Click photo to enlarge

Marin

• West Marin Commons offers a weekly harvest exchange at 1:30 p.m. Saturdays at the Livery Stable gardens on the commons in Point Reyes Station. Go to www.westmarin commons.org.

• Kurt Timmermeister discusses “Growing a Feast” at 3 p.m. Feb. 2 at Diesel at 2419 Larkspur Landing Circle in Larkspur. Free. Call 785-8177 or go to www.dieselbookstore.com.

• The Novato Independent Elders Program seeks volunteers to help Novato seniors with their overgrown yards on Tuesday mornings or Thursday afternoons. Call 899-8296.

• Volunteers are sought to help in Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy nurseries from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays at Tennessee Valley, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesdays at Muir Woods or 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays or 9 a.m. to noon Saturdays in the Marin Headlands. Call 561-3077 or go to www.parksconservancy.org/get-involved/volunteer/.

• The SPAWN (Salmon Protection and Watershed Network) native plant nursery days are from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Fridays and weekends. Call 663-8590, ext. 114, or email jonathan@tirn.net to register and for directions.

• A Marin Rose Society class on “The Ins and Outs of Rose Pruning” is at 10 a.m. Feb. 8 at Sloat Garden Center at 401 Miller Ave. in Mill Valley. $5. Call 388-0365.

• Marin Master Gardeners and the Marin Municipal Water District offer free residential Bay-Friendly Garden Walks to MMWD customers. The year-round service helps home-owners identify water-saving opportunities and soil conservation techniques for their landscaping. Call 473-4204 to request a visit to your garden.

• Marin Open Garden Project (MOGP) volunteers are available to help Marin residents glean excess fruit from their trees for donations to local organizations serving people in need and to build raised beds to start vegetable gardens through the MicroGardens program. MGOP also offers a garden tool lending library. Go to www.opengardenproject.org or email contact@opengardenproject.org.

• The Marin Organic Glean Team seeks volunteers to harvest extras from the fields at various farms for the organic school lunch and gleaning program. Call 663-9667 or go to www.marinorganic.org.

San Francisco

• The Conservatory of Flowers, at 100 John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park, displays permanent galleries of tropical plant species as well as changing special exhibits from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. $2 to $7; free on first Tuesdays. Call 831-2090 or go to www.conservatoryofflowers.org.

• The San Francisco Botanical Garden Society, at Ninth Avenue and Lincoln Way in Golden Gate Park, offers several ongoing events. $7; free to San Francisco residents, members and school groups. Call 661-1316 or go to www.sf botanicalgarden.org. Free docent tours leave from the Strybing Bookstore near the main gate at 1:30 p.m. weekdays, 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. weekends; and from the north entrance at 2 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Groups of 10 or more can call ahead for special-focus tours.

Around the Bay

• Cornerstone Gardens is a permanent, gallery-style garden featuring walk-through installations by international landscape designers on nine acres at 23570 Highway 121 in Sonoma. Free. Call 707-933-3010 or go to www.cornerstonegardens.com.

• Garden Valley Ranch rose garden at 498 Pepper Road in Petaluma is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Self-guided and group tours are available. $2 to $10. Call 707-795-0919 or go to www.gardenvalley.com.

• Don Landis teaches “How to De-Bitter Olives” from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Feb. 2 at Jacuzzi Family Vineyards at 24724 Arnold Drive in Sonoma. Free. Reservations required. Call 707-931-7575.

• The Luther Burbank Home at Santa Rosa and Sonoma avenues in Santa Rosa has docent-led tours of the greenhouse and a portion of the gardens every half hour from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. $7. Call 707-524-5445.

• McEvoy Ranch at 5935 Red Hill Road in Petaluma offers tips on planting olive trees and has olive trees for sale by appointment. Call 707-769-4123 or go to www.mcevoy ranch.com.

• Wednesdays are volunteer days from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Occidental Arts and Ecology Center at 15290 Coleman Valley Road in Occidental. Call 707-874-1557, ext. 201, or go to www.oaec.org.

• Quarryhill Botanical Garden at 12841 Sonoma Highway in Glen Ellen covers 61 acres and showcases a large selection of scientifically documented wild source temperate Asian plants. The garden is open for self-guided tours from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. $5 to $10. Call 707-996-3166 or go to www.quarryhillbg.org.

The Trowel Glove Calendar appears Saturdays. Send high-resolution jpg photo attachments and details about your event to calendar@marinij.com or mail to Home and Garden Calendar/Lifestyles, Marin Independent Journal, 4000 Civic Center Drive, Suite 301, San Rafael, CA 94903. Items should be sent two weeks in advance. Photos should be a minimum of 1 megabyte and include caption information. Include a daytime phone number on your release.

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David Hughes, a Doylestown, Pa., landscape architect with an affinity for native flora and natural landscapes, often finds himself ripping out dead, overgrown or otherwise undesirable plants to make way for new.

But he doesn’t haul that nasty Japanese honeysuckle, Chinese white mulberry or Norway maple to the dump, curb or chipper. Hughes is that rare soul who prizes what other designers and gardeners despise, more so if it’s scarred by deer browsing, insect damage or disease.

That’s because, in addition to designing ecologically responsible landscapes in the Philadelphia region, Hughes, 46, is a skilled woodworker who makes rustic furniture from garden “debris,” a kind of plant-world Dumpster diver.

“To me, it’s a nice marriage, landscaping and woodworking,” says Hughes, whose 5-year-old business, his second, is called Weatherwood Design. It comprises about 70percent landscaping and 30percent woodworking.

Storm-felled trees and gnarly vines make good raw materials. So do pruned branches, old barn boards and stuff plucked, with permission, from the side of the road.

An arborist friend scouts out intriguing branches and discarded trunks. Hughes helps the Natural Lands Trust and local preserves thin out invasives or dead trees. And every July Fourth, again with permission, he rescues unwanted driftwood from death by bonfire at a public beach on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The wood might sit for years on the one-acre property Hughes shares with his widowed dad, Merritt Hughes, a retired English teacher. Logs, planks, oddball sticks and scraps are stacked along the driveway, in the yard and in and around Hughes’ densely packed, unheated 8-by-12-foot workshop.

“It’s hard to throw anything out,” he says a bit sheepishly of the jars of nails, screws and bolts, the bits of this or that and the saws, planes and other tools of his trade.

Drying wood outside is challenging. But if rain and snow are his nemeses, water is also a friend. “My best ideas come in the shower,” he says.

Those ideas — for chairs, tables and benches, garden gates and screens, trellises, arbors, railings and birdhouses — are time-consuming. A simple-looking chair can take 35 hours to make, at $45 an hour, not counting time to find and dry the wood and do research.

“It’s like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle. There are no square edges to anything,” says Hughes, who is itching for some land of his own so he can grow hedgerows of the native trees — alder, sassafras, Eastern red cedar, black locust, Osage orange — he likes to work with.

He also wants to live off the grid and build native plant, meadow and woodland demonstration gardens. Four acres, at a minimum, would do it, though so much real estate would involve a lot of deer-fencing.

But fenced it must be; deer are plentiful and Hughes has had Lyme disease 14 times since the early 1990s.

That he has worked through such a scourge reflects a lifetime of loving plants.

Growing up in Glenside, Pa., Hughes was “always out playing and getting muddy and dirty,” often in Baederwood Park. Foreshadowing the landscape architect he would become, he spent hours in the attic constructing vehicles and buildings with Legos and Lincoln Logs.

As an 8-year-old, guided by his handy grandfather, Sylvester “Cookie” Cook, Hughes built metal cladding to reinforce a toy castle and carved sticks to support a leather-covered tepee.

“I loved the outdoors,” he says, including time spent at his family’s vacation home outside Wellsboro, Pa.

Hughes is a graduate of Abington High School and Pennsylvania State University, where he knew almost instantly “I was doing the right thing” in studying landscape architecture. He also did graduate work at the University of Massachusetts.

His resume includes jobs at plant nurseries, landscape architectural and planning firms and the U.S. Forest Service. He has restored wetlands and woodlands and worked on suburban subdivision landscapes, meadows and residential projects, including a highly idiosyncratic Bucks County, Pa., second home belonging to New Yorkers Todd Ruback and Suzanne Schecter.

The couple’s 2½-acre property, overlooking the Delaware Canal in Upper Black Eddy, Pa., features a converted century-old barn that backs up to a gravelly 200-foot red shale cliff that was choked with exotic vines. Hughes cleared the cliff and literally carved a landscape into it, choosing wildlife-friendly plants such as Eastern prickly pear cactus, the region’s only native cactus, that grows almost exclusively along the high cliffs of the Delaware River.

“He’s not bringing in eucalyptus trees,” Ruback says. “He’s making use of what local, Bucks County nature is giving us.”

And much of what Hughes takes away from “Bucks County nature” goes toward his rustic furniture. The results, says a mentor, Daniel Mack of Warwick, N.Y., are both sturdy and playful and demonstrate “a poetic sensibility.”

“Nobody actually needs any of these chairs. There are plenty of chairs in the world already, thank you,” says Mack, a rustic-furniture teacher and author. “You’ve gone beyond need and you’re into another realm.”

It’s a realm, Mack says, that “engages us with the landscape in a way you don’t see with more-anonymous furniture.”

Fri, 31 Jan 2014, 06:59:03 EST
Edited by Christopher Simmons

MONUMENT, Colo., Jan. 31, 2014 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Classic Gardens Inc., in Monument, Colorado, has recently been credited for taking the missions that many other landscapers simply cannot accept. As a landscape specialist in Colorado, the company has been asked to take care of and – in some cases – fix some pretty ‘impossible’ situations for some of the largest and most intricate landscaping scenarios in Colorado – one of America’s most outdoor and scenic-oriented states.

MONUMENT, Colo., Jan. 31, 2014 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Classic Gardens Inc., in Monument, Colorado, has recently been credited for taking the missions that many other landscapers simply cannot accept. As a landscape specialist in Colorado, the company has been asked to take care of and – in some cases – fix some pretty “impossible” situations for some of the largest and most intricate landscaping scenarios in Colorado – one of America’s most outdoor and scenic-oriented states. The company also has been known for their efforts to “take the time” to give their clientele exactly what they are looking for, by locating the necessary materials.

Recently, the company has been given the nickname “Landscape Impossible” as a result of some of these highly difficult projects. One job involved the removal of a fully grown 30-foot-tall Blue Spruce with a 90-inch tree spade, as well as the company’s ability to properly rig and lift up to 20,000 pound boulders, up to 10 feet in diameter. The company also has been utilized for the construction of several high profile features for clients such as the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, the Olympic Training Center, and several very large residences throughout Colorado whose amazing dynamic vistas appear as if “Mother Nature put them there.”

“The thought was to create a unique gardening and landscaping company that not only can give you the serenity of a classic English garden in a Rocky Mountain environment, but to create an environmentally concerned landscape company, that will take into consideration the existing vegetation, structure, wildlife, and water requirements,” stated Glenn Cope, President of Classic Gardens Inc. “In the state of Colorado, this sometimes requires finding a way to do the impossible – and make it seem easy.”

Classic Gardens is a full service commercial and residential Colorado landscape company serving the Rocky Mountain region since 1985. From concept to completion, all phases of design and construction are handled in-house. Their staff of highly trained employees pays strict attention to detail and quality, enabling them to becoming one of Colorado’s premier landscape companies.

If you would like to learn more about Classic Gardens Inc., or have any questions about your specialized project, please visit http://www.classicgardensinc.com/ or call toll free at 866-597-4341.

To contact Classic Gardens Inc. directly, email sales@classicgardensinc.com.

NEWS SOURCE: Classic Gardens Inc.

Send2Press® is the originating wire service for this story “Classic Gardens brings out the ‘Landscape Impossible’ in Colorado” and content is Copr. © 2014 Classic Gardens Inc. with newswire copy Copr. © 2014 Send2Press (a service of Neotrope). All trademarks acknowledged.

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Karin Leonard describes herself as a “guerrilla gardener,” a plant plopper whose goal in her personal outdoor space has always been simple and straightforward: To create something beautiful.

And she has succeeded, even if it has meant taking a few risks, like the Japanese maple she planted. “I knew it was a little iffy, but in a protected place, when the sunlight shines on it, it’s a peak experience,” enthuses the long-time gardener.

“I’ve always loved nature and found solace in nature. I feel so at home in nature,” says Leonard, who is self-employed. She was born in Austria, which she believes gives her a natural affinity for woodland plants. She also advocates organic gardening, and the use of native plants, which she describes as an outgrowth of being a single parent of a special-needs child. “I wanted organic everything, and it was a conscious choice not to use chemicals.”

Over the years, the landscape surrounding her home has provided an opportunity to design beds and borders that are both pretty and practical.

“Little by little over the last 10 to 15 years I’ve planted and added areas and the garden has evolved.

Leonard deliberately set out to make her garden a soothing place. “I feel so at home in the garden, and it’s such a peaceful retreat.”

Several years ago, Matthias Landscaping installed new hardscape that “looks like it has always been here.”

There are no real straight lines in the garden, which creates a better sense of flow, and there are both physical and visual transitions to keep the garden interesting. Tabletop gardens and garden art are finishing touches.

The front porch boasts a pleasant seating area that seems to invite lingering and offers a sense of seclusion.

Plants provide texture and repetition of favorite plants provide continuity. Bloodroot, with its yellow-centered white flowers, is among the first plants to bloom in spring, along with bluebells and maidenhair ferns.

Leonard is also a fan of celandine, a plant in the poppy family, and other favorites include hostas, Asiatic lilies, clematis, Chinese lanterns, cleome, ornamental grasses, Queen Anne’s lace, coleus and succulents. Some plants, such as bloodroot and Chinese lanterns, can be invasive but she keeps them in check. “If they pop up where I don’t want them, I rip them out.”

She especially enjoys the “Intensia” phlox series, and all of her plant choices are easy to care for and look attractive for weeks on end.

“That’s important because I don’t have the time or energy to always be tending it,” she confesses, smiling. “I’m an early riser, and I love being able to walk in my garden and snip flowers to bring in or to pull a few weeds. I walk around with a cup of coffee and see what needs attention.”

EL MONTE The city is making lemonade out of lemons, or, perhaps more accurately, lemon trees out of air pollution.

Lambert Park is getting a much-needed facelift thanks in part to a $1.1 million fine paid by the now-defunct iron foundry Gregg Industries to the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

New landscaping, picnic shelters, restrooms and a splash pad are potentially on the horizon for the aging park. A small woodland garden and watershed garden are already being built on the park’s corners.

The project is being funded by the Gregg Industries fine as well as $972,000 in state funds obtained by the San Gabriel Valley Conservation Corps for watershed rehabilitation projects.

Gregg Industries was cited by the AQMD more than a dozen times last decade for alleged air pollution violations. The foundry closed in 2009, officially because of the recession, though some blamed the AQMD fines. In the end, as part of its settlement with AQMD, the company paid the agency $1.1 million. Because the alleged pollution emitted by the foundry was in El Monte, city officials told AQMD those funds belong in the city.

“We lost 450 jobs, but we got $1 million,” Mayor Andre Quintero said Tuesday as the city council voted to officially receive the funds.

Resident Cosme Jimenez encouraged the council to get community input on the park’s design.

“We haven’t put an improvement in there in 50 years. If you are going to do it, do it right,” he said.

The first phase of the project is already underway — the construction of woodland and watershed gardens, as well as landscaping improvements on the perimeter of the park by the conservation corps. El Monte is using some of the Gregg funds to make urgent repairs to the park, including removing a dead tree, repairing sidewalks and building a picnic shelter.

The city will then actually design the park’s larger renovations, explained parks and recreation director Alexandra Lopez.

Those renovations could include new restrooms, a splash pad, new regulation-size soccer fields, a small office and other amenities depending on funding, Lopez said.

All of the projects could cost an estimated $7 million and will be built in additional phases, Lopez said. The city must decide which to prioritize first to be funded with the remaining Gregg funds.

Officials will then look for grants for the other improvements.

Bradley C. Bower/Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT

Landscape architect David Hughes is also a skilled woodworker who salvages garden “debris” to make rustic furniture.

Flagstone terrace is featured that David Hughes, of Doylestown, Pa., carved out of the face of a cliff for clients in Upper Black Eddy. (Courtesy David Hughes via Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT)

David Hughes created this 4-foot-tall garden gate using native Eastern red cedar and Moravian tiles. (Courtesy David Hughes via Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT)

PHILADELPHIA — David Hughes, a Doylestown, Pa., landscape architect with an affinity for native flora and natural landscapes, often finds himself ripping out dead, overgrown or otherwise-undesirable plants to make way for new.

But he doesn’t haul that nasty Japanese honeysuckle, Chinese white mulberry, or Norway maple to the dump, curb or chipper. Hughes is that rare soul who prizes what other designers and gardeners despise, more so if it’s scarred by deer browsing, insect damage, or disease.

That’s because, in addition to designing ecologically responsible landscapes in the Philadelphia region, Hughes, 46, is a skilled woodworker who makes rustic furniture from garden “debris,” a kind of plant-world Dumpster diver.

“To me, it’s a nice marriage, landscaping and woodworking,” says Hughes, whose five-year-old business, his second, is called Weatherwood Design. It comprises about 70 percent landscaping and 30 percent woodworking.

Storm-felled trees and gnarly vines make good raw materials. So do pruned branches, old barn boards, and stuff plucked, with permission, from the side of the road.

An arborist friend scouts out intriguing branches and discarded trunks. Hughes helps the Natural Lands Trust and local preserves thin out invasives or dead trees. And every July 4, again with permission, he rescues unwanted driftwood from death by bonfire at a public beach on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The wood might sit for years on the 1-acre property Hughes shares with his widowed dad, Merritt Hughes, a retired English teacher. Logs, planks, oddball sticks and scraps are stacked along the driveway, in the yard, and in and around Hughes’ densely packed, unheated 8-by-12-foot workshop.

“It’s hard to throw anything out,” he says a bit sheepishly of the jars of nails, screws and bolts, the bits of this or that, and the saws, planes and other tools of his trade.

Drying wood outside is challenging. But if rain and snow are his nemeses, water is also a friend. “My best ideas come in the shower,” he says.

Those ideas — for chairs, tables and benches, garden gates and screens, trellises, arbors, railings and birdhouses — are time-consuming. A simple-looking chair can take 35 hours to make, at $45 an hour, not counting time to find and dry the wood and do research.

“It’s like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle. There are no square edges to anything,” says Hughes, who is itching for some land of his own so he can grow hedgerows of the native trees he likes to work with — alder, sassafras, Eastern red cedar, black locust, Osage orange.

He also wants to live off the grid and build native plant, meadow and woodland demonstration gardens. Four acres, at a minimum, would do it, though so much real estate would involve a lot of deer-fencing.

But fenced it must be; deer are plentiful, and Hughes has had Lyme disease 14 times since the early 1990s.

That he has worked through such a scourge reflects a lifetime of loving plants.

Growing up in Glenside, Pa., Hughes was “always out playing and getting muddy and dirty,” often in Baederwood Park. Foreshadowing the landscape architect he would become, he spent hours in the attic constructing vehicles and buildings with Legos and Lincoln Logs.

As an 8-year-old, guided by his handy grandfather, Sylvester “Cookie” Cook, Hughes built metal cladding to reinforce a toy castle, and carved sticks to support a leather-covered tepee.

Hughes is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University, where he knew almost instantly “I was doing the right thing” in studying landscape architecture. He also did graduate work at the University of Massachusetts.

His résumé includes jobs at plant nurseries, landscape architectural and planning firms, and the U.S. Forest Service. He has restored wetlands and woodlands and worked on suburban subdivision landscapes, meadows and residential projects, including a highly idiosyncratic Bucks County, Pa., second home belonging to New Yorkers Todd Ruback and Suzanne Schecter.

The couple’s 2½-acre property, overlooking the Delaware Canal in Upper Black Eddy, Pa., features a converted century-old barn that backs up to a gravelly 200-foot red shale cliff that was choked with exotic vines. Hughes cleared the cliff and literally carved a landscape into it, choosing wildlife-friendly plants such as Eastern prickly pear cactus, the region’s only native cactus, which grows almost exclusively along the high cliffs of the Delaware River.

“He’s not bringing in eucalyptus trees,” Ruback says. “He’s making use of what local Bucks County nature is giving us.”

And much of what Hughes takes away from Bucks County nature goes toward his rustic furniture. The results, says a mentor, Daniel Mack of Warwick, N.Y., are both sturdy and playful, and demonstrate “a poetic sensibility.”

“Nobody actually needs any of these chairs. There are plenty of chairs in the world already, thank you,” says Mack, a teacher and author. “You’ve gone beyond need, and you’re into another realm.”

It’s a realm, Mack says, that “engages us with the landscape in a way you don’t see with more anonymous furniture.”

LOS ANGELES — California American Water in partnership with the Surfrider Foundation and G3 Green Gardens Group will offer a series of free Watershed Friendly Garden Classes designed for residential customers.

California American Water encourages residents and customers to attend the classes to learn about water tolerant landscaping, the urban watershed in which they live and how to create beautiful, sustainable gardens and strategies for reducing potable water consumption.

“The Watershed Friendly Gardening Classes will focus on landscape design, plant selection, irrigation systems and maintenance techniques for developing and maintaining aesthetically pleasing and water-efficient landscapes,” said California American Water’s Conservation Manager Kimberly Smith. “These classes have proven to be an important and successful tool for reducing outdoor water use by educating both professional landscapers and home gardeners.”

All classes are offered on Saturdays and will be held at the Encanto Park located at 751 Encanto Parkway, Duarte, Calif. Classes will be offered from 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. on the following dates:

 

When:

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Class Topic:

Site Evaluation Workshop – In this hands-on workshop, customers will
learn how to take the first steps in turning their yard into a
Watershed Friendly Garden – evaluate their current landscape’s
strengths and weaknesses and develop a plan to reduce water use,
keep more rainwater on their property, and improve the soil.

 

When:

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Class Topic:

Sheet Mulching Grading for Rainwater Capture Workshop – Customers
will learn how to remove their water thirsty lawn without the use of
toxic chemicals and discover how to transform their lawn into rich,
healthy soil – the foundation for a beautiful Watershed Friendly
Garden – using a technique called “sheet mulching.”

 

When:

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Class Topic:

Planting Irrigation Workshop – In the third and final workshop
customers will learn firsthand how to reduce their landscape water
by designing and installing a drip irrigation system on their own.

 

California American Water customers, residents of Duarte and surrounding communities may register online for the free classes at www.watershedwisetraining.com/events or by calling the company’s conservation department at 626-614-2536.

California American Water, a subsidiary of American Water (NYSE: AWK), provides high quality and reliable water and/or wastewater service to approximately 600,000 people. California American Water’s Los Angeles County service district includes approximately 28,000 households and businesses and serves a population of about 100,000 people in the cities of Bradbury, Duarte, El Monte, Irwindale, Monrovia, Rosemead, San Gabriel, San Marino and Temple City, as well as unincorporated portions of Los Angeles County and the Baldwin Hills area.

Founded in 1886, American Water is the largest publicly traded U.S. water and wastewater utility company. With headquarters in Voorhees, N.J., the company employs approximately 6,700 dedicated professionals who provide drinking water, wastewater and other related services to an estimated 14 million people in more than 30 states, as well as parts of Canada. More information can be found by visiting www.californiaamwater.com.

This week I will continue with my review of gardening books that I use most often with my landscape design clients. Last time, I focused on those that reference sustainable and native gardens, and edible gardens and this week will address other well-adapted plantings, many of them focusing on botanicals that have thrived in Texas gardens for hundreds of years.

Herbs might be grouped together with edibles, though they are often planted in gardens designed for them alone. I have perhaps a dozen books focusing on herbs and herb garden design, but if I were to have the choice of only one, it would be “Southern Herb Growing” by Madalene Hill and Gwen Barclay. This book was written by and for gardeners who live very close to us in Central Texas; both authors lived in Round Top when this book was published. It focuses on herbs that will thrive in our long, hot and humid summers and gives detailed information on growing them. It is organized into three parts: A herbal primer on why to grow, designing a garden, growing in containers and propagation; a growing guide for more than 130 featured herbs; and a section on cooking with herbs, both culinary (for cooking) herbs and ornamental herbs are discussed in this book.

Another favorite guidebook for clients is “Heirloom Gardening in the South: Yesterday’s Plants for Today’s Gardens.” I was a Texas Rose Rustler with author Dr. Bill Welch (and associate Greg Grant), beginning in 1981, and have learned much from my intermittent association with him. This book begins with an exploration of our gardening heritage, discussing influence of Native Americans, the Spanish, French, Africans (through African-Americans), English, German, Italian and Asians. Understanding these various influences helps to develop a garden that is in harmony with both the surrounding landscape and also the style of the house (and the owner). He discusses natives and (those dreaded) invasives, how heirloom plants were shared and spread through the South and then gives ideas using basic design principles for designing your own garden.

The following chapter lists plants including trees, shrubs (including old roses), vines, grasses, perennials and bulbs that have survived for hundreds of years in Texas gardens and other areas below the Mason-Dixon Line. A final chapter gives us a view of both authors’ home gardens and how they grew. I actually have two copies of this book, so I can share with more than one design client at a time!

Following in that same vein, I offer “Antique Roses for the South” as an in-depth introduction to the Old Garden Roses. Also by Dr. Welch, this book details an historical perspective of Old Roses and gives information on some of the rose “rustling” endeavors that contributed to our knowledge of, and spreading interest in, their culture and cultivation. He discusses landscaping with Old Roses, arranging them into bouquets, rose crafts and the propagation of roses for sharing with garden friends. The final 100 pages are dedicated to describing care and culture for over 100 roses suitable for gardens in our climate. There is a photo of the front of my old house and cottage garden in Austin on p. 33, showing how I trained the very vigorous climber ‘Mermaid’ into a large pecan tree there.

Another wonderful book from another Texas Rose Rustler is “Landscaping with Antique Roses” by Michael Shoup and Liz Druitt. His book is organized into chapters on designing the garden, integrating roses into the landscape, rustling/propagating/purchasing and planting/protecting/pruning. Following is an encyclopedia of selected Old Garden Roses, most, if not all of them, offered by his Brenham (actually Independence) Texas Antique Rose Emporium Nursery. One little known fact: I was actually a sales representative for the nursery in the mid-1980s, working with nurserymen in the Austin and San Antonio area to get the plants into local retail nurseries. Later, he built his own Independence and then San Antonio facilities and my job ended. At the time, I was importing roses and planting them in my large garden at 48th Street and Evans Avenue in Austin. Many cuttings from plants in that garden later became part of his offerings at the nursery.

The last book most often shared is another Bill Welch classic, “Perennial Garden Color: Perennials, Cottage Gardens, Old Roses, and Companion Plants.” This book was published long ago in 1989 and helped promote wider interest in gardening with old-fashioned plants. He offers information on the roots of our gardens, perennials for easy garden color, arranging those plants in the garden and also buying, planting and caring for them. A later section of the book talks about inter-planting these perennials with Old Garden Roses.

Although native plants will be the most easy-care and sustainable flora in the garden (and also offer the most to our friends the butterflies, birds and other fauna), I always try to find a place for a number of other well-adapted plants in my designs for Central (and SE) Texas Gardens. I hope some of these books will help you to choose suitable plantings for your gardens, as well.

Please address any questions or suggestions you might have for me by visiting my website www.thefragrantgarden.com and clicking on the “CONTACT” tab.”

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On Dec. 31 Chicago Botanic Garden reached a milestone for a single year’s attendance: one million visitors. The final tally for 2013 was 1,003,000. In 2012, the garden had about 954,000 visitors, officials said, but last summer’s warm, mild weather and some very warm days in December helped push attendance higher.

The 385-acre site features 26 display gardens. The 2013 budget was $28.8 million.

Sophia Siskel, president and CEO since 2006, said, “We’ve really seen a momentum building here the last five years. I didn’t anticipate that we’d reach a million people, but it was certainly something we aspired to.”

Siskel credits an initiative starting about 10 years earlier as “Barbara Carr, my predecessor, invested in a public relations and advertising campaign,from 2004 through 2006 with banners and placards on buses in Chicago and on billboards.

“That was the first step in building a region-wide and often national and international awareness,” said Siskel. “The second thing was the garden’s emphasis on the customer and providing an exceptional experience at a good value. You can come with as many people as you want in one car and pay ($25) for parking or come on foot or on bike and it’s free.”

In 2010 the garden’s board of directors unveiled a 10-year plan to expand their reach by adding events, including free and more frequent summer concerts, gardening classes and wellness programs like tai chi and yoga. The purpose was to spread events throughout the year instead of shooting for high attendance at a few large-scale events.

Garden public relations director Gloria Ciaccio said a volunteer corps of 1,325 remains the backbone of the garden’s sustained excellence. “We have volunteers who’ve been with us for 40, 37, 28 and 25 years,” she said. “We could not operate the garden without them.”

Betsy Sharp’s interest in planting prairie grasses led her to become a master gardener through the garden, a position she’s held for 30 years. Her work in the seed bank – cleaning, categorizing and storing plant seeds in deep freeze storage – is tedious but rewarding.

“We’re cleaning these seeds for storage against global warming and for the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” she said. “As a volunteer, working in the lab and the greenhouses, you learn a lot, sort of like learning about cooking by working in a restaurant kitchen.”

Bob Sharp, 91, is a greeter at the garden. “He’s out front, talking to people from all over the world and he invariably says how much it means to so many,” said Betsy Sharp.

On a recent snowy, frigid weekday, friends and garden members Kathleen Soriano of Park Ridge and Louisa Dianova of Skokie examined greenhouse plants at the RegensteinCenter.