Boost Your Garden Design Skills and Save Money at a Flower and Garden Show

What if you could complete a master garden design course in a day? That's what you get when you attend one of the major flower and garden shows in anticipation of spring. Certainly, looking through web sites, books, and magazines are useful ways to find inspiration, but walking through dozens of gardens in a day (sans bone chilling winds and snow drifts) is my idea of comfort and efficiency.

If you live anywhere near Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco or any of the big-time, celebrity-studded venues, you'll find the inspiration to push your design chops to the next level. True confession: I've only been attending shows for a few years, mainly to find fresh ideas to share with my readers. But even though I've been designing gardens since the 70s, each time I visit a show, I come away with new tricks, discover hot plants, and find innovative products to use in my own clients' gardens.
(And this year, you can find me sharing my design wisdom at two West Coast shows, but more on that in a minute.)

My intent isn't to diss the smaller regional shows scattered around the country, but the resource pool of top-of-their game designers, garden creators, and speakers can be limited. On the other hand, regional shows feature local professionals intimately aware of the opportunities and challenges of gardening right where you live. If a local home and garden show is as far as your spare time and budget can take you, by all means, get thee to a nearby exhibit hall and soak up everything you can. The following advice applies regardless:

Didn't mean to tease, but you'll have to click to get the good advice at my January 16, 2012, Fine Gardening blog post.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

Washing Machines and Art Collide in a Santa Barbara Garden

"Honey, I'm so proud of you turning off the tube and taking a sculpture class at the community college. And I'm sure there's a perfect spot near the hose bibb where that thing be very happy."

Unfortunately, that's how a lot of "art" winds up in the garden, along with the accumulation of stuff you just couldn't pass up at the swap meet. Some people have a knack for "eclectic", but for the rest of us, there's another way to personalize your garden.

Take the approach my clients John and Constance Thayer used, for example. Their new garden was something they'd been waiting years to design and build. When it came time to put the finishing touches on the garden, Jonstance (that's how they sign their e-mails; I think it's cute.) took their time and saw the importance of marrying the ideal pieces with each garden room.

If you were the Thayer's letter carrier, you'd know right away that these folks know how to have fun.


See more fun art and a perfect bench at my Cool Green Gardens blog at Fine Gardening.

Get Thee To A Garden Show

This is the time of year when all my writing pals blog about New Years resolutions for the garden. Since I've never kept a resolution longer than the time it takes to pass across my well-intentioned lips, I'm not gonna even attempt that feat. Instead, I'll ask YOU to make -- and keep -- a garden resolution.

Repeat after me: "THIS is the year I'll go to a garden show!" And what more appropriate time to dream about spring and working in your own garden than the icy grasp of winter?

At this very moment some of the most imaginative garden designers are hunkered down at their drawing boards putting the finishing touches on displays that'll knock your socks off. Most shows have dozens of seminars presented by experts in every gardening niche - container gardening, vertical gardening, succulents, tropical displays, outdoor living spaces, preserving your harvest, off-planet terraforming -- you can't miss.

[Health precaution: Before you step into the show's vendor section, have a full check-up from your physician - some of the luscious plants that debut at the shows will make even a seasoned gardener palpitate.]

To Which Show Shall You Go?

No matter what region you live in, there's a garden show -- too many for me to write about here. So I posted a note at Facebook asking some of my hort homies which ones they'd recommend. It didn't take long to get some rave endorsements. Here's what my peeps say you gotta go see...

San Francisco Flower & Garden Show - Wed. Mar. 23 - Tue. Mar. 29; San Mateo Events Center

Laura Livengood Schaub (Schaub Designs), perhaps a bit prejudiced, since she's social media manager for the show, told me "The SFGS is not to be missed, since you're speaking!"

That's right, Laura. My readers can meet me at the show. I'll be speaking on Thursday, March 24 (check the schedule when we get closer to the date). My seminar is titled, "How To Create Any Style Garden Using Mediterranean Plants." (If you live in snow country and can't grow a silver-leaf princess flower to save your life, come anyway, if only for the jokes.)

In the first hour, I'll teach you the same design principles I use in my own garden designs. Once you're brains are filled with cool design ideas, I'll release you to the vendor's hall to hunt for killer plant combos for your own garden. When you've shopped until you drop, come back for a bit of show-and-tell and personalized design advice from yours truly.

Check out the rest of the top shows around the country at my Fine Gardening blog.

Did Vertical Gardening Start During the Gold Rush?

I'm no garden history expert, but I'd be willing to bet that vertical gardening, the current rage, started in San Francisco in the middle of the 19th century. At least it looked that way from where I was standing.

Little did the Gold Rush-era sailors know that the stone they were blasting and hauling off as ballast for their ships would someday support a rich tapestry of lush plants smothering the sheer, stony cliffside of Telegraph Hill.

Before all those tons of rock were removed, water lapped at the base of a gently sloping hillside inhabited by grazing goats (good name for a band). It's taken a century and a half to revegetate the barren, jagged rock face, but the results are impressive, as I witnessed on a recent trip to The City (that's what cool people call it).

Lin and I were in San Francisco taking in the Post-Impressionist show at the DeYoung Museum, and visiting our son, Cosmo, who's living the life of a poet, cooking on a gourmet Vietnamese lunch truck and finishing college.

We rose early, ate a power breakfast with the kid and headed for the waterfront. "Oh heart, be still!" I gasped. "I've found unexpected free parking on a side street in the commercial depths of the Embarcadero, just a few blocks from our destination, Filbert Steps." (I tend to talk that way when I'm excited.)

The eastern face of Telegraph Hill looked wild and inaccessible, like El Capitan rising from the floor of Yosemite Valley. The rock face cascaded with ribbons of green, framed by the shimmering golden foliage of poplar trees. Fortunately, we weren't going to need a Sherpa or oxygen masks to mount our assault - we'd hoof it a couple of blocks to the Filbert Steps and take the more civilized route.

Lots of great photos and plants at Fine Gardening

A Book That Fattens Your Wallet

I don't think I've ever started my blog with a joke, so here goes.

Scene: A dark, cold bedroom, 3:27 AM.

Margie, bundled in layers of blankets, startles Mort with a loving elbow jab to the ribs. "Honey, shut the window. It's cold outside."

Mort, ever the logical and snarky one, mumbles, "So if I shut the window it's going to be warmer outside?"

---

Okay, it's a pretty lame joke, but there's a point to be made. What if you could improve the comfort of your home without opening and closing windows, piling on and peeling off layers of blankets, or fumbling the thermostat with freeze-dried fingertips?

Better yet, what if you could combine your love of gardening with your environmentally keen attitude, AND reduce your energy bill?

Well, here comes Massachusetts-based landscape architect Sue Reed's book, Energy-Wise Landscape Design - A New Approach for Your Home and Garden, with a whole lot of smart advice. The book's back cover promises that you can "Save money and energy while adding natural beauty to your home." Sue delivers on that promise.

The first four sections of the book address ideas for designing landscapes with energy in mind, like arranging plants to make the interior of the house more comfortable in summer and winter. Other chapters are packed with strategies for making outdoor spaces around the house more usable.

Lots more to learn at my Cool Green Gardens blog at Fine Gardening

Dumber Than A Potted Plant? Not So Fast...

Out here in the far west, October is usually summer's last blast, but you wouldn't know it from the umbrella weather Lin and I ran into down San Diego way last weekend. Don't get me wrong - I love having to use the windshield wipers in our SoCal near-desert climate. An early start to the rainy season makes me happy as a banana slug in a redwood forest.

After a jolting blast of Peet's dark roast coffee and a couple of wrong turns on the freeway (so much for my iPhone MapQuest app) we made our way to Balboa Park, a 1200-acre cultural park that was originally the location of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition and then the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition.

Not knowing quite where we were heading, we pulled into the first parking lot we saw, seeking the Museum of Photographic Arts. As we found our way through a newly planted garden between the buildings, there it was, framed in the arch of a colonnade - the 1915-era Botanical Building, one of the largest lath structures in the world.

The massive but graceful edifice houses more than 2100 permanent plants, mostly tropicals, some of which you might find in the houseplant section of your local garden shop. There were also a slew of specimens you probably wouldn't see unless you macheted your way into a jungle.

There's more at Fine Gardening...

Rain Dance

I'm a slug, not a lizard. I'd rather be under a boulder than baking on top of it. My ideal weather is the cool temps of a SoCal winter; my favorite sound is rain softly thumping on fallen leaves. That's when I work in the garden, go for long bike rides or read old issues of Fine Gardening.

It's too early to know if this will be a good rain year on the Left Coast, but whether Santa Barbara reaches our usual 18 inches or the stingy six of a few years back, doesn't it make sense to take advantage of every ounce we do receive?

With all the paved surfaces that surround us, it's amazing anything gets into the ground. Back in the heartland, you're "winterizing" your cars. I think we'd be wise to do the same for our gardens. So here are a few things you can do to make the most of every drop that falls on your property.

Let's start with that lawn.

Fundamental question. What does your lawn do for you? I'm not a complete anti-lawn zealot, mind you. If you've got kids who need somewhere to blow off some energy, or you're trying out for the Olympic croquet team, a lawn is the only practical surface. But if you don't use it, lose it-or at least downsize it.

Consider the monetary and environmental costs of a typical lawn. In the West, 60 percent of our residential water use is for lawns. The monthly water bill is only part of the equation: add the environmental cost of polluted run-off from fertilizers in our creeks and gas mowers that spew 10 times more emissions than a typical automobile and you can see why you might want to rethink your attachment to this big green beast.

Read more at Fine Gardening...

Dallas In September: Sweatier than A Bronco Rider's...

(You fill in the blank. This is a G-rated blog and I have a pretty vivid imagination.)

For all you folks who live where the summer norm is 90-plus temps and 2437.3% humidity, I am in awe of you. I've been back from the Garden Writers Association annual symposium in Dallas for a few weeks and I just don't know how y'all do it.

My raging souvenir cold has run its course, induced, no doubt, by slogging from the uber air conditioned hotel, to vegetable-crisper busses, to jungle-steamy-hot gardens best described as "air you can wear."

But rather than delve into the esoterica of what 600 garden writers do when they get together, I thought it would be informative to share some of the truly coolio products I ran across at the symposium's exhibit hall. The trade show gives nurseries, garden product sellers and professional organizations a chance to meet, greet and impress "garden communicators." Their hope is that we'll say nice things and create demand for their product. I'm game!

I didn't stop at every booth. I'm was sniffing out the products that fit my predisposition for the coolest, greenest, most sustainable ideas - or the ones lure me in with brimming bowls of handmade, Belgian dark chocolate.

So here's a digest of the offerings that made the biggest impression, the ones I hope you'll investigate further, and perhaps welcome into your own garden.

Read more at Fine Gardening...

Calling On The Capitol - DC Revisited

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but something's up. Why would those tricky devils at the Garden Writers Association derive so much pleasure from watching me perspire?

A little background: I joined and attended my first GWA annual symposium in 2008, when it was held in cool, drizzly Portland, Oregon. Since September is usually a hot month for Santa Barbara, I looked forward to traveling north, splashing in puddles and maybe having to wear a scarf!

What a great organization. Not only was I welcomed with open arms by the members and given the tools to launch my newfound career as a "real" writer, but they even provided a climate suitable for a banana slug like me.

Last year, it all changed - they had lured me in, then sprung the trap. My second GWA symposium was in Raleigh, North Carolina. The weather was gummy -- that's "muggy" spelled inside out. It wasn't all bad. There were lots of great people and great educational sessions, but then we'd get on a bus, tour a garden and I'd be reduced to a whimpering puddle of sweat.

But there was lots of good stuff going on in DC, too.... click and read on: