HAMBURG — Let your love of nature and gardening show, as you decorate for the upcoming holidays.

“Make people want to linger,” said Mary Gurtler, designer at Lockwood’s Greenhouses, located at 4484 Clark St. in Hamburg.

She and fellow designer Samantha Platt will offer a class on designing a welcoming entryway at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 1 at Lockwood’s. To register, stop into Lockwood’s, call 649-4684 or visit www.weknowplants.com.

This is one of a series of classes and hands-on workshops that will help you bring nature into your holiday decorating, this year.

Gurtler shared some ideas that she and Platt used in decorating the store.

Start with items you already have. Many people display bird houses inside their homes all year round. Add some berries, snow or lights to bird houses and they can become holiday decorations.

Gurtler said that she feels lights are an important part of holiday decorating. “It’s all about the lights,” she said. “I don’t care if they’re white or colored or blinking.”

The use of branches can help bring nature into holiday decorating. Attach a curly willow branch to a wall and hang Christmas ornaments from it, or set a branch in a pot of stones and add your favorite bird ornaments.

Bring items from your garden inside and use them in creative ways. For example, a bird bath on a pedestal can hold a Christmas scene.

Many of us have allium in our gardens. These plants remind me of giant Tootsie Pops®, with a very round flower perched atop a straight stem. They bloom in spring, but the dried flower can add interest to the garden, all summer. In the fall, Gurtler brought in the dried bloom, painted it white and set it atop a Christmas tree. Allium flowers also look spectacular, when painted black or gold.

If you do not have any allium in your garden, plant bulbs in the ground, now. You can plant them until the first week of December, or until the ground freezes.

That trellis that stands vertically in your garden during the summer can be brought inside and hung horizontally, from the ceiling. Dangle Christmas ornaments and other decorations from it.

If you have a favorite chair or spot where you like to relax, have a holiday candle nearby and something pretty to look at, from that spot.

“Decorating is as much for you as it is for the people you have over,” Gurtler said.

Learn more during classes and workshops that are scheduled at Lockwood’s. Call the business for more information and for prices.

– On Sunday, Nov. 18, at 1 p.m., learn how to make a Thanksgiving centerpiece using real flowers, with the help of professional florist Mary Trifunovic.

–Learn how to design a welcoming entryway at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 1. Gurtler and Platt will provide nature-inspired ideas for doorways, using wreaths, swags and container arrangements.

– Make a seasonal gift, using fresh and faux materials, during make-a-gift workshops at 11:30 a.m. and noon on Saturday, Dec. 1. Attendees at the earlier workshop will make a candle ring. Noon students will make a door handle basket.

– Decorate your mantel or sideboard with style on Sunday, Dec. 2 at 1 p.m. Floral design professional David Clark will demonstrate how to create eye-catching holiday tablescapes.

– A basic wreath workshop will be held on Thursday, Dec. 6 at 6:30 p.m. Lockwood’s Greenhouses gardening expert Sally Cunningham will teach attendees how to make a full, natural greens wreath, with a bow.

– On Saturday, Dec. 8 at 10:30 a.m., design an elegant wreath of mixed greens and berries, with Cunningham.

– Trifunovic will help attendees make a boxwood tree on Sunday, Dec. 9 at 1 p.m. at Lockwood’s Greenhouses. You’ll make a 16-inch tabletop tree designed with boxwood cuttings and miniature decorations.

– On Wednesday, Dec. 12, a mixed greens wreath workshop will be held at 6:30 p.m. Cunningham will lead the workshop.

– Make a kissing ball with Cunningham on Saturday, Dec. 14 at 10:30 a.m.

– Create a Christmas centerpiece on Sunday, Dec. 23 at 1 p.m. Under the guidance of Trifunovic, you will use greens, cones and natural material.

Connie Oswald Stofko is publisher of Buffalo-NiagaraGardening.com, the online gardening magazine for Western New York. Email Connie@BuffaloNiagaraGardening.com.

Our neighbour, Keith, who’s in his 70s, has been gardening for years. He went from working for an agri-chemical company to establishing and running a successful organic citrus orchard, which gives you an idea of how forward-thinking and flexible he is.

Every now and then he comes out with a gem of wisdom which proves invaluable in the garden.

His latest offering is this: buy half a dozen pots of lavender and stick them in the fork of a branch about halfway up your fruit trees.

Hmmm. Bit of a weird design feature, I thought, but he wasn’t out to make a style statement. The lavender will attract bees, which will then pollinate the fruit trees, he reckons.

Lord knows whether it works, but much of what he tells us does, and it’ll be a cheap, interesting experiment at the very least.

The Landscaper dearly loves lavender, so having pots of it hanging around in the orchard will be no hardship. He may even take it a step further, he thought, and underplant the fruit trees with different varieties of lavender, which would, I admit, look quite a lot better than the neat but uninspiring circles of bare earth that facilitate easy mowing.

A step or three on from this is herbal ley, a living grass ground cover that helps to control and suppress weeds, retain moisture, prevent erosion and attract beneficial insects and bees. Herbal ley acts as a nutrient fixer and recycler, and there’s no question it looks better than the bare earth circle. You can create your own ley for different purposes so, if you want to enhance the look and productivity of your fruit trees, find a mix designed for orchards.

Trees don’t naturally grow in isolation or surrounded by lawn or bare earth so it’s easy to see how herbal ley will enhance tree health.

Bear in mind, though, that in this context the word “herbal” doesn’t mean thyme, rosemary and the like. It actually refers to “herbage” – leafy green ground cover and low-growing plant species.

The way to go about it is to skim off lawn around the tree and then sow “orchard herbal ley” seed.

Plant borage (blue edible flowers), red and white flowering clover, lemon balm, chicory and spring bulbs to attract bees and other insects to fruit trees for pollination and, therefore, more fruit.

Planting members of the Umbelliferous (Apiaceae) family, such as parsley, carrot, parsnip, coriander and dill will help to protect fruit trees from caterpillar and grub pests. Let them flower and set seed, and sow again for next year. Apples also like to be underplanted with yarrow, chamomile, borage, clover, chicory and cornflower.

For soil fertility and nutrients, plant clover and lupin for nitrogen fixing, and comfrey for potassium.

It’s not too late to sow or plant a herbal ley if your soil is still moist. Buy a herbal ley mix or persuade friends with yarrow, clover, tansy, lemon balm, bulbs and chicory to divide some bits off their established plants for you and replant them around your trees.

And, if you like, sneak a bit of lavender in there, too.

Earthly delights

If you’re around Auckland between now and November 18, you can visit New Zealand Sculpture Onshore – an exhibition of contemporary sculpture at a spectacular clifftop overlooking the Hauraki Gulf.
More than 120 outdoor works by established and emerging artists will be on show, alongside an indoor sculpture gallery, and a display of children’s sculpture.

Tell me what’s new

When British Garden Designer of the Year Andrew Fisher Tomlin turns up at next year’s Ellerslie Flower Show, he’ll be looking for The Big Idea.

He’s a firm believer in new designers leading the way and hopes to see new designers’ unexpected takes on what a garden should be. Fisher Tomlin, who judged at the first Christchurch show in 2009, says he’s excited about returning to judge at “one of the best flower shows in the world”.

He’ll also be looking for the ingenuity he saw last time that proves you don’t need big bucks to make a huge impression.
 

Designing your landscape can be one of the most rewarding projects you’ll ever do. It’s also one of the best garden-related things you can do during the long, cold days of winter.

Good gardens don’t just happen; they’re the result of careful planning. As anxious as you’ll be to rush to the garden center, now’s the time to pause and develop a real understanding of your property’s features and how they can be used to create enjoyable outdoor spaces.

Consider doing these steps:

— Base map. A sketch of your yard, showing property lines, the house’s orientation, driveways and paths. Start at the front corner of the house. With a 100-foot tape, measure the distance out to the curb and across to the nearest property line, and draw onto graph paper. A scale of 1 inch equaling 10 feet works well, but pick whatever works for you and stay consistent through the drawing. The larger the grid paper, the easier it will be to write in all your plans and ideas. If you can find it, 18- by 24-inch grid paper is great.

Continue measuring from all corners of the house to the property’s boundaries. Draw an arrow indicating north. Locate doors and windows; gas, electric and cable utilities; trees and shrubs; and any neighbors’ features near the property line that might affect your design, such as large trees, fences or buildings.

— Site analysis. Make a basic inventory of the property’s strengths and weaknesses. A site analysis can be sketched in a single day, but it would be better to record how the area changes throughout the year. Note all significant features like sunny and shady spots, prevailing winds, drainage problems, existing vegetation, good and poor views and all utilities and easements. Make several photocopies of the base map with site analysis notes.

— Preliminary designs. Now use the copies to come up with three or four preliminary designs. Let your imagination run wild with gazebos, vegetable gardens and flowerbeds. For each design draw a bubble diagram roughly indicating the shapes and locations of these features. Exact items and perfect graphics aren’t necessary; just “bubble in” rough ideas.

Do pay attention to your site analysis, however. For example, a vegetable garden needs a flat, open area with lots of sun. Don’t place it under a huge tree. Consider how the elements relate to each other and the house, too. For example, a compost pile should be close to the vegetable garden but out of view. Or a patio shouldn’t get blasting, summer sun without some kind of cover. It’s going to take several tries to fit the odd pieces smoothly into the jigsaw puzzle, but finally a practical plan will emerge.

Look over your preliminary designs and note the features you like from each. Put them all together on a new, more detailed base map while paying attention to that site analysis. It’s critical that the garden’s features all cooperate. Here is where you need accurate dimensions, too. Find the mature spread of that shade tree; measure exactly how long that front walk will be; count the number of shrubs needed for the hedge. You may find you have to make a hybrid of several different ideas to get everything to work together. Above all, consider the mature size of the plants and trees you want to add. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for lots of work and expense later.

When you find your perfect design, draw it on a clean base map. As an option, you can color the different features for easier visual reference, then show it to other gardeners or even a professional landscape designer. A fresh set of eyes is an insurance policy that you haven’t overlooked something that could really cost you later.

— Next, work out a budget. Don’t let money limit your creativity, but be realistic. Actual costs might mean a change in the design. But instead of going back to the drawing board, consider building one part of the plan at a time. Figure what you most want and can do immediately and what can wait until next year. You may find you can have it all — but just not all at once.

Good landscape design isn’t difficult, but it involves a definite process. Planning, patience and looking to the future are characteristics of gardeners, anyway. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can create the landscape of your dreams.

Adapted from an earlier The Gardener Within column. Joe Lamp’l, host of “Growing a Greener World” on PBS, is a master gardener and author. For more information visit www.joegardener.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.

Landscape Designer and Harvard resident Rochelle Greayer has a green thumb when it comes to growing new businesses. Several years ago, Greayer started a blog about landscape design called Studio ‘g’. Her growing list of followers is attracting enough advertisers to supplant her design business.

A year ago, Greayer and her business partner, Susan Cohan, launched an online magazine about landscape design called Leaf Magazine, which has a growing list of followers as well.

Greayer is also one of the founding members of the Harvard Farmer’s Market, which recently completed its sixth and most successful season.

The latest endeavor for the designer and mother of two is the launch of her first design class — to be held in partnership with floral designer Roanne Robbins — in Greayer’s barn on Pinnacle Road.

For more information, visit her web site.

Leaf Magazine just celebrated its one-year anniversary. How did it get started?

My business partner and I knew each other through online networking. We’re both landscape designers. She’s down in New Jersey. We’re both active in online activities related to landscape design, as professionals working in the industry. We’re both bloggers and we’d seen trends of online magazines being able to emerge because the technology made it more simple to create that magazine feeling. And it’s fairly inexpensive technology and we didn’t have any in our area [of landscape design].

What is Leaf Magazine all about?

When I moved here eight years ago from where I lived and worked in England, it was so different coming here, because it’s such a gardening culture over there. There are about eight beautiful magazines [in the U.K.] covering the industry in whichever way you can imagine.

Here we have a couple but they’re small and struggling. We really saw a hole in the market for a practical magazine that was inspiring but in a way that is attainable rather than completely aspirational. Not necessarily being a hard-core gardening magazine, we’re much more about design in the same sense that an interior magazine would be — they’re really lifestyle magazines.

We saw that as a real pull — having a garden and living in a way where you’re eating directly from your garden, you care about environmental issues, you like to be outdoors — you just have this nice lifestyle that extends beyond your front door.

How big is the staff of the magazine?

We have six people who work on the magazine now. My partner, Susan Cohan, and our advertising sales person and our graphic design person all live in the New Jersey. Myself and our copy editor and one of our contributing editors are up here, between Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

A lot of people ask how we manage with everyone working from home in different places. That’s totally not the way most magazines operate. The way we make it work is we use online tools and Skype and chat all the time.

How often does a new issue come out?

Right now we’re at three times a year. That’s what we’re planning for next year. We’re definitely looking for publishing business partners that might help us financing-wise and industry-wise to grow it. Right now we’re growing organically, which is great, but we’d love to maybe speed it up a bit and take on a partner so we can do four or six issues a year.

Tell me about your blog, Studio ‘g’:

It’s might be one of the biggest in the industry about garden design. Blogging seemed like a great way for me to organize myself creatively. It quickly evolved to attract a lot of readers.

About a year and half ago – really it was the same time that I started Leaf – I’ve made it really the only thing I do. I’ve stopped taking on design projects and continuing to grow the blog by adding revenue there and make a living off of that.

You’re starting to offer design classes. What’s that all about?

I have this bigger end game in mind of offering classes in related topics as an extension of the blog and Leaf. The first one features Roanne Robbins, who was a vendor at the Farmer’s Market. She’s a contributor on Leaf as well as a contributor on ‘g’. She and I will be running the class.

I have a barn where I live on Pinnacle Road by Carlson’s, and I’ve always wanted to use the barn to have classes and events there. So we’re running our first class on Nov. 14. You can learn from Roanne how to make beautiful Thanksgiving centerpieces from cuttings from your garden, and cut flowers you might buy at the grocery store.

We’re also trying to focus on going for a walk in the woods and how to gather things and how to use things that you might just see around. To me the reason you would want to come is because it’s a nice place with nice people to hang out for two hours — almost like going to the spa for two hours. It’s almost like spoiling yourself.

October 18, 2012_Solana Beach, California_USA_

McCarville admires the variegated colors of Kalanchoe ‘Fantastic,’ a hybrid variety of a succulent commonly called “flapjack” or “paddle” plants. Water-wise succulents are increasingly popular landscape plants.” Hayne Palmour IV • U-T photos

A milk weed plant from South Africa at Cedros Gardens in Solana Beach.

Horticulturist and landscape designer Jason Chen shows the flower of a “Giant Dutchman’s Pipe” vine plant at Cedros Gardens in Solana Beach.

Yellow blooms of the perennial sunflower “Maximilian” frame Cedros Gardens owner Mia McCarville and horticulturist/landscape designer Jason Chen. The flowers are part of the “cottage garden” area of the nursery, which is in the Cedros Design District of Solana Beach. Hayne Palmour IV • U-T

Penny Lingo

Special to the U-T

‘We don’t want to eat three meals at one time, then fast for a week,” said Mia McCarville, owner of Cedros Gardens in Solana Beach. “Plants are the same.”

Slow-release fertilizers, like most organics, she said, feed the plant with a steady stream of nutrients instead of a big gulp. “We try to use organic.”

Organic gardening is just one of the earth-friendly practices championed by McCarville and horticulturalist Jason Chen, the garden’s resident landscape designer.

Healthy soil is filled with microbes, essential for supporting plant life. “Chemical fertilizer is very easy to use, and it produces instant results,” said McCarville. But the high levels of chemicals kill the microbes and thus the soil, and then seep into the groundwater. “That will end up in the lagoon and then in the ocean.”

“And then it ends up (back) here,” Chen added. “It’s a big circle.”

McCarville’s experience with growing plants began in her early childhood when she helped her parents in their garden in Japan.

Her advocacy for the use of organic materials and water-saving practices has grown steadily in the past two decades, since she moved up from a smaller nursery to open her current business in 1993.

Though she said she is “is pretty much self-taught,” the knowledge she has acquired over the years enables her to offer her customers sound advice on plants and garden procedures, and consultations on design.

Chen, who holds a degree in ornamental horticultural design from North Carolina State University, came on board about two years ago. He estimated that design work is about 40 percent to 50 percent of their business. He’s learning a lot, he said, from working with McCarville.

The two agree that every plan must be tailored to the wants and needs of the client; at the same time, consideration must be given to conditions such as soil type, and the size and orientation of the space. “We have to know how the plants develop in the garden, how they’ll look year-round, before we can put it in the design,” McCarville said. “Sometimes we have to tell (clients) what they don’t want to hear.”

Both Chen and McCarville are enthusiastic about using edible plants in landscape design.

Chen cites citrus as an example of greenery with benefits: “It’s beautiful, it’s evergreen, and you can sometimes get fruit year-round.” Some hybrids grow well on the coast: Cara Cara pink navel oranges (Citrus sinensis ‘Cara Cara’), Valencias and all the Mandarin varieties.

For smaller spaces, options include planting one of the dwarf varieties or training a plant against a trellis on a flat plane, known as espalier. “We’ve had a couple clients that want to espalier,” Chen said. The spare, regimented look can complement a contemporary architectural design.

“Something new to this area is cherry trees,” McCarville said. “There are two varieties, and you have to plant both for pollination, but they both have wonderful fruit. Royal Lee (Prunus avium ‘Royal Lee’), and its companion pollinator Minnie Royal (Prunus avium ‘Minnie Royal’) have medium-large cherries similar to Bings in flavor. They are adapted to milder climates with moderate summers and winters that provide at least 200 hours below 45 degrees – less than half the chill needed for traditional cherries.