Groovy Zoo Gardens

If you love gardening, want to discover some new plants, and make new friends who understand why you have dirt under your fingernails, how about volunteering at your local zoo? More about tapping this mother lode of horticultural fun in a second, but first, a quick detour...

I was always grateful my former neighbor Janie, the elephant tender at the Santa Barbara Zoo, didn't bring her work home with her. The steps to her second story apartment were not up to her "co-workers" popping in for an after-hours beer.

I was thinking about Janie - who has since moved up the food chain to the San Diego Wild Animal Park - the other day while researching a story on zoo landscaping. I was admiring the Santa Barbara Zoo's Asian elephants as they reached for stalks of bamboo and giant bird of paradise leaves, suspended from a towering umbrella-covered support system. Their meal hadn't traveled far. Called "browse" in zoo parlance, these munchies were harvested from landscaped areas around the grounds, doing double duty not only as a staple in the diets of zoo inhabitants (gorillas and giraffes get second "dibs"), but also as ornamental plants simulating of each animal's native habitat.

Wanna see penguins and palm trees? Follow this link...

Gift Idea? Give the Hippest Garden Photos on the Planet

Last time I posted here, I spilled the beans regarding all the green and not-so-green options for Christmas trees. So I thought it might be a good idea to forge ahead with an idea for a gift to put under the tree for the garden lover in your life. No, you can't dig holes and plant bulbs with it, but you can make some magical moments when you combine a new iPhone with the hippest photography app on the planet.

I saw my first Hipstamatic image a couple of years ago, posted at a Flickr page for aficionados. The image that caught my eye was a fairly mundane composition - the exterior of a 1930s era office building. But it looked like someone had dug it out of an old shoebox in the attic: grainy, tired colors, and lighting irregularities that gave it a dreamy feeling.

To my delight, I found out that Hipstamatic is an app created for iPhones, and for $1.99, I thought I'd splurge. (Biff the Wonder Spaniel can go a day without a rawhide chew.)

Hipstamatic is photo enhancement software that digitally simulates different types of lenses, films, and flashes to create an almost endless array of sometimes hauntingly unpredictable effects. Launch the app and you'll see what appears to be an old pocket camera, complete with textured, matte black case, a small view window, and a big yellow button that triggers the shutter.

See lots more cool pics at FineGardening.com

Christmas Trees Should Smell Good

The headline pretty much sums up my argument. But my boss would not be happy with a five-word blog post, so allow me to share a few more reasons why I'd never let an artificial Christmas tree through my front door.

I make no claims of being a Christmas tree maven, a Yiddish word meaning expert, or connoisseur (a French word meaning maven). I'm from a middle-class Jewish upbringing and I only knew Christmas trees from the homes of my non-gefilte-fish-eating buddies. I remember Jay's metallic silver contraption with the rotating multicolor floodlight. Better, but still pretty bizarre, was Terry's cut tree encrusted in robin's egg blue flocking -- but at least it smelled like a plant.

Christmas trees started appearing in my living room after moving out of my folks' place and setting up housekeeping with a girlfriend from a more Norman Rockwell upbringing. Over the years, I've refined my criteria for the perfect tree:

• Douglas Fir, because it has more space between the branches for ornaments than the Michelin Man morphology of Noble Firs.
• A strong leader to hold the cone-shaped, copper wire-haired, red pipe-cleaner winged angel my son made when he was little.
• The enlivening, fresh aroma of resinous conifer needles (overpowered for a day or two by the lingering fragrance of volatilized peanut oil, potatoes, and onions from our annual Potato Latke Gorging Night).

It's only in recent years that I've thought about where these trees come from and how they arrive in tree lots around the country. I've wondered whether cutting down live trees for a few weeks of tradition is at odds with my professed stance regarding sustainable living.

So I did a little sleuthing and, for me, I can emphatically state that real trees win the enviro-battle, hands down.

Holey Crocs, Batman!

Regular size people recognize me by my hat. But really teeny tiny people know me for my distinctive, perforated footwear. I'm a Crocs kinda guy. My shoe rack is stippled with chubby pairs of size tens - red, brown, green, orange, and when I wear a tux, black.

My wife, Lin, and I are die-hard What Not To Wear fans, so I get it when she admonishes me that, "But they're really comfortable!" is no excuse for a grown-up wearing what Stacy and Clinton revile as "clown shoes." She's right, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it. As Dr. Scholl taught me, when my feet are happy my brain is happy. And when my brain is happy I can write fascinating garden blogs about my shoes.

I pretty much live in my Crocs, so I wear through them regularly. So then what? Landfill? Not for a guy who's so sustainable he can work the same piece of dental floss for a month. So rather than cast off these loyal friends who've served me so well, I tap my inner Martha, transforming them into long-lasting, self-draining, artsy-fartsy wall planters.

I had a burst of creative energy this week. Instead of buying the usual box of floral gift cards as a thank you for the landscape architects who share their work with my class, I decided to make something for them. I could solve my shoe disposal conundrum and add a personal touch.

Do you wear shoes? Do you like easy, wacky projects? Here's what I did.

Plant Tags: So Much to Say, So Little Space

I know just what Mark Twain meant when he apologetically explained, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." Writing is tough enough, but sometimes editing my first draft down to a tight, lively, informative read feels like medieval dental surgery. So imagine what it's like to compose a plant tag, those skinny little plastic strips we see poking out of containers at the garden center.

You've probably done this hundreds of times: A spectacular looking flower beckons you from across the nursery, so you sprint over, pull out the tag, read a few dozen words, and decide whether that cute little darlin' will be coming home with you.

It's not much to go on, but sometimes it's all the information we have when the "ME NEED PLANT" neurons in the primal core of your brain commence to firing. So, what if you could take an extra minute, fire up your smart phone, scan a QR code, and tap a deep mine of information?

We're starting to see QR (Quick Response) codes popping up everywhere. They're small printed squares filled with a unique pattern of black and white pixels, like a petri dish experiment gone wild. Download one of many free apps to your smart phone (I like QRReader), hold it in front of the square, and the next thing you know, you're at the product's website.

Read how QR codes can make your garden shopping a lot more fun...

Time Machine Tales Part II: Long Strange Trip To The Garden

Back in July, I blogged about finding an old drawing from my first landscape design class and the memories it triggered. From summers in the mountains to discovering I had a sense of rhythm, it didn't look much like a gardening column. I said it was "Part One in what will likely be a sporadic series." Well, I'm done "sporadickling" and ready to pick up the trail where I left off.

Some kids obsess about sports or rock collecting or astronomy or hedge fund trading. For me it was "all drumming, all the time." Bongos were the start, then a pair of drumsticks banging on anything that made noise. I studied jazz, Dixieland, classical, big band, bebop, surf, rock. I even played a polka gig dressed in lederhosen. (Thankfully, no photos survive)

Here's my high school rock band, A Little Bit of Sound. We not only won the biggest battle of the bands in LA, but we ended up opening for The Doors in San Diego.

I stayed with music into my twenties, doing studio recordings, nightclubs, and clocked thousands of cross-country miles on the road. One year I toured with the opening act for the Jackson 5. (Don't get too impressed. We were the band everyone wished would get off the state so Michael would come out.)

What's this have to do with gardens? Here's the rest of the story...

Surprise at the Indianapolis Museum of Art: A Paved Paradise

The last time I visited Indianapolis was the early 70s. My one-week stay didn't start out so hot. Perhaps it had something to do with the paranoia of being a longhaired hippy musician in Middle America, coupled with my first (and only) tequila hangover. Did I mention it was Easter Sunday?

This year was different. I was back in Indy for the annual Garden Writers Association symposium, and aside from my soulful karaoke rendition of Joe Cocker's You Can Leave Your Hat On, there were no reportable shenanigans.

This was my fourth GWA event and I have to say that each trip is better than the last. There was a big turnout: We were dubbed the Indy 500, attending sessions covering everything from publishing e-books to the benefits of beneficial insects. The exhibit hall was packed with vendor booths sharing hot new products and services you'll be reading about soon. And these annual meet-ups always provide opportunities for "the tribe" to reinvigorate old friendships and germinate some new ones.

Lest you think we spend all our time indoors, the host committee for each city always organizes tours of private gardens and estates, public spaces, and educational facilities. That way we have stuff to write about and share with our readers - sort of like this article.

One of our obscenely early morning tours took us to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, housing over 50,000 works representing a variety of cultures and 5000 years of art history. But I'll have to take their word for it, since I spent my time trying to make a dent in the horticultural offerings contained in 152 acres of gardens, woodlands, wetlands, lake shore, meadows, and even their parking lot.

Loads of luscious pictures and reading ahead...

Taking On Lawn Alternatives With The Garden Designers Roundtable

Here in my sleepy little beach town of Santa Barbara (where Kim Kardashian had a sleepy little multimillion dollar wedding last weekend) I write a bi-weekly blog for Edhat.com. It's a great website known for alternative community news, contests, trivia, mailbag, and quirky essays. (I do some of the quirking.)

So it makes sense that I reviewed Reimagining the California Lawn: Water-conserving Plants, Practices, and Designs there a few weeks ago, stimulating lots of enthusiastic comments from green-minded readers.

But here at my Fine Gardening blog, where most readers don't wear flip-flops and pick fresh lemons from their kitchen window in January, it wouldn't have occurred to me to bring this regionally important book to national attention. It's not like loyal readers in Platteville, Wisconsin, are going to grow Bougainvillea ‘California Gold' on a patio trellis, then take the sprawling, spiny monster indoors to overwinter it on a sunny window sill. But here I am, writing about the book anyway.

The Rationale

I was invited to guest-post at this month's mass blog hosted by the Garden Designers Roundtable, a panel of professional landscape and garden designers blogging monthly on topics related to design. And this month the topic is one near and dear to my heart (and other internal organs): lawn alternatives.

Sure, Reimagining's plant recommendations might be specific to California gardeners (and probably crosses over to bordering states), but what it says about the reasons for reimagining the role of lawns in our landscapes should be food for thought for anyone concerned about the uncertainty of changing global weather patterns. Droughts this summer have been catastrophic. Texas has received only 6.5 of its usual 34 inches of rain; in 2008 the news was filled with stories about Atlanta's municipal drinking water supply drying up. Who's next?

This is a story that will grow on you. Read more at Fine Gardening

Chardonnay and Herbs Meet in Sonoma Wine County

My fellow bloggers recommend that my posts should to be like quick jabs—get in, score your point, and get out. A few words and a picture.

[Dang! I just used 109 characters telling you that I shouldn't take so long getting to the point. Shoot!! That was another 79! Yipes!!! Another 22.]

So, here's the point: On Wednesday, August 31, award-winning, landscape-loving, nicest-guy-you'd-ever-want-to-meet garden photographer Saxon Holt will be holding a book party at the coolest, most beautiful, all-sustainable vineyard and winery, smack in the middle of Sonoma wine country.

Saxon will be joined by author and herbalist Tammi Hartung to talk about their book, Homegrown Herbs: A Complete Guide to Growing, Using and Enjoying More Than 100 Herbs (Storey Publishing, $19.95). The talented twosome will be appearing from 2 to 4 p.m. at Lynmar Estate at 3909 Frei Road in Sebastopol. Attendance is free but limited to the first 60 guests. For more information, call 707-829-3374, ext. 102, or email candi@lynmarestate.com.

As blog posts go, that was efficient, but not much fun. I like fun.

I promise I'll circle back to tell you more about the impressively sustainable vineyard and winery run by husband and wife team Anisya and Lynn Fritz, located in the rolling hills of California's Russian River Valley. Meantime, promise me you'll keep reading while I detour for "a few" paragraphs. If you do, you'll see luscious images and perhaps take away some inspiration for your own garden.

More luscious reading at Fine Gardening...

Healthy Skepticism for a Healthy Garden

"Why, yes, I do have a confessional in my office," Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott replied. I was calling her to seek absolution for my horticultural transgressions.

"It has paisley curtains," she continued.

I just finished reading her book, The Informed Gardener (University of Washington Press, 2008). In this authoritatively written, sorely needed dose of science and skepticism, Chalker-Scott reveals the truth behind many of the dearly held myths surrounding gardening practices and products.

I worried: Would she pardon years of advising customers to "throw a little bone meal in the backfill. Helps the roots get started"? What about telling clients to tip-prune transplants "to keep the roots and foliage in balance"?

Hogwash! Clearly, I was guilty of unconsciously passing along what one of Chalker-Scott's colleagues calls "faith-based horticulture."

Chalker-Scott didn't set out to be a matador, hell-bent on goring gardening's sacred cows. Her first two degrees put her on a steady course toward a career in marine biology. In the 1980s, deciding instead to chase her passion for gardening, she completed her doctorate in ornamental horticulture at Oregon State University, focusing on the stresses affecting landscape plants in urban environments.

The contest is over, but there's lots more to read at Fine Gardening...

Time Machine Found in Old Box: Connecting the Dots

Last week I was rummaging through an old box and found a time machine. To anyone else I'm sure it looked like an old, primitively drawn landscape plan. But for me, it was like taking Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine to 1975, when my love affair with gardens was sending up its first shoots.

1975 might have been one significant garden milestone in my life, but I realize now that plants have been poking at me since I was just a punk kid. So let's go back to where it all started as I attempt to connect the dots and share a few lessons along the way...

I was born at a very early age in Brooklyn, NY. We lived in a four-story brick apartment building and I don't recall there being any trees on our block. I vaguely remember a low hedge behind a dangerously pointy iron fence, but my first truly personal connection with plants was getting a pussy willow bud stuck in my ear, and my mom discovering it weeks later.

Read more at Fine Gardening...

Cornerstone Sonoma: Where Art, Imagination, and Plants Come to Play

Forgive me for thinking Toto and I had crossed into Kansas. But how to explain what appeared dead ahead in my windshield – a massive white picket fence, painfully twisting like so much tormented fusilli pasta, rising into a drizzly March sky. I checked my GPS: Sonoma, in the heart of northern California wine country. Perhaps this aberration was my destination.

I had heard so many wondrous things about Cornerstone: Festival of Gardens. It was one of those breathlessly spoken, Oh, you have to go there, places my designer friends insisted I visit. They portrayed the nine-acre complex as a pilgrimage required of every garden designer, that they might experience the melding of art, landscape architecture, horticulture, sense of place, playful imagination, and drama. The flying fence was this play’s opening act.

Cornerstone Sonoma was conceived and nurtured by the husband and wife team Teresa Raffo (pictured at right) and Chris Hougie. Their inspiration for this ambitious venture arose during their 1996 honeymoon visit to Frances’s Loire Valley, where the Festival Gardens of Chaumont cast a spell on their imaginations. Eight years later, in collaboration with world-renowned landscape architect Peter Walker, they opened the doors and gates to a twenty-two garden wonderland.

Lots of great pictures and descriptions continue at my Fine Gardening blog.

Airplanes In The Garden -- Kids, Butterflies, and Summer Fun

Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and camp counselors! We haven’t hit the solstice yet, but Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer. Time to think about what the kids will be up to for the next few months. Would you like to divert them away from mind-numbing, thumb-mashing video games and get them into the garden for some good clean dirty fun? Then flip open a copy of Joan Z. Calder’s book, Airplanes In The Garden: Monarch Butterflies Take Flight, and get ready for action.

I can’t think of a more rewarding, long-lasting summer strategy for entertaining (and stealthily educating) youngsters than reading this fancifully illustrated, engagingly written, instructional book. It’s about Sergio and Stanley, a couple of monarch caterpillars who appear one day in a young girl’s garden.

The story opens with pigtailed Bonnie delighting in a small squadron of graceful monarchs wafting through her family’s garden. When her mom asks her what she’s up to, Bonnie replies, “Mom, there are airplanes in the garden!” Her fertile imagination sees the flowers as airports, where butterflies pick up “babies and moms and dads to take them on a trip.”

Read more about this delightful book, click over to my blog at Fine Gardening.

Another Definition of Vertical Gardening - Marcia Donahue

Unless you're Rip Van Winkle, or you've been spelunking the Vrtoglavica Caves of Slovenia for the past few years, you couldn't miss the garden world's clamor about vertical gardening: succulents packed into honeycombs mounted on walls, Patrick Blanc's Chia-Pet-on-steroids flights of fantasy, and at a slightly less grand but far more practical scale, Susan Morrison's and Rebecca Sweet's new book, Garden Up!


But it was Marcia Donahue's garden that made my eyes and imagination reach skyward. It seemed that everywhere I looked around her garden something was pointing up: the gables of her two-story Victorian, bamboo and vines slathered on fences, and a series of cylindrical and round "beads" threaded over poles and slinking into trees.


Marcia has managed to pack a bundle of charm, whimsy, and wonderment into her garden, while also cultivating an abundantly productive urban farm. Amid the art and horticultural thrills, chickens roam, veggies overflow planters, and hives buzz with honeybees.

Read the rest at Fine Gardening

Before You Dig, Get "Fit To Garden"

Riddle: What do you get when you cross an enthusiastic vegetable-growing Master Gardener with a passionately energetic, camera-ready physical therapist?

Answer: None other than Stacy Walters, the creative force behind Fit to Garden, a program designed to help gardeners stay in the garden, not flat on their backs under a mountain of ice packs.

I was inspired to write about Stacy after reading this Facebook post by my dear friend, Stephanie: "Last of my seeds arrived today. Will get my seeds started in their trays this weekend. Will be ready after the last frost date."
Stephanie lives just outside of Boulder, CO. Now, I don't want to gloat, but out here in Santa Barbara, "last frost date" makes about as much sense as "beginning of breathing season." I forget that most of you have recently experienced that season they call winter. For months your "gardening" has consisted of rereading the tattered pages of last summer's Fine Gardening issue for the hundredth time, ordering this year's horticultural adventures from seed catalogs, and gapping the spark plugs in your trusty Fiskar's PowerGear Bypass Pruners.

See what Stacy's Fit to Garden website can do for you at FineGardening.com

Lessons From Legendary Flora Grubb Gardens

Apologies for being a year late with this post. Good intentions and all that, but I'm here to redeem myself.

Last year, while attending the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show, a Bay Area friend lured me to Flora Grubb Gardens. "You HAVE to go. You'll go nuts!" she'd breathlessly implored me for years.

On my 2010 trip, Mara and I hooked up at Flora's. The place just knocked me out (which might explain why I spaced for a year and didn't blog a word about my visit).

It's about time I paid homage to The Divine Ms. Grubb and her matchless approach to horticulture, gardens, and the educational value of inspiring displays.



More luscious pictures and useful design lessons at my Fine Gardening blog...

I'm Branching Out Into Archaeology: Blame the Wisteria

We have cable. That’s why I’m such an intellectual force to be reckoned with. I have at my fingertips access to in-depth research tools like the Hallmark Channel where I learn about what makes women tick (something to do with automatic air fresheners, from what I can tell), the Speed Network for the latest developments in dirt bike oil filters, and the History Channel (it’s not just about pawnshops).

But I’ve yet to see a documentary on the ancient migratory trail of the Wisterians, who evidently passed through Santa Barbara, leaving barely a trace. Without a reliable body of research I can only conjecture that they appeared about 14,000 years ago but were out-completed by the Clovis civilization (purveyors of fine stone spear points). Or the Clovis folks just had better PR.

But back to the Wisterians. They must have been a gentle people as evidenced by their love of sweet smelling, pastel colored plants.

“Why Professor Goodnick,” you challenge incredulously, “with what evidence do you support your hypothesis?”

Fair question. You know how in the first Indiana Jones movie he finds that metal thingy, puts on top of a stick and on just the right day at just the right time the sun shines through and illuminates the secret location of the Ark of the Covenant? It’s like that, except instead of calculating sun angles and seasons, the math-phobic Wisterians planted wisteria vines along their migratory route to mark their path.

How else do you explain the sprawling purple wisteria vines that are at this moment bursting forth along Highway 101, the coastal route through my fair state. They’re scampering up tangled trees, showering them in luscious lavender-colored, perfumed vines. Like a Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs, those clever Wisterians turned their love of plants and into a pre-GPS way-finding technology. Of course, if they came back at any other time of the year, they’d be righteously screwed, dude.

It just continues getting sillier and sillier... Will you join me at Fine Gardening?

Hot Tubbing with Jeffrey Gordon Smith?

Aside from my new Design Workshop column in Fine Gardening magazine and this blog, I write about gardens for a few Southern California magazines and blogs. Feeling a need to expand my horizons beyond my Santa Barbara borders, I planned a road trip to the San Luis Obispo area (SLO), about 100 miles north of my home.

I studied landscape architecture at Cal Poly SLO in the 80s, but haven't really kept up with the area's garden design scene, so I asked everyone I knew for advice. Just about everybody said, "You've GOT to meet Jeffrey Gordon Smith and see his designs."

Smith (a landscape architect based in the small, beachside town of Los Osos, and executing beautiful projects from the Bay Area to the southernmost reaches of the Golden State) and I hammered out the details for a visit, but a super deluge in December wiped out my plans. Later, as I perused the program at the SF Flower and Garden Show, I noticed that Jeffrey was not only going to be speaking about his new book (Jeffrey Gordon Smith Landscape Architecture), but also constructing an exhibit garden at the show.

I thought he'd be an interesting subject for a pre-show blog post, and phoned him for an interview to find out what visitors to the SFFGS might find inspirational. Our conversation kept detouring into all kinds of topics, and when I got off the phone 45 minutes later, I still wasn't sure what I'd write about. I had asked all the right questions: "What's your big idea?" "How would they be inspired for their own gardens?"

I do know one thing: If you visit his garden at show, you're going to have a fabulous time and walk away with a huge smile on your face. "I'm all about having fun. Why do it if it ain't fun?"


The discussion continues at Fine Gardening...

Foliage Foundations and Gnasty Gnomes (the Gs are silent)

[Author's note: I'm making this first part up.]

Imagine this late night scene: You've finished flossing, folded down the quilt, fluffed the pillows, flipped open F is for Fugitive, felt it fall flat on your face, and flipped off the fluorescent.

That's their signal. I'm not condoning their behavior, mind you, but as you sail off to The Land of Nod, your garden gnomes begin their nightly escapades. Imagine a job like theirs -- standing immobile while the summer sun bakes off your paint, or winter winds whip you with sleet. And what's with the sprinkler bidet?

So when late night falls and their shift ends, the gnomes need to blow off some steam. Off to the all-night pub, they belly up to the brass foot rail and get down to serious business.

The night isn't over yet. Stumbling home, their little concrete eyes gleaming, the merry pranksters repeat their pre-dawn ritual: Picking off all the flower buds waiting to open, so the garden never blooms.

The moral of this story: Design your garden as though these mischievous, misanthropic (or is that mis-flor-opic?), buggers live in your garden. Don't use flowers as the sole visual interest in your garden. Instead, concentrate on creating year-round interest by exploiting your plants' shapes, density, leaf patterns, and foliage colors, so your garden looks great, flowers or not.

Allow me to share one of the most elegantly sophisticated little corners of landscaping I've ever seen. What knocks me out so much is the use of two key visual design principles - harmony (elements with similarities) and contrast (elements with differences). This vignette sits a few blocks from my house, adorning the Sansum Diabetes Research Center in Santa Barbara.

More photos and astute analysis at Fine Gardening

Add Nan Sterman's Great Book To Your Library!

Nan Sterman's California Gardener's Guide, Volume II, (Cool Springs Press) fills in much of the info that the Sunset Western Garden Book sometimes leaves me guessing about.

Although Sunset includes more than 8000 plants in their encyclopedia, the specific information about each plant is sometimes inconsistent. I can look up one plant and find out everything I need to know (including its SSN and high school transcripts), while another plant's listing leaves out something critical, like how wide the plant gets at maturity.

Filling In The Gaps
That's why I always happy when a plant I need to know more about is listed in Sterman's book. California Gardener's Guide takes a "less is more" and a "more is more" approach: It lists only 186 plants, but packs each entry with well-researched, vital information that helps me make intelligent plant selection decisions.

The book starts with inspiring and informative introductory chapters explaining California's enviable Mediterranean climate and its affect on the garden. Sterman explains the pronounced differences in growing conditions throughout this diverse state, including easy-to-understand tables showing typical rainfall and high/low temperatures in major five regions.

Sterman's advice about planning, installing, and caring for a garden is steeped in the most fundamental concepts of sustainable landscaping: Know your site and the growing conditions each plant will face; apply the principles of water-efficient gardening; and take the time to intelligently match the right plant to the right place.

More to read about Nan Sterman's must-have book at Fine Gardening...