I f the breeze hits a yoshino cherry tree in your yard the right way, it can look like pink snow falling from the sky.

Some plant lovers view the cherry as one of the most beautiful flowering ornamental trees.

But accord ing to Clyde Jones, a master gardener who volunteers at the 3.5-acre Discovery Garden at University of Florida IFAS Extension in Tavares, it’s not a goo d tree to grow Central Florida.

“Don’t bring them down here,” said Jones, who is familiar with the trees from the National Cherry B lossom Festival in Washington D.C., which commemorates the 1912 gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo to the city.

He fav ors the flatwoods plum or Chickasaw plum.

Trying to dig up ideas for some good plants to grow here, you might want to learn Central’s Florida’s landscape first, he said.

Jones on Saturday led an hour-long class, “Plant This, Not That,” and taught about which plants are recommended for Central Florida and which should be avoided.

Jones said one of the biggest misconception about Central Florida — at least to newcomer plant growers — is Florida’s tropical climate.

“We get hard freezes here too,” Jones said.

Want to add grace and beauty by planting Japanese maple? It’s too hot and humid for most of them, he said. However, the Japanese maple glowing embers can work fine here, the state of Georgia’s Gold Medal winner for 2005.

“It does need afternoon shade,” he said.

Croton is an extensive flowering plant genus in the spurge family — and look nice, but can be an expensive plant to maintain.

Jones prefers daylilies.

“There’s a million different colors,” Jones said.

The queen palm is most suited for acidic, well-drained soils and grows best in the full sun.

“It can suffer cold damage,” Jones said.

He prefers the sabal palmetto, also known as cabbage palm — a very dense, 10- to 15-foot-diameter, round crown of deeply cut, curved, palmate leaves.

Like the Sylvester palm tree, popular for landscaping, lining avenues and as accent trees on golf courses.

“They are OK, but have pretty heavy spikes,” Jones said. “Don’t plant them near your pool.”

Bearded iris is among the most elegant — and easy to grow — flowers of spring. But it must stay 30 days in temperatures below 40 to survive, Jones said.

Jones likes the Louisiana iris, which has a wider color range that most iris.

“It’s a beautiful thing and its very cold tolerant,” he said.

Jones has seen plenty of Holland tulips at Holland’s Keukenhof, advertised as the world’s most beautiful spring garden.

But for Central Florida, he likes amaryllis, a small genus of flowering bulbs.

“They just grow well here,” he said.

The class was part of a “Saturday in the Garden” speaker series held on the first Saturday of each month at UF/IFAS Extension.

Karen Casalese, of Tavares, wanted to get advice on her crape myrtle.

“It was very informative class,” she said.

For information on the “Saturday in the Garden” series, call 352-343-4101 or g o to http://lake.ifas.ufl.edu.

From gravelly, gnarly patches of grass to a glorious “garden of eatin’” forest.

That’s the new vision for the 6th Ward Park.

And this coming week, it takes one huge step toward becoming reality.

Helena will be the first city in Montana to design an edible forest garden. And starting this week Dave Jacke, a national leader in this type of garden design, will teach a Helena workshop of 33 professionals from across the country who will help design the new park.

Jacke gives a public talk on edible forest gardens from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, July 9, at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church. The cost is $10 in advance, $12 at the door. To register go to www.insideedgedesigners.com/register.

Instead of a barren grassy parking plot, think of an edible park with pear and plum trees, raspberries, currants and gooseberries, said Jessica Peterson, a social economist whose dream for this park is about to take root and bloom.

From groundcovers, to shrubs, to trees, the park will offer an array of tantalizing edible plants that also rebuild the soil and attract beneficial insects like bees.

The 6th Ward Park will also be the new home for 22 Helena Food Share community garden plots that need to be relocated to make room for that facility’s expansion.

The future garden park might also offer such amenities as playground equipment and benches.

On Tuesday night, Jacke will introduce the vision of forest gardening to Helena, sharing scientific background and successful examples of such gardens blooming across the country. You’ll also get to sample some perennial edibles suitable to growing in Helena’s backyards and gardens.

This past Tuesday morning beneath a blazing sun, the 6th Ward Park behind the HATS Transit Station was looking more than a little bit woebegone. Except for grass and gravel, it offers a lilac hedge, a couple of ash trees and a crabapple.

Its only visitors were two young foraging bucks and a cluster of folks there to discuss their shared vision for the park.

“It’s been a public park since 1915,” said Caroline Wallace, a landscape architect and partner in Inside Edge Design, which has taken a lead role in organizing the garden. “This place began as a community effort. This neighborhood was being developed as a business center when the train still ran. The park was very much a community effort.”

Trade organizations and a plumbing trade group pitched in to build the community park, which once was home to a baseball field and wading pool, she said. “It’s been under-utilized for decades.”

Wallace and Jessica Peterson, a social economist with Inside Edge Design, have been joined by a host of parties including Helena City Parks and Recreation, Helena Community Gardens and Helena Food Share, as well as the 6th Ward Neighborhood Association, P.A.L. and Central School students.

A host of other groups from Youth Connections to Lewis and Clark County Extension Office are joining in the conversation, and the list keeps growing.

It is this type of community support that’s needed to not only create and plant the garden, but to ensure it flourishes over the years, said Peterson.

According to Jacke, author of “Edible Forest Gardens,” the idea of an edible perennial landscape has been around thousands of years. It was used by native peoples in America and across the globe.

“It’s a forest garden that is designed by humans to mimic the forest ecosystem,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Montague, Mass.

Its many benefits include growing food, fuel, fodder, medicinal plants and building healthy soil.

“In Helena, which gets 11 to 12 inches of precipitation, we have challenges mimicking a forest ecosystem,” he said. But there are natural, sustainable plant communities he intends to explore — sagebrush steppes, aspen forests and ponderosa pine openings are just a few.

“A forest garden is a metaphor,” he added. While a forest might work on the East Coast, which gets a lot more moisture than here, an edible meadow or “eddow” could be part of a 6th Ward Park design.

So far, a list of some 300 plant species that thrive in the Helena area has been pulled together, according to Peterson.

A few potential plant mixes could include saskatoon, a native plant for dry prairies that produces seven tons of fruit per acre, said Jacke. There’s also currants, elderberries, burr oak, sunflowers, prairie turnips and such plants as buffaloberry that may not be all that edible but fix nitrogen into the soil.

While Jacke will lay out the design process at this week’s five-day workshop, the 33 attendees will help design the park, keeping in mind the needs of the three main stakeholders — Food Share, the Community Gardens and the city parks department. There’s also been input from the neighborhood association. By Friday night, July 12, the group will unveil its design.

“What’s for dinner is a design question,” said Jacke. “All human beings are designers.”

He helps train people around the country, so they can take the knowledge he shares and adapt it to their local landscapes and growing conditions.

Edible forest gardens are taking seed from coast to coast — from Wesleyan University’s two-acre forest, to a seven-acre one being planted in Seattle. And Maine lawmakers just directed officials there to plant edible landscaping of fruit trees and shrubs around the Statehouse.

Jacke sees this type of gardening as a way to not only feed more people, but also to heal the planet. Some researchers say current agriculture is responsible for some of the most destructive practices on the planet, he said.

Ann Waickman, executive director of Helena Food Share, is excited and grateful that they are part of the 6th Ward Park redevelopment.

Fifteen percent of the population in Helena turns to Food Share for assistance and it is particularly concerned about losing the current community garden plots on its property when it expands its building in the future.

“I’m excited to not only increase access to fresh food,” she said, “but to build community through this park.”

And both she and Cara Orban, who manages the HFS Community Gardens, see the new garden as having great educational potential for kids and adults.

“Helena Farmers Market reaches an audience that already knows about nutritious local foods,” said Orban. “This garden will put it front and center for a whole new audience.”

“I see this as another chapter of how to re-use this park,” said Amy Teegarden, director of Helena Parks and Recreation Department. “It will be a new focus for the neighborhood and reconnect the neighborhood. It’s just been waiting for this to happen.”

Ever since the wading pools were removed in 2007-2008, few people even knows this patch of land is a park, she said. The parks department has been waiting for the transit station to be completed before taking any action on the adjoining park land.

“I always think it’s meant to happen,” she said, “when the partners appear.”

One of the things that will make it a good neighborhood park, Teegarden said, is the transit station, which provides buses for the neighborhood and people from across the community.

There are challenges ahead, they all admit. Not only does the park have at least four different soil types, but some of the soil may have been contaminated by industrial use and will need to be removed and replaced. Funding partners are also needed. The city put forward an initial $13,000 for an irrigation system to be installed, she said.

This money needs to be supplemented with grants and other funding.

“What the city brings to this is the space and long term support,” said Teegarden. “The partnerships are what will make it successful. I’m just excited for this new chapter in the 6th Ward’s history.”

Longtime 6th Ward resident Rose Casey, who’s lived in the neighborhood since 1977, said the neighborhood supports the plan.

“It was a popular park back in 1977,” she said, when kids used the pool. The new edible forest garden “is probably a good use of the land,” she added. While the neighborhood’s first wish had been for new tennis courts, the cost of building and maintaining these didn’t prove feasible. “So this came along and it really seemed like a good idea.”

The 6th Ward neighborhood has never given up on the idea of recreating itself as a center for homes and community businesses. “What happened in the Great Northern Center could happen here,” she said. “The 6th Ward Neighborhood Association has given a big approval for this park … it fits into our vision.

“We appreciate good ideas that bring back the character of the neighborhood,” Casey said. Young families are beginning to move back into the neighborhood. Often, the young parents grew up in the 6th Ward. “It’s not just a decaying neighborhood, it’s found new life.”

Casey, who’s raised five children in the 6th Ward and has 19 grandchildren, said “we are very invested in the neighborhood.

“I know what it takes to turn an idea into reality,” she said of those who’ve led this effort. “I admire their spirit of cooperation with the neighborhood and their tenacity. They’re doing it the right way and I appreciate that.”

A library stocked with books and computers perches along 156th Avenue Southeast, near the place where the QFC used to be. Adjacent is an office building where any day now new businesses may find a home. Apartments and duplexes are planned over the coming years.

This is the former Lake Hills Shopping Center, a 60-year-old suburban Bellevue retail hub that declined over the years due to changes in shopping patterns and development rules.

Its rebirth as Lake Hills Village is an example of how communities and developers are trying to be bring new life to aging shopping centers that dot many suburbs.

A few Eastside centers have been redeveloped, while others are waiting for a face-lift. What sets Lake Hills Village apart, officials say, is the plan to add housing to the mix.

Housing “is really a departure for a neighborhood shopping center because it’s so small and nestled right in a residential area,’’ said Dan Stroh, Bellevue planning director.

“There are a lot of larger sites elsewhere where that kind of model might be more common. Mixed retail and housing in the same development is common in downtown Bellevue, but in a little neighborhood center it’s much less common,’’ he said.

Lake Hills renewal

The 6.7-acre Lake Hills Shopping Center opened in 1958 at a time when the suburbs were taking off. Land was cheap, gasoline was inexpensive and disposable income was on the rise.

The center thrived for decades. But an agreement between the community, the city and the developer stymied expansion of the Lake Hills QFC — the original store of what grew into a grocery chain.

When the grocery store couldn’t compete with larger stores in the area, it closed in 2001. Other stores eventually left as well.

Today, nothing is left of the center as it was.

Liebchen Delicatessen, one of the last remaining tenants, moved out in January. It had been at the center 41 years but moved because an agreement with the existing center forbade them from cooking — necessary for the business to grow, said Siobhan Donohue, whose parents own the business.

Lake Hills’ developer Oscar Del Moro, vice president with Cosmos Development, believes a redevelopment can be successful if you “have a captive audience to live, work, shop and enjoy one area.”

The Lake Hills Branch of the King County Library System opened at the site last year, and underground parking is being built. The next few years will bring duplexes and apartments, a grocery and offices that could house anything from medical and dental offices to accountants, Del Moro said. He estimates the cost of the entire development at $80 million.

The “mixed use’’ concept of adding living, working and shopping space side-by-side has long been used in Europe and more recently in urban areas such as downtown Bellevue and Northgate.

The idea is to create neighborhoods with less reliance on cars and provide gathering places for people to linger, as they might have in a town square.

The center eventually will include an outdoor stage for performances, Del Moro said.

Cosmos worked for the past 10 years with the East Bellevue Community Council on the plan.

Steve Kasner, chairman of the community council, enthusiastically backs the project and would like to see other shopping centers in the area redeveloped as well.

At Newport Hills Shopping Center, not far away, a nail salon, dry cleaners and martial-arts studio cling to the edge of a vast parking lot, and there are shadows of the letters R-e-d A-p-p-l-e on the empty building where a grocery once was.

“This is what happens if nobody steps in to do something,’’ Kasner said. “A lot of people have approached us with ideas,’’ about redevelopment, he added. So far there are no plans.

Other redevelopments

At Bellevue’s Kelsey Creek Center, the city, developer and community joined forces in 2011 to revamp the shopping center, which

had slipped into decline once it lost its anchor, Kmart.

In that case, the big obstacle to redevelopment was a city requirement that any work include daylighting Kelsey Creek, which was running through a culvert.

But after years of negotiation, the city allowed developers to leave the creek covered, in exchange for other modifications to the site, Stroh said.

The center still has a large parking lot, but not quite in the acres-of-asphalt style as in the past, and now native landscaping is part of the design. Now anchored by a Walmart, the center is lively and well used.

So is Crossroads Bellevue to the north, where redevelopment 20 years ago included adding game tables and a floor chess board in the food court, a community meeting room, a performance stage and outdoor space for a farmers market, which draws 5,000 people a week.

“It connects us to the whole community,” said Susan Benton, Crossroads property manager.

Also on the Eastside, the city of Kenmore purchased the aging Kenmore Village center in 2005 and is in the process of finalizing sales of parcels to developers who plan to build 160 apartments, mixing them with offices and shops, said City Manager Rob Karlinsey.

Why aren’t more aging shopping plazas developed into mixed-use centers?

One reason, experts say, is the kind of legal quagmire that prevented expansion of the grocery at Lake Hills.

“The body of laws and codes developed over the last 50 years … really mitigate against good traditional urban design,’’ said James Howard Kunstler, an expert on urban design and author of “The Geography of Nowhere.” “And they are very difficult to overcome.’’

It took Cosmos 10 years working to clear a path for redevelopment of the Lake Hills Shopping Center. The company doesn’t have an exact date for completion of the project but hopes to start building housing units in the next two years.

“We’re in it for the long haul,’’ Del Moro said.

Nancy Bartley: 206-464-8522 or nbartley@seattletimes.com