If you’re lucky enough to travel anywhere in the world, there’s no excuse not to try and visit the local botanical garden or arboretum. My family has become used to this mission of mine and they often accommodate me.

Last weekend, though, I was with my fellow hort geeks, and no one tried to stop me from a garden side trip! I traveled to Phoenix for the Garden Writers Association winter board meeting. After sitting indoors in a board room all day, we rewarded ourselves by racing over to the Desert Botanical Garden, a magnificent place in the heart of Phoenix.

I first visited DBG about five years ago while staying with my parents (they have spent their winters in Mesa, AZ, a suburb of Phoenix for the past five or six years). At the time, I was a Seattle gardener. I was not interested in cactuses or other thorny desert plants. But the visit changed my mindset. The garden dates back to the late 1930s and it is designed beautifully. Who knew then that I would eventually live in Southern California where all these alien plants thrive with little or no water, heat, sun and (practically) neglect!?

Here are a few shots I took on that first visit:

The January 31, 2009 visit had an agenda.

Number one: Tour “Chihuly: The Nature of Glass” show, the Seattle artist’s first installation entirely within a desert garden environment.  Number two: Meet Ken Schutz, the garden’s executive director, who led the GWA board on guided tour of the show (plus, he graciously joined us for dinner following our hour-long walk through the plants-and-glass extravaganza).

We gathered at the DBG entrance and were welcomed with a refreshing drink, straight from the desert: Prickly Pear Margaritas topped with a wedge of lime! You can purchase the Prickly Pear syrup in the garden’s wonderful gift shop.

 

Enjoy my narrated introduction, followed by my favorite images:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_F6-J8AOwo

A virtual tour of the gorgeous glass sculpture display:

“Sun,” the opening sculpture

Agaves in glass: the new entry piece

READ MORE…

The sage and pumpkin-colored entry garden hints at the glories inside the gate!

Patrick donned his “Aloe Orange” linen shirt so he could match his garden!  

I think I’ve established my willingness to drive, fly, walk, hike, take a train or ride a bicycle to get to a garden destination that summons me.

Last Sunday is a good example. I was staring at an invitation from Patrick Anderson and Les Olson, owners of a cactus and succulent garden extraordinaire (not to mention the most majestic dining pavilion in the universe – you can find it on page 126 of Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways, in my chapter entitled “Extravagant Gestures”).

“Sweets, Savories & Succulents,” read the invite. “Please join us to celebrate the New Year, and the glory of the garden in midwinter.”

This was the third time Patrick and Les extended an invitation to their winter party. And it was the first year I wasn’t traveling out of state. I first met the men in 2005 when they hosted a Pacific Horticulture Open Garden event for donors. I returned with Bill Wright in the fall of 2006 to photograph the dining pavilion and garden for our book. Practically hyperventilating with excitement about shooting such a cool setting, we rose before dawn and tiptoed out to the garden to get the very best early-morning shots (our task was eased, thanks to the offer of lodging in Patrick and Les’s guest bedrooms).

Last weekend, I desperately wanted to visit their exotic botanical wonderland in San Diego County. Not only did I want to say hello to my “Shedista” friends, but I knew the aloe display would be at its ever-lovin’ peak of perfection.

Who cares that going to the party meant a 300-mile round-trip drive on a Sunday afternoon? Husband and sons all fed and settled into their own activities, I hopped in the car after church and hit the freeway, heading south.

Oh what a treat I had! This is the very type of excursion that convinces a California newcomer that all her former Seattle blossoms have serious competition for her affections. It’s tough to yearn for my hydrangeas, peonies and lilacs when the intense, architectural aloe blooms are in my face.

Orange, gold, salmon, yellow, apricot, terracotta pink – saturated hues of the sun – on display like colorful fireworks hovering at the tips of erect stalks. Each bloom is composed of tubular flowers tightly arranged around the stem. And what diversity! Some are shaped like a red-hot poker Kniphofia bloom; others are short and wide, in the shape of a spinning top. Some tilt upwards; others are arranged like rays of the sun. These flowers are winter’s antidote to gloom.

According to Sunset Western Garden Book, aloes are primarily South African native plants:

They range from 6-inch miniatures to trees. “Showy and easy to grow in well-drained soil in reasonably frost-free areas, (aloes) need little water but can take more. . . . Highly valued as ornamentals, in the ground, or in pots.”

That’s not all Patrick and Les have in their 2-acre garden.

They own, of course, the enviable dining pavilion (I still marvel at my luck convincing my editor Doris that we could include this architectural gem.)

It is certainly an “elegant hideaway,” although a very distant relation to a shed.

Not a wimpy latticework gazebo, but a bold, manly garden house that can accommodate a quiet dinner for two or a raucous gathering of a dozen friends.

Here are the opening lines that appear in the Stylish Sheds chapter about their dreamy garden hideaway:

Patrick seized the chance to invent his own plant world here, spending the past fifteen years shaping the landscape with unusual spiked, whorled, spherical, and fan-shaped cactuses, along with succulents representing a color spectrum from maroon to bronze to silvery blue. “Every inch of this property is plantable if I ever get around to it,” he maintains. The garden’s finishing touch: a golden, open-air pavilion where Les and Patrick seek haven from heat and sun.

The neighbors jokingly call it the Taj Mahal, but the opulent pavilion situated at the highest point of Patrick and Les’s property has exactly the right degree of dramatic presence their flamboyant desert garden needs. Together the structure and plant collections embody Patrick’s two loves: theater and horticulture.

Patrick fell in love with aloes and other succulents and cactus forms years ago, as a volunteer at the famed Huntington Botanical Gardens near Pasadena. He learned to grow and propagate many varieties, including aloes. And I suspect his design sensibility (he studied theater and costume design in college) was also honed as he spent time in the Huntington’s desert collection.

When he began to transform the property nearly 20 years ago, Patrick wanted to plant a wide variety of desert-climate plants in a lush style that he describes as a “dry jungle.”

More than 200 varieties of aloes unify the garden. Against the pointed and thorny blue-green leaves, the brilliant aloe blooms remind visitors that there’s nothing dull about the desert floral palette.

Thank you, again, Les and Patrick, for sharing your garden with me and with so many of your admirers!

It was a long drive. But an inspiring day. And I am certain that by next January, when another invitation to “Sweets, Savories, and Succulents” arrives in my mailbox, I will clear my calendar and make the drive again!

P.S., One amusing photograph I just had to add.

For anyone who has been up close and intimate with an aloe, agave, cactus or other thorny plant. . . the “Caution” tape was a reminder of how careful one must be in a desert garden!

Sparkling and serene, this is a tiny garden that oozes romance and mystique (design and photo, Laura Morton)

I believe that the paths we walk lead us to the people we need to know in our lives.

Case in point: A week or so after I insisted that my friend Shirley Bovshow, an LA garden media personality and talented designer, bunk with me for 2 nights at the Portland Garden Writers Association annual symposium, she invited me to join an Association of Professional Landscape Designers’ lunch meeting at her home in Woodland Hills. Since Shirley and I live relatively close to one another (by LA standards), I took her up on the invite. The other guests were fellow members with Shirley in APLD’s LA chapter. Plus, Shirley’s garden is a wonderland of plants and design ideas.

The Association of Professional Landscape Designers is an impressive organization. I have met, interviewed and written about APLD members (and their work) in many venues, including Seattle, Los Angeles and beyond.

The September gathering introduced me to several Southern California garden creators, including Shirley (Edenmaker), Jennifer Gilbert Asher of TerraSculpture (I’ve recently written about her work), and Laura Morton of Laura Morton Garden Design.

When Laura casually mentioned to me that one of her projects won the 2008 APLD “Gold Award” for residential landscape design, I went a little crazy. “Has it been published?” I quizzed her. “No,” she admitted.

No sooner than I heard this – and no sooner had Laura sent me several photographs and a little movie about her design for Mala Vasan’s Hollywood Hills backyard, than I was on the phone to LA Times HOME section editor Craig Nakano. As I suspected, he was very interested in seeing what Laura had to share.

Open air living: Designer Laura Morton changed a plain backyard at Mala Vasan’s home into an Indian-tinged outdoor living room with a reflecting pool, fire pit and garden (Laura Morton photograph)

The story about Mala’s garden, inspired by her own multicultural interests and designed by Laura Morton, appears in today’s LA Times Homes section. Here are the opening lines:

HER PASSAGE TO INDIA: A Hollywood Hills bungalow’s small backyard is transformed into an exotic, cozy retreat and social spot.

If you’re looking for a good excuse to invest in landscaping, Mala Vasan’s is hard to beat. She credits her dreamy mix of Indian and Moroccan inspiration for seducing her sweetheart.

“My garden brings out an inner magic,” says Vasan, a producer of TV commercials who was going out to eat with screenwriter Brian P. Regan when he saw the enchanting outdoor space and said, “Forget it. Let’s stay here and order Chinese food.”

With scented blossoms, dancing flames, the sound of spilling water and chaises large enough for two, the intimate setting is, indeed, full of romance. (“Our first dates were on those couches,” Vasan says.) The garden also is an artful antithesis of what it used to be: a driveway too small for a car and a 560-square-foot backyard dominated by a wobbly brick patio and views of a boxy air-conditioner hanging from the neighbor’s garage.

The transformation of this Hollywood Hills property earned its creator, Laura Morton of Laura Morton Design in West Hollywood, a gold medal last year from the Assn. of Professional Landscape Designers. For Vasan, the thoughtful design was proof that tiny details and a vivid imagination could turn a prosaic space into a pretty and practical retreat.

The Times’ online photo gallery features several before-and-after shots, including a darling photo of designer Laura Morton and client Mala Vasan, seated in the garden. You can see the gallery here.

Here are a few more photographs, courtesy of Laura Morton. Visit her web site to see many more of her projects – inspiring and alluring spaces that will get you thinking about turning your own backyard into an exotic oasis with plants, cushy textiles, the presence of water, candles to illuminate and other sensory pleasures.

A curtain of water spills over the reflecting pool’s tiled edge into a hidden channel behind the fire pit (Laura Morton photograph)

Romantic chaises, piled with textiles and cushions, create a luxurious outdoor living room (Laura Morton photograph)

In my interview with Laura, she described how a feeling of intimacy can be created in a garden:

“Enclosed spaces instill a sense of intimacy, and within that, your own sense of paradise is possible.”

Dateline: Thousand Oaks, California

Zone 10

Well, I’m one-day late, but that’s because I spent most of January 15th sitting on an airplane.

So I’m back in Southern California – and hurrah! It’s supposed to be 80 degrees outdoors today. Early this morning, I snuck out to see what my garden has to share with you. Four new blooms, intentionally selected to show you something different from my December blooms. All of these came into my possession from the prior owners of our home, which we bought in August 2006.

A beautiful, mature Aloe – about to bloom

A sprawling Pelargonium – planted as a ground cover

Rosemary – blue blooms to blanket my hillside

Silvery lavender foliage offsets a rare late bloom

Happy New Year to each of you, and may the garden feed your heart, health and soul!

Inspired by the words of Elizabeth Lawrence, “We can have flowers nearly every month of the year,” Carol of May Dreams Gardens started Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. On the 15th of every month, garden bloggers from all over the world publish what is currently blooming in their gardens, and leave a link in Mr. Linky and the comments of May Dreams Gardens.

Yes, it may only be the second week of January, but our Noble firs and cedar boughs are now past their prime (and in my case, at least) cut up and ready for recycling in the yard-waste bin.

Onward to spring!

To get me in the mood, I have this inspiring drawing pinned next to my desk.

My friend Jean Zaputil, an artist and garden designer, illustrated and hand-colored it as a most charming New Year greeting.

The scene depicts a songbird perched on top of a hellebore, with the wistful and compelling lines, which read:

“If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” 

[attributed to Percy Byssne Shelley]

Perhaps this saying will give you something to hold onto in the dormant months of winter! Spring is coming soon!

Also getting me in the mood for spring: Country Gardens’ early spring 2009 edition, which just arrived in my mailbox. 

I opened it up to find my story about friend and designer Bonnie Manion, owner of Mon Petit Chou, a vintage design business based in Encinitas, California. Bonnie blogs at VintageGardenGal – a cheery and charming spot to visit – you’ll want to do so frequently!

The story, commissioned by James A. Baggett, editor of Country Gardens, is called “Tour de Forced Bulbs,” and it features Bonnie’s designs pairing forced spring bulbs with forced flowering branches – arranged in vintage containers.

Here is the story in its entirety. A shorter version appears in the magazine, along with the step-by-step instructions for planting a container with hyacinth bulbs and pussywillow branches. The story was photographed by Ed Gohlich and produced by field editor Andrea Caughey.

TOUR de FORCED BULBS: Get a jump on the season by pairing vintage vessels with spring-fresh forced bulbs to create uniquely charming displays.

The promise of spring appears in fresh-green leaves emerging from the pointed tops of daffodil, tulip, hyacinth and amaryllis bulbs at Bonnie Manion’s garden in Encinitas, California. Swelling buds on her flowering trees – apricot, plum and peach – hint at new growth about to unfurl into delicate blossoms and tender foliage.

Bonnie, a collector and purveyor of garden antiques and cottage décor, celebrates the season’s arrival by growing a multitude of flowering bulbs. But instead of digging holes in the ground for her many bulb varieties, this clever gardener relies on unique vintage containers for forcing and displaying masses of spring blooms.

She named her vintage design business Mon Petit Chou (translated from French, it is a term of endearment meaning “my little cabbage head”). The whimsical phrase encompasses her love of French antiques and American barnyard implements alike.

“I look for pieces with a history but that can also be repurposed and used in a fabulous new way,” Bonnie explains. She custom-designs her arrangements for special events and commissions, often advising customers about what to plant inside a chipped enamel kettle, a wire market basket or even an intricately-carved wooden drawer.

Come springtime, Bonnie considers flowering bulbs and branches as the perfect partners.

Some gardeners are intimidated by forcing bulbs, but to Bonnie, nothing could easier. “In a way, bulbs are similar to a chicken egg in that they are also one of nature’s perfect self-contained packages,” she says. “They have everything that’s required to bloom into a flower. There’s a lot of simplicity to growing them.”

Using fresh-cut branches, the flower and leaf buds of which have yet to open, requires little effort, Bonnie adds. Whether brought indoors for flower arranging, or used as accents to planted containers, the tiny buds slowly open until flowers gracefully unfurl. “They last quite a while, especially if you keep the branches in water,” she advises.

With a spring palette ranging from soft pastels to bright primary colors, bulbs and branches pair companionably with timeworn artifacts of the past. “I like the yin-and-yang of it. To me, the weathered patina of old containers goes well with the colors of my spring bulbs.”

To grow bulbs in containers, Bonnie begins with the right vessel, selecting an eye-catching piece with a generously-sized opening at the top. Bulbs don’t require much root space, meaning that even a four-inch-deep wooden box is adequate as a planter. Deeper containers can be used as well. “You can keep the soil level low around the bulbs, and use the height of the container to support bulbs such as paper whites or amaryllis, as they grow tall and reach for sunlight,” Bonnie says.

Interesting vintage containers include chicken feeders, tool carriers, old boxes or pails, hay racks, sugar tins, large and small funnels, oil cans, children’s wagons or carts, old urns, kitchen strainers – “virtually any container with a wonderful vintage character,” she says.

Bonnie’s finished designs look spontaneously fresh. “I get a lot of my plant and container ideas from my travels,” explains this vintage garden gal.

She frequents large and small flea markets and other off-beat vintage garden antique sources around the country and occasionally visits Europe for inspiration. “I might see a single potted rose in a Paris flower shop. Or, I’ll discover a dramatic floral arrangement in a London hotel lobby and try to recreate it at home.”

Bulb-filled vintage containers never fail to make a statement. “Put them in a setting in your garden where you need some ornamentation,” Bonnie suggests. “You can have fun bringing old pieces back to life and making them functional again. Get as creative as you like, and your pieces will be uniquely you!”

Forcing Bulbs

Try Bonnie Manion’s methods of planting spring-flowering bulbs in an unusual vintage or salvaged container. Look for blooms that will show off the best features of the vessel, such as crimson-streaked tulips that echo the red painted handle of an enamel kettle. Here are some tips:

• Make note of each bulb’s “Plant-to-Bloom” timeframe to coincide with your needs. Bloom times vary greatly and you will need to plan ahead when planting.
• Forcing bulbs in soil, versus water only, will ensure the bulb has the ability to bloom again year after year (replanted in your outside flower beds or another vintage container).
• Use organic or general-purpose potting soil. The soil should reach a level one-inch below the container’s rim. Make sure you have good drainage so that any excess water is able to drip out of the base (you may need to use a saucer to protect furniture or windowsills from water damage).
• Plant dormant spring bulbs directly into the potting soil. Bulbs should be root-side down and pointed-tips upward. It’s okay to pack bulbs “shoulder to shoulder” for a massed and abundant result. In general, you can completely cover daffodil, tulip and hyacinth bulbs with at least one inch of potting soil. The top third of an amaryllis bulb should peek out above the soil surface. Pack potting soil firmly around bulbs to anchor them in place and water once thoroughly to close any air pockets in the soil.
• Bulbs require sunlight to awaken from their dormant state, and begin forming roots, stems, and flower parts under their onion-skin-like sheath.
• Protect the container from extremes (place on a porch or under eaves in milder climates; bring indoors in colder ones). Do not let the soil dry out, but keep it lightly moist. In general, bulbs prefer to be on the drier side, rather than wet.
• If you want maximum versatility with your designs, plant bulbs in small plastic nursery pots. One or two bulbs will fit inside a six-inch, soil-filled pot. You can plant up dozens of bulbs and care for them using directions above. Once they begin to bloom, arrange the bulbs inside larger containers and layer Spanish moss on top to cover your secret.

Check out one of Bonnie’s favorite bulb sources: Easy-to-Grow Bulbs.

Forcing Branches

Young branches of woody trees and shrubs are supple and pliable in the spring. This makes them easy to weave into trellis-like designs as Bonnie has done. If you cut the branches before their flower or leaf buds open, you can bring them indoors for long-lasting vase arrangements. Better yet, add cut branches to outdoor containers as a complement to spring bulbs. Here are some general guidelines:

• Look around your landscape for inspiration. Do you have a golden forsythia, coral-bark maple, or flowering plum? As many of these woody plants are in need of early spring thinning or pruning, save the cut branches for container or vase designs. A neighbor might also allow you to lightly prune a few branches. In late winter or early spring, local markets or florists are good sources for cut branches, such as curly willow, quince, or witch hazel.
• Use a pair of clean, sharp garden shears, secateurs or loppers to branches at a 45-degree angle. Make the cut at the bottom of a stem where it joins a larger branch.
• You can stick the pointed base of each cut branch directly into the planting soil, at least three inches deep. As you water your bulbs, the branches will soak up needed moisture to keep the buds plump until they bloom.
• You can also arrange cut branches in a water-filled vase. Flower preservatives can keep the water muck-free, but nothing’s better than replacing water daily.

This post aspires to nothing more than sharing with you my garden-gal outing two days ago to the Getty Center in LA. I had a lovely “New Year’s” lunch with garden designers Linda McKendry (of Linda McKendry Design) and Laura Morton (of Laura Morton Garden Design).

We toasted the New Year and talked about our goals, our wishes, our dreams, our *resolutions* and a bit of reality. After lunch, the three of us took an afternoon stroll through the Getty’s Robert Irwin-designed garden.

The light was beautiful. The plantings were surreal. Enjoy!

Enjoy this photo gallery of some of my New Year’s gardening projects, accomplished today. I’ll add a few comments with each image to explain what I did. Above: Two hyacinth bulbs from Brent and Becky Heath’s care package – I saved them to grow in these glass bulb vases in my kitchen windowsill.

The blogosphere and Twitter world have been busy today, with my friends and those whose work I admire/read writing about resolutions, garden mission statements, and more. I have really tried to tear myself away from the keyboard and screen. It’s ironic that I spend more time here at my desk – looking through the open shutters to the backyard – than I do actually touching, breathing and engaging with said yard.

So today I decided to spend time on gardening projects. I am stiff and tired. Six hours straight – pruning and deadheading, digging up, wheeling the barrow to and fro – is not my typical schedule these days. And I am determined to return to this routine (or an edited version of it) in 2009.

Because you know what? I’m feeling very happy.

At left: I finally planted this beautiful Billbergia nutans ‘Variegata’, which I am embarrassed to say I purchased in March 2008 at Western Hills Nursery in Occidental, Calif., during our post-SF Flower & Garden Show garden-gals’ field trip. Miraculously, this plant has not only endured, but seemingly thrived in a 6-inch pot all these months. It is a beautiful, strappy, striped plant and doesn’t it look nice with the Clare Dohna mosaic orb?

What’s been holding me back anyway?
Since leaving behind my cherished garden in Seattle in August 2006, and moving to what many people think is heaven on earth – Southern California – I have been fairly disengaged with my new yard. As I’ve said before, I can’t really call it a garden. It’s really just a yard filled with plants I don’t understand or particularly like. I’ve had bursts of energy now and then to try and tackle things, including hiring someone a year ago to dig up and haul to a landscaping dumpster a yard’s worth of big red lava-rock mulch that covered every surface of soil.

But my heart hasn’t been in it. My heart is so torn between my past life and my present life. Surely, I am a lucky woman. I have my family who I cherish. I have so many wonderful friendships that continue, regardless of whether I’m in Washington State, California or other places around the globe. I manage to keep writing articles about gardens and design topics that really get published by tangible publications (that’s a shocker) and so what’s the problem?

At right: Senecio cristobalensis is another survivor from the Western Hills plant-shopping excursion in March, now given a special place in my front border. What pretty leaves! It’s supposed to reach 6-ft x 6-ft so I will eventually have to relocate this fuzzy-leafed beauty. This is one of those plants I once purchased from Heronswood (I just found the original plant tag from 2001!) that never wintered over in Seattle. See? I already have a new reason to be grateful for living in Zone 10~

I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve been pondering on how to get out of my rut. And the answer is staring me right in the eye. I need to return to the garden. The one that I see if I lift my eyes away from the computer screen and look through the slats of the shutters. Sometimes we have to start moving forward even before we know the path. “Putting wheels on it,” is how my friend Stephanie would describe it. Moving anywhere is better than staying put. There’s a lot of safety at this keyboard. But I don’t want to be just an observer of other people’s gardens, homes, plants and collections. I need to have my own relationship with the land, the plants, and the wildlife that occupy my suburban backyard.  I’ll say it again:  I need to return to the garden.

Today, I did just that. And while I’m in no position to write a garden mission statement, I do have a simple goal (dare I say Resolution?) for myself. And that is to spend 1 hour a day, at least 5 days a week, in the garden. Lord knows, I waste that much time reading emails each day. I think there’s a much better use of my physical and mental energy – and that’s to get outdoors and garden.

I don’t have money to hire a landscaper to do all the things I dream of accomplishing here, but my investment of time and attention is bound to improve my environment. It’s bound to improve my emotional attitude about this place. I’ll try and use this blog to document my progress.

Above: I guess any month of the year is bulb-season here in LA. It’s just that my bulbs will have to be annuals. That’s something I will have to get used to, after investing in and planting hundreds of spring flowering bulbs back in Seattle. The hyacinths, narcissus, tulips and muscari I planted today were a surprise gift from Brent and Becky Heath. The box filled with 70 bulbs arrived a few weeks ago ~ what a treat! I planted layers of bulbs in 2 terracotta pots this afternoon. Then I sprinkled annual seeds on top of each (dwarf cosmos on one; nigella on the other). Who knows if you can pair annuals with bulbs? It’s worth a try! This is my chance to experiment, so stay tuned!

And Happy New Year to all of you. Let’s cherish what we have!

In early 2005, Cool Springs Press published the Washington & Oregon Gardener’s Guide, a book I co-authored with the wise and gifted garden writer Mary Robson. We combined our talents to share years of garden experience to help readers plan, plant, and maintain a beautiful and healthy garden.

The book is filled with our personal recommendations of plants that thrive in the Northwest, presented in a concise, helpful format. The major challenge of writing WOGG, as we called it, was to limit ourselves to 186 individual plant selections, from annuals to vines. No gardener wants to be told she has to “choose” a finite plant list!

Our fabulous publicist, Lola Honeybone, who now runs Media Workshop, a Nashville-based book PR shop, suggested that Mary (shown at left) and I develop a lecture to accompany our book-signings and appearances. She dreamed up the title “Seven Habits of a Highly Successful Gardener.” Lola’s clever angle brought Mary and me together for a 2005 lecture at the Northwest Flower & Garden Show in Seattle. It was so much fun to plan this talk knowing Mary and I would have a friendly give-and-take as we walked the audience through our Seven Tips.

Later, our friend Richard Turner, editor of Pacific Horticulture, asked us to turn the lecture into an article. Here is the article, from the journal’s Winter 2006 issue. It seems appropriate to share this as we approach 2009 – and I encourage you to adapt these tips for your own New Year in the Garden:

Seven Habits of a Highly Successful Gardener

Gardeners in the west enjoy the unique luxury of living with few rules about what’s right or wrong in the way we grow our plants. We appreciate and adapt to our garden’s cultural conditions. We are overwhelmed with a seemingly endless selection of excellent, healthy and suitable trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, vines, bulbs and ground covers from which to choose for our landscapes.

In the Pacific Northwest [my former home], we’re particularly lucky to have temperate conditions where it’s not too hot – and not too cold. This welcoming, plant-friendly climate bestows added blessings. Imagine how hard it was for us to compile a regional gardening book and limit ourselves to only 186 great plants!

Perhaps the horticultural excesses in our lives call for a little discipline. Certainly, we want to be good stewards of our gardens, both to ensure our immediate enjoyment and the long-term health of the plants and places we tend.

So, with apologies to the original “7 Habits” author Steven R. Covey, we offer the following Seven Habits of a Highly Successful Gardener:

READ MORE…

Those of us who attended the September 2008 Garden Writers Association annual symposium in Portland were in for a big treat when we boarded the coach buses (seven or eight in all) and took a ride to Boring, Oregon, home of Iseli Nursery.

We were introduced to a world of ornamental conifers, in every shape and size. Even though Washington is called the “Evergreen State,” in the nursery trade, it seems, the folks in Oregon claim the title. 

Iseli Nursery grows all sorts of amazing woody plant specimens – trees, shrubs and more. They sent us home with a gift bag packed with five delightful little conifer specimens – perfect for a container planting, rock garden or tablescape. You can see the incredible variety in Iseli’s “Fanciful Gardens” collection depicted above (including some dwarf broadleaf evergreens in the front row). My photos, from left: A colorful “knot garden” of mostly dwarf conifers mixed with barberry, Iseli entrance; tiny, just-propagated woody cuttings of mugo pine.

The next day, I found myself sitting on yet another the bus ride/garden tour with with Sandy Dittmar, a horticulturist at Iseli. We talked about how many gardeners are only now discovering conifers, and how dwarf conifers are so versatile for smaller landscapes. She planted a seed of insight and got me thinking.

So when I saw my local Trader Joe’s stocked with miniature Leyland cypress and Lawson cypress (we’re talking 4-inch pots for $4.29 or so), I called Sandy and said: Remember when we talked about dwarf conifers? Are those Trader Joe’s mini-trees yours?

It turns out, the tiny live trees in shiny pots are supplied by BloomRite Nursery, a wholesale grower in Half Moon Bay, California. But Iseli’s tiny Alberta spruces, mugo pines, and blue-star junipers, and countless other dwarf conifers are showing up in specialty nurseries and retail florists around the country. Cute, they are. Versatile, too. And perfect for a scaled-back Christmas!

In this cost-conscious holiday season, it was a fitting “tiny tree story” for the Los Angeles Times’  Home section, page F2 (December 13th).

Here is the piece I wrote under the “Seen” heading, in its entirety:

A pint-sized forest at home

Looking for evergreen decor – something that can last long past Christmas? Turn tiny potted conifers into a miniature forest across a fireplace mantle, or create a tabletop landscape with dwarf pines. Tiny trees are “a cheap luxury,” says Lisa Tsui, a product manager at BloomRite, a wholesale grower in Half Moon Bay, Calif., that supplies potted pines and Leyland cypress to Trader Joe’s. “In this economic environment, people are using them to supplement decorations they already have,” she says.

Iseli Nursery in Boring, Ore., ships tens of thousands of dwarf conifers to garden centers during the holidays. Even though some customers treat the evergreens as throwaway décor, they can be transplanted in the garden or an outdoor container, Iseli sales manager Jock Demme says. The challenge is to keep the plants alive indoors. “The home setting has drier and warmer air than these plants require,” he says. “I suggest submerging the pot in a larger container of water and soaking the roots every day.” The trees at Trader Joe’s sell for $4.29 to $5.99 each; you’ll find variations for $9.95 at the Empty Vase in West Hollywood, (310) 278-1988, www.emptyvase.com. Also try Red Envelope, (877) 733-3683, www.redenvelope.com.

Here’s a little gallery of dwarf and miniature tree photographs, shared by Iseli and Nurserymen’s Exchange (which is the company behind BloomRite).