafe.org/

To find a Fire Safe Council near you: www.firesafecouncil.org/

For Glenn Nader’s publication on Home Landscaping for Fire, as well as other publications about fire safety, visit the UC Davis publication catalogue: http://anrcatalogue.ucdavis.edu/

For a good website on types of plants and their various levels of flammability, check out Las Pilatas, a native plant nursery: www.laspilatas.com

For Master Gardener Help and Recommendations about Landscaping With Fire in Mind:
www.csrees.usda.gov/newsroom/news/2008news/07101_wildfire.html

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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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.

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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I wager most gardeners would say that they welcome birds and butterflies into their gardens, and that many gardeners would say that in part they even plan their gardens or choose their specific plants in order to attract butterflies, hummingbirds and songbirds. Brian and Jill Williams and their two young boys, Canyon and Cooper have a bird and butterfly friendly garden well beyond what I have ever imagined, and in fact is more accurately described as a wildlife friendly garden. The Williams’ work to attract waterfowl, raptors, song birds, butterflies, moths, woodland mammals, lizards, snakes – even grubs, because the Williams’ philosophy is that “wildlife makes a garden alive and adventurous,” and who would want anything less?

Brian Williams is a consulting wildlife biologist. He comes from generations of farmers in Placer County and graduated with his graduate degree from Sacramento State. He and, Jill, an educator, have been creating their house and 10 and a half-acre garden outside of Honcut since 2002. The concept of planning for a wildlife friendly garden actually started with the Williams’ search for a home site. They had very specific criterion, which included that their dream property had to have water. After looking at several different land parcels around the Northstate, the Williams chose their property outside of Honcut in part for the ½ mile of Honcut Creek, which runs year-round through the property. They also chose this property for its many mature, native Pines and Oaks. These elements – creek and trees - were not only aesthetically attractive, but – from the Williams’ perspective - they would provide the water, food, and shelter necessary for a truly wildlife friendly garden.

Next, the Williams’ carefully sited and then built their house by hand – literally – of adobe bricks mixed from their property’s red clay, straw and sand and then baked in the sun. While building, Brian and Jill noticed that rough wing swallows were darting in and around the adobe walls as they progressed. Brian came up with an ingenious version of a “bird house” by building 3-inch PVC pipe lengths into the house walls in three spots around the house. The pipes are open to the outside and lead into three nesting boxes that are faced with removable ¾ inch exterior-grade acrylic on the inside. These peek-a-boo nesting boxes are curtained so that they remain dark and private for the nesting families, but still allow the Williams family occasional close-up looks at the nesting cycles of the birds. The acrylic panels are removable so that the boxes can be cleaned out annually. Besides the bird boxes, the exterior of the adobe walls host many a swallowtail butterfly larvae in the winter.

This attention to the patterns of the wildlife already on their property - noticing the rough wing swallows exploring for nesting sites – is one of the important habits to develop if your really want to create a wildlife friendly garden, Brian emphasizes. Pay attention to when the animals that are already there come out to feed, where they show up already and either re-produce sites like the ones they already like, or make the ones they already like more protected from predators, more accessible, whatever. Brian and Jill do more than just pay attention to patterns – they track the patterns of the wildlife in their garden on a spreadsheet. Brian keeps track of when different species appear each year, if and when they nest, how many eggs, if the nest was successful, what they eat, when they depart. Williams says that an average garden equipped with a handful of bird-feeders will attract 6 or so species. At last count, the Williams’ garden in Honcut had 160 different species of birds visiting every year.

When I visited his garden, Brian said: It doesn’t look like a garden does it? And in fact there is little in the way of traditional lawn, or flowerbeds as of yet. The Williams plan to add a very small adobe walled garden close to the house in time. But theirs is already a garden nonetheless - carefully planned and cared for specifically to welcome and nurture wildlife. Besides the “infra-structure” of water and trees that they looked for when choosing their home site, the Williams have used the ensuing six years to create even m ore “habitat” for creatures. “Encouraging the whole food chain is the best way to encourage any one part of the food chain,” says Brian, so if you want birds, you need bird food. And by that he does not mean man-made feeders outside of your windows. He means the whole web of things that feed wild birds throughout the year: plants that create the seeds as well as attract the worms and grubs and bugs and other small critters that will nourish a large bird population, including migrating, nesting and with young, or over-wintering birds.

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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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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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