The gate at the Alnwick Poison Garden is a spooky sign of what’s inside. (Photo by Steve F/Wikimedia Commons)

Skulls and crossbones bar the locked gates on Alnwick Castle’s grounds, 35 miles north of Britain’s Newcastle upon Tyne. “These plants can kill,” signs warn. Don’t be scared, though. Beyond lies a charitable trust — and one of North East England’s biggest tourist attractions: The Poison Garden.

Among its 100-odd intoxicating inhabitants grow cannabis, opium and hemlock, the plant that sent Socrates to his demise. Poppies, foxglove and belladonna also number among the “inmates,” as staff members like to call the fatal flora.

Right: Suspended walkways and steps lead to the giant treehouse at Alnwick Garden. (Pawel Libera /VisitBritain …This deadly destination lurks beside one of Europe’s largest inhabited castles, which earned supernatural street cred as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films. The turrets, ramparts and “lost cellars” may be closed for winter, but the garden is still going strong ($6 for children, $18 for adults). It magics up Halloween events from wand crafting to pumpkin carving and bewitching performances of Shakespeare’s terrible trio from “Macbeth.”

Visitors can also explore the world’s largest wheelchair-accessible treehouse, which stays open later in the year to celebrate Christmas dinner and a five-course New Year’s banquet.

“I wondered why so many gardens focused on the healing power of plants rather than their ability to kill,” said the poison garden’s creator, Jane, the Duchess of Northumberland. “Most children I knew would be more interested in how a plant killed, how long it would take, and how gruesome and painful the death might be.”

The mother of four unveiled her lethal landscaping a decade ago, sparking controversy from all sides. Since then, 3.8 million visitors have infused about $240 million into the county’s economy, according to a study by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The charismatic, can-do duchess announced earlier this month that she’ll prune her involvement down from its current daily doses by 2015. That will allow more time for another project she has on the boil: “The Poison Diaries,” a trilogy of novels for teens.

But a fresher, flashier romance could upstage the duchess’s 18th-century fiction, as her son George Percy — the heir to Alnwick (pronounced “ANN-ick”) — keeps company with Pippa Middleton, Kate’s younger sister. Last spring, the two close friends had tabloids cooking up potent rumors again.

As “The Poison Diaries” say, “in the right dose, everything is a poison. Even love…”

by Amanda Castleman

Top: The gate at the Alnwick Poison Garden is a spooky sign of what’s inside. (Photo by Steve F/Wikimedia Commons)

Right: Suspended walkways and steps lead to the giant treehouse at Alnwick Garden. (Pawel Libera /VisitBritain)

Revel in autumnal fun – with hawks, owls, pumpkins and more – at this Saturday’s Fall Festival at Hoch’s Landscaping Garden Center in Barnegat.

“We definitely want to get people excited about the fall,” said Adrienne Cerefice, who owns and runs the business along with Daniel Hoch, a longtime landscaper in the area who branched out with the garden center earlier this year.

“Fall is a great time to plant trees,” Cerefice noted. Besides stocking, as Hoch pointed out, “all your garden needs” – plants, flowers, trees, soil, mulch, fertilizer, planters and much more – on the site’s two acres, the center also now offers pumpkins, hay bales, corn stalks and Indian corn.

From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, stop by to see live hawks and owls, brought from the Cedar Run Wildlife Refuge to the Migration Station, which moved in to the shop next door to Hoch’s last month.

There also will be pumpkin painting for kids all day; Hoch’s provides the paint with a pumpkin purchase.

The garden center staff also will hold a seminar at 10 a.m. on fall pruning, fertilizing and winterizing gardens and flower beds. “We have a very knowledgable and helpful staff,” said Cerefice. “They’re always willing to answer questions and help customers plan their gardens.”

Refreshments will be provided.

Hoch’s, located at 229 S. Main St. in Barnegat, is open from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day through the fall.

For more information, call 609-361-4310, or visit hochslandscaping.com.  —J.K.-H.

When Chuck and Petra Meinke’s two kids were in high school and going to formal dances, the garden was the place to gather for group photos.

“We had a lot of prom pictures out here,” said Petra, surveying the textured tapestry of foliage that fills their Apple Valley back yard.

The little footbridge at the edge of the pond, framed by gracefully draping weeping willows, was an especially popular place to strike a pose. “It would be a great place for a wedding,” Petra noted. (Not that she’s hinting, mind you.)

The Meinkes’ landscape wasn’t always so photogenic. When they built their house in 1991, the land was marshy and choked with weeds.

“The nettles were this high,” Chuck said, gesturing well above his head.

Landscaping their unruly lot was a DIY affair from start to finish. “We didn’t order a service,” said Petra. “We didn’t have the money.”

She gives Chuck most of the credit for creating their masterpiece, noting his back-breaking work hauling and placing the rocks and boulders that give their landscape its “bones.”

“I look at some of these rocks and wonder, ‘How the heck did I move that?'” Chuck said.

He may have done more of the heavy lifting, but Petra contributed to the aesthetics.

“She’s the artsy one,” he said. He seeks her advice when placing individual plants and designing mass plantings, which they lay out first with a garden hose to get the curve just right.

European entry

The Meinkes started in front, aiming for a sheltered courtyard effect with a bit of European flair.

“Here in front we keep a European look — as best we can in Minnesota,” Petra said, who grew up in Germany. Chuck was raised in a military family and traveled extensively as a child. “I got exposed to a lot of gardens all over the world,” he said. “The Alhambra [in Granada, Spain] is my favorite. I also love Versailles.”

The landscaping leading to their front door has a cosmopolitan air, with dwarf evergreens, arborvitae in pots, lion statuary and the Kentucky coffee tree Chuck had always wanted. The courtyard gets hot in summer, but during the cooler spring and fall months, it’s where they like to congregate with neighbors over a beer.

The back yard presented a much bigger challenge — on a much bigger canvas. Today it looks less like a suburban back yard than a well-groomed park or estate, with terraces, wide, meandering walking paths framed by foliage of every color and dozens of colorful container plantings as accents.

The spacious garden looks like it could keep a full-time groundskeeper busy, but Chuck insists it’s less labor-intensive than it appears. He planned the shady garden with hardy perennials to be low-maintenance.

“I tried to pick stuff you don’t have to spend a huge amount of time on,” he said, including ferns, ligularia, ground covers and 110 varieties of hosta. “We needed plants that take care of themselves.”

It’s true that the garden is “a beast” for a couple of weeks every spring, Chuck conceded. But most of the growing season he spends only an hour or two a week working on their landscape.

A fair amount of that time is spent raking up debris from the picturesque weeping willows. “They make a mess,” Chuck said. “When we planted them they were about 5 feet tall and about an inch around. Now they’re ginormous.”

Serenity in the city

The little footbridge that creates a focal point at the water’s edge was built by Petra’s father. “He used to come from Germany for four to six weeks, and we had to keep him busy,” Petra said with a laugh.

The Meinkes have continued to add to their landscape, installing two smaller ponds closer to the house and, most recently, an outdoor fireplace.

“It’s a great place to entertain,” Petra said. “We did an Oktoberfest with a real band in lederhosen and 100 people, just like in Germany.”

First-time guests are always taken aback when they see the back yard. “People don’t expect it,” Petra said. “They say, ‘Wow! This is like an arboretum.'”

And there are plenty of first-time guests, in part because strangers often wander through the garden, just to have a look. “People say, ‘You guys should charge admission,'” Petra said. “That’s not what this is about.”

What it’s about is creating a refuge of peace and tranquility.

“We both had high-stress jobs,” Petra said. She’s a recently retired marketing manager; he’s an even more recently retired corporate compliance security manager.

“We never wanted a cabin,” she said. “This kind of took the place of a cabin. It’s as serene as it can be, while being in the city. Coming home to this — it’s my haven, my little paradise.”

And even though they’re now retired, they have no intention of leaving. “I put all that work in.” Chuck said. “I’m not going to move south or downsize.”

Kim Palmer • 612-673-4784

At the Sacramento
River Discovery Center’s
two acre garden the recent
cooler weather has
spurred a flurry of activity.

The work in the garden
continues to be accomplished
by a group of fantastic
volunteers.

Spending some place
between one hour and ten
hours a week they have
changed the appearance
of the garden and have
started to do some
replanting.

Some of the new plants
have come from stock in
the garden, but working to
replace some plants lost
over the last few years the
Center has purchased
plants from California
Native Plant Society
members and Floral
Native Nursery.

New maps of the gardens
are being created to
help create different areas
for different types of landscape
needs.

The new version
will have a variety of
sections.

One will feature,
only local region, drought
tolerant natives, meaning
that once established, the
plants should survive the
summers using a miminal
amount of water.

Another section will
feature native plants and
grasses that will need
shade and water during
the summer months.

There will be section that
will feature plants that are
drought tolerant and deer
resistant, but may not be
native to this section of
Northern California.

The garden has produced
some wonderful
native grasses such as
feather grass, maidenhair
and deer grass, Volunteer
Executive Director Bobie
Hughes said.

We will
have a good quantity of
these to sell at the

Fall
Fest Plant Sale from 9:30
am to 1:30 pm on Nov. 3.
With climate change a
reality it is important that
we work of preserve as
many different native
species as possible.

The
plants original locale
might be changing so we
are going to see if we can
help plants survive in
warmer and/or cooler and
drier conditions. It will be
like a large science experiment.

The SRDC will be
investing the monies
earned from the Plant
Sale to expand the number
of species grown and
we test to see about their
ability to withstand our
cold winters and hot summers.

Bill Greer of Bill
Greer’s landscaping and
one of the original garden
workers, is helping the
SRDC plan and install a
new timed water system.

Alsco Irrigation will be
helping the SRDC with
some donations of the
much needed materials.

Starting with larger
diameter piping and modern
emitters and sprayers
the garden should be even
more beautiful and take a
lot less of the gardener’s
time, Greer said. I will
be happy to help people
learn how develop a timed
system as well as to do
repairs with existing system.

Greer has spent 25
years in the landscape
business, in this area.

I will be happy to
meet with anyone looking
do convert to low water
use landscaping, Greer
said.

You can see my
work in the front of the
Pauline Davis pavilion at
the Fairground.

The SRDC is always
looking for volunteers to
help with the many projects,
including planting
of wild flower seeds and
propagating plants for the
Watershed Plant Sale.

The Center is at 1000
Sale Lane in the Mendocino
National Forest’s
Red Bluff Recreation
Area.

The Center will be
open Tuesday thru Saturdays
from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
until Nov. 15. After that
date the Center hours will
be 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. To set
up group visits call 527-
1196 or e-mail Bobie
Hughes at
bhughe1@tehamaed.org or visit the website:
www.srdc.tehama.k12.ca.us.

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Follow the stone walkway to the secret garden just off of the master bedroom

The Smith’s dining room takes in the yard via a wall of plate glass windows.

The evening glow of the sunset lights Sid and Cissy Smiths’ home on a recent evening. The extra large lot is filled with lush landscaping and gorgeous trees.

The oversized pool is just right for the Smiths’ large lot.

A wonderful spot to sit, rock and enjoy the pool and yard views, especially at dusk.

The Smiths’ living area is bright and colorful with large windows to take in the gorgeous grounds.

A flagstone walkway leads the way around the back of the home to the secret garden and all beautiful points in between.

The spaciousness of the Smiths’ yard allows for large beds with mature trees among the hedges and flowering plants with plenty of room to enjoy the lawn.

CORPUS CHRISTI —
Step inside the gate and be surprised at the size of the Smiths’ lush garden. The pool with large decks surrounded by many blooming plants is the first thing one sees. Angel statues stand watch over the pool while banana trees lead to Fort Smith, the children’s playground on stilts at the back of the yard. Numerous seating areas provide a place for conversation, from the covered patio for outdoor dining, to the swings and gliders by the large rock fountain, to the built-in benches under the pool decks. The garden is lined with a large variety of plants, statues, outdoor lanterns and blooming pots. A sign on the fence points to a secret garden outside the master bedroom. Two guest houses face the pool and provide a beautiful respite for their children, grandchildren, and many guests. On cool evenings an outdoor fireplace is the perfect place to relax and listen to the soothing sounds of the fountain.

Their garden and four others will be open for tours from noon to 6 p.m. today.

Why do you love your home?: We love our home because of the beautiful neighborhood with all the trees. It is a bright, comfortable home with plenty of large windows looking out to the patio and pool. It is perfect for our relaxed, casual lifestyle with family and friends.

Why did you decide on this home: Back in 1973 my husband thought this was a place where he could spend the rest of his life and be very happy.

Best home project I’ve completed here and why: Living here for so long, there’s been so many projects, but opening the wall separating the kitchen and den, and putting in large plate glass windows in the dining room have been a couple of our favorites.

Something no one knows about my home: All the brick yard trim in the front came from the old Luby’s cafeteria on Alameda.

A home item I can’t live without: The outdoor shower….absolute heaven to take a shower in the morning under the banana trees and listen to the cooing of the doves.

My home’s best feature: the large back yard, patio, and decks.

A home I’d love to see inside: The White House at Christmas.

Three words that describe my home: Comfortable, inviting and fun.

A funny story about my home: During a Young Life gathering here, the kids were jumping around to “Brown Eyed Girl” and broke 10 floor joists in the living room.

Unannounced guests would find my home: Decorated for all the holidays, a candle burning and our dog, Chico, stretched out on the couch.

This item would never make it through the front door: Large, mounted UT longhorns.

I can’t believe I put this in my home: My husband’s six-foot-wide mounted UT longhorns.

Worst home advice I ever received: Don’t take up the carpet, the wood floor isn’t that nice.

Best home advice I ever received: Take up that carpet, and refinish this beautiful pecan flooring.

I will always have space in my home for: Holiday decorations, beach towels, pool toys, swimsuits, dogs, kids, books, and pictures of the family.

My home can never have too many… kids swimming in the pool.

Send home nominations to Eddie Seal at eddieseal@gmail.com or 688-0887.

By Roger Mercer

Dear Roger: I can’t afford to water my plants extensively in summer. So daylilies and hostas are out. Can you suggest plants that would work well in a low-maintenance, xeriscape garden in our area?- Pressey, Fayetteville.

Dear Pressey: Xeriscaping means landscaping with plants that require little watering, fertilizing, mulching or other care beyond what they get from nature.

Generally, native plants are considered first choices. But I would push for plants from anywhere on earth as long as they fit the low-care, low-water requirement and are exceptionally beautiful.

Saving water is an increasingly important issue in urban areas throughout the nation.

Here’s a list of plants that will grow reasonably well with very little attention and watering in our gardens:

Dogwoods are the finest of our native trees. They need good care to become established. Do not plant deeply or you’ll kill the tree. Plant shallow and mulch well.

Keep dogwoods watered well the first two years after planting, and you can expect to give them no more care thereafter, except to water if there is a severe drought in hot weather.

Magnolias are excellent in our region and are among the first trees to bloom in spring. I’m not talking about the summer-blooming, large-leaved evergreen magnolia that’s native here. The native magnolia has fairly high maintenance requirements because it constantly drops leaves. It can require very large amounts of water for three or four years to become established. And it takes so much water from nearby plants that they often grow poorly.

Instead, I’d grow the tulip or saucer magnolias, as they’re often called. These are more specifically calledMagnolia soulangeana(a hybrid from denudata),Magnolia nigra(the small tree with purplish flowers found in many older gardens),Magnolia denudata(tall tree, pure white flowers),Magnolia sprengeri(huge flowers like white or pink basketballs on bare branches),Magnolia salicifolia,Magnolia stellataandMagnolia kobus, to name a few.

Like azaleas, camellias and dogwoods, these Oriental magnolias must be watered weekly the first year after planting and must be given good soil and a mulch.

Azaleas, you’ll notice again, are not native. At least not the evergreen or semievergreen ones we usually grow. They’re from Asia. But they are among the loveliest of our shrubs.

Don’t bury the roots of azaleas. Put the plant on top of your prepared soil and pull up soil and leaves, mulch or compost around the root ball. Water well and frequently the first year, or two years if the plants you start with are small. After that, the plants will need water only in the hottest part of summer when there is no rain for more than 10 days.

Camellias, also from Asia, are choice plants for shady and partly shaded spots. One generally thinks of camellias as needing large amounts of water. But I’ve found that they are drought-tolerant in my garden, as long as they are not exposed to full sun. Plants in full sun will need much more water to survive and won’t always have good leaf color.

Native azaleas are seldom used in our landscapes, but many are more drought-tolerant, cold-resistant, colorful and showy when in bloom than the Asian types. We often fail to value what is beautiful that is closest to us. Azaleas bred from our native types are available in many colors of yellow and orange that cannot be found in the Asian azaleas.

One of my favorite, easy-to-grow natives is the box sandmyrtle, whose formal name isLeiophyllum buxifolium. Dr. Bruce Williams, a founder of the Cape Fear Botanical Garden, gave me a small rooted cutting of one many years ago. I planted it in a bed with some azaleas. Given the same care as the evergreen azaleas, it has developed into a 2-foot-tall by 2 1/2-foot-wide shrub of great beauty. I have given it no care except occasional watering.

Landscape architect Morgan Wheelock’s life work encompasses a range of styles and earthy canvasses.

Wheelock, former chairman of the Architectural Review Commission, has for decades designed gardens and landscapes for estates in Palm Beach, New England and across the country. He has called his firm’s redesign of the Philip Hulitar Sculpture Garden at The Society of the Four Arts “the best dance of my life.”

Farther out, he’s created a sculpture garden in London; crafted landscaping for a horse farm in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; and won accolades for, among other projects, The United States Armed Forces Memorial Garden in Caen, France.

In recognition of his work and his willingness to mentor budding landscape architects who have become award-winners themselves, Wheelock will be inducted into the New England Design Hall of Fame, in the landscape design category, on Nov. 8 at a ceremony in Boston.

“I didn’t believe it when they called me,” Wheelock said from his West Palm Beach office. “I was — wow — quite surprised but very excited and grateful.”

His philosophy about landscape design has evolved over the years, he said.

“I believe landscape architecture is a medium through which people can retain their biological connection to the land,” said the Harvard-educated landscape architect. Executed properly, a garden’s form and composition can produce moments that are spiritual and healing, he said.

The redesign of the 2.6-acre sculpture garden at The Society of the Four Arts, which was unveiled in 2007, is a prime example, he said. The southeast quadrant has a naturalistic feel, while the northwest quadrant is “architecturally controlled,” Wheelock said.

“One finds strong geometry on that side of the garden and romantic natural landscape on the other side,” he said.

Wheelock said the project that touched him most emotionally was the Armed Services Memorial Garden, which he designed in 1994. It was a truly international effort. Craftsmen in Carrara, Italy, used a saw designed in Germany for the project, to cut and shape 3,000 pieces of granite from Finland, Wheelock said.

“It called upon me to interpret the battle of Normandy and the impact on American soldiers and their families, the sacrifice the whole country made in the liberation of France” during World War II, Wheelock said.

His favorite project, however, is A Woman’s Garden at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden. The second part of the phased project opened in 2002. In typical Dallas fashion, Wheelock said, it opened in a grand way — with 1,000 attendees, an orchestra and roses everywhere. Landscape architects vying for the commission were asked to create individual gardens within the space that represent 12 feminine qualities.

“I came up with 26 of them. Some of them were not welcome,” Wheelock said with a laugh.

Palm Beachers Gay and Stanley Gaines hired Wheelock when they wanted to update the gardens at 1473 N. Ocean Blvd.

The couple sold that home in July and moved to another island home in September.

“He is an old-fashioned gentleman from head to toe and I think he has a great design sense,” Gay Gaines said. “He’s well trained.”

Wheelock’s stock and trade is residential landscape design. Gaines wanted a garden with the indoor/outdoor ambience of a Caribbean estate. Part of the job was finding shiny white roof tile for the buildings on the property, she said.

“We used lots of bougainvillea climbing up the walls, lots of yellow hibiscus and white oleander. He wasn’t crazy about [oleander] but I wanted it,” Gaines said. Wheelock employed bamboo and large specimen trees to create the jungle effect Gaines desired. That treatment was balanced by the “sunny openness” of unobstructed views on the ocean side, Gaines said.

“I didn’t do everything Morgan wanted me to do because I wanted certain color incorporated, but we worked well together because I am enormously respectful of his vision. He was equally respectful when I wanted to change something,” Gaines said. “The final product was a great collaboration between the two of us. I think the world of him. If I ever had another project, I’d think of Morgan.”

Growing a business may seem like a natural metaphor for a landscaping company, but doing so in a difficult economy and keeping the services provided at a high level to meet expectations are a couple of the growth elements that occasionally keep Chris Niccum, president and owner of Sonoran Gardens Inc., up at night.

However, insomnia notwithstanding, Sonoran Gardens is flourishing at a time when competing businesses have shut their doors. Niccum says the core business focus of Sonoran Gardens has been designing outdoor living spaces for residential customers since the company’s inception in 1996, and the company’s expansion into a Custom Care division a few years ago has given it a boost that has fueled a part of its growth.

Sonoran Gardens also has just completed the purchase of the Contained Gardener, a company specializing in potted plants for residential and commercial customers, that Niccum said fits neatly into the Custom Care division mold of providing landscape maintenance and service, pool care and handyman services.

“Our core business is still the design and building of outdoor living spaces,” Niccum said, “which is how we survive as a company. But balancing that with our Custom Care business means we have become much less construction dependent.”

Niccum said Sonoran Gardens was “pretty much a residential construction landscape company in 2008,” but that after revenues dropped 50 percent in 2009, “we knew we had to do something different to survive that downturn.”

And survive it did, becoming a bigger company today in terms of people and revenue than it was in 2008, Niccum said.

“We have 16 employees now, including the four family members who make up the management team of Sonoran Gardens,” Niccum said. “That’s the big change in the last few years — I’m the CEO now with a strong focus on financial management and working on new opportunities.”

Niccum’s wife Jean serves as bookkeeper and office manager. Their son Matt manages the construction side of the business and builds all of the outdoor living spaces, and their daughter, Kira Niccum-Pritzl, is the operations manager, scheduling all jobs, ordering materials and assisting the Custom Care manager, Roberta Braegelmann.

Niccum, who holds a bachelor’s degree in ornamental horticulture from Purdue University, said his goal is to double the size of Sonoran Gardens in terms of revenue over the next five years, hoping to take the business over the $3 million mark annually.

“Our landscape construction business continues to grow and a lot of that is due to the marketing we do and the close relationships we’ve developed with designers,” Niccum said. “We have two designers who work for us as contract employees, but still maintain their own design firms.”

Niccum says Sonoran Gardens won’t do a landscape construction job without first having a design developed, calling it the “first step in the job, where the designer meets with the client and gets the project going.”

He believes one of the biggest innovations in the landscape construction business is that most of the marketing is done on the Internet. For instance, when he gets an initial phone call from a client, Niccum first calls up a Google Street View of the residence and takes a bird’s eye look at the house to get a first impression of the scope of the job.

“Using technology is the wave of the future in every business,” he said. “From the design side, there is a lot of software being developed that allows you to sit in front of a client with a laptop and show them in 3-D what their project will look like when its done.”

Technology comes into play on the service side of the business too. The Sonoran Gardens service technicians have iPads with estimating software loaded into them, Niccum noted, “which means he has an office in his pocket where he can access the internet and maybe have a look at an owner’s manual if necessary.”

He sees one of the biggest challenges to all residential construction companies as the difficulty clients are having in obtaining money.

“The decline in the housing market has been a big hit for everyone,” Niccum observed. “It’s difficult for people to get home equity loans for construction projects because many don’t have much equity left in their houses. But the market is starting to change and we’re seeing some banks loosening up on their lending standards, which has been reflected in more residential custom home work for us.”

He also believes that one of the chief reasons Sonoran Gardens recovered so quickly from the recession is due to marketing.

“We fully understand the value of marketing and spend money to do it well, and right,” he said. “We’re constantly updating and changing our marketing tactics, and even with the economic downturn when we cut costs, we never cut back on our marketing budget. We want to be out there always trying and doing new things ourselves.”

By

Cranford Chronicle

Cranford Chronicle

on October 18, 2012 at 3:55 PM, updated October 18, 2012 at 4:00 PM

Brought to you by

Cranford Chronicle

Natural wildlife garden
Cranford Chronicle

The Union County Board of Chosen Freeholders and the Department of Parks and Community Renewal offer adults, 18 and older, more landscaping classes this fall at Trailside Nature Science Center in Mountainside.

The Trailside Museum Association is sponsoring these classes from 11 a.m. to noon, on Saturdays, Oct. 27 (Deer Resistant Plants); and Nov. 3 (Creating a Natural Wildlife Garden). Pre-registration is preferred, but walk-ins are welcomed as space permits. There is no fee for these classes but donations are appreciated.

“These programs will provide residents with knowledge and skills to grow and maintain beautiful gardens,” said Freeholder Chairman Alexander Mirabella. “The Board of Chosen Freeholders appreciates the Trailside Museum Association’s sponsorship of landscaping classes, as well as their ongoing support and commitment to Trailside.”

Bryan Lowe, consultant for HortSeminarsNJ, and a certified rain garden installer, will present these landscaping lectures. On Saturday, Oct. 27, the topic of discussion is deer-resistant plants. Learn what plants are not attractive to deer, and what techniques work to deter deer.

On Saturday, Nov. 3, the class will examine the proper design for creating a backyard corner for attracting birds, as well as a landscape dedicated to providing food and shelter for our animal friends. The class will offer a chance to explore Trailside’s wildlife habitat.

The Trailside Museum Association, sponsor of these landscaping programs, is dedicated to assisting Trailside staff in their efforts to educate people in all aspects of nature, science and conservation by assisting with funding, volunteering and advocacy.

For information about the landscaping classes or about any other programs or upcoming events, call Trailside at 908-789-3670 or visit ucnj.org/trailside.

Trailside Nature Science Center is located at 452 New Providence Road in Mountainside and is a service of the Union County Board of Chosen Freeholders.

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