A New Garden for the Northern Central Valley
Sloshy, cold winters and dry, searing summers are not obstacles to gardening—they are an opportunity to grow something unique. That is one of the le…
Regions: Northern California
Nor. Cal
Alcatraz Garden Restoration
From the mid-1800s until 1963, residents of Alcatraz Island (military personnel and their families, military prisoners, civilian prisoners, and prison…
Interesting Parallels
It might not occur to the majority of San Francisco’s visitors that two of its most important and popular attractions are actually human-made garden…
Observations in a Small Garden: The Unexpected Weed
I was thrilled to see a few native plants re-emerging .in.my hillside garden upon the removal of the last of the smothering ivy and invading broom and…
Safari to the Bottom of the Garden
We usually think of our gardens as places for our own pleasure, of our own contrivance. If our houses are the first ones built on our land, we tend to…
Schima
Schima is an attractive genus of evergreen trees from subtropical and warm-temperate regions of Asia. A member of the tea family (Theaceae), schima is…
Are We There Yet? Designing Gardens that Move and Arrive
Nearly seventy years after Gertrude Stein stingingly rebuked Oakland by asserting “There is no there there,” we find this observation widely appli…
Tender But Tough: The Old Tea Roses
In the 1930s and early 1940s, whenever Francis and Marjorie Lester left their nursery, which they had moved from Monterey to Watsonville in 1937, they…
Daisy Mah and the WPA Garden
Pull into the parking lot across from the Sacramento Zoo, and you’ll likely see young parents pushing strollers or leading noisy toddlers to nearby …