Every garden has at least one thing in common with every other garden – in the beginning they are all just a dream. Sometimes it’s a small dream like spelling out the name of your grandchild in radish seeds to watch her face glow when a living version of her very own name pushes up out of the ground. Or it could be a really big dream like laying the original plans for Golden Gate Park.
Thinking about garden dreamers close to home I chose to look at six. Closest to home was Blanche Brown founder of our local Unity Club Wildflower Show. A lover of flowers and an educator her enthusiasm fired up the community so much that people began bringing her plants from their homes places and roadsides for identification. She shared these specimens with her students and eventually these collections morphed into the Annual Wildflower Show we know today. Come to see the delicate wildflowers that we so often overlook, trample on or walk by. April 22 and 23rd at the Boonville Fairgrounds 14400 Hwy. 128. Plant starts will be available for sale.
Going north the Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden at 18220 Hwy. 1 in Fort Bragg was the joint vision of retired Orange County nurseryman Ernest Schoefer and his wife Betty. Undoubtedly wondering how she was going to keep her husband busy in retirement she recognized that the mild coastal climate, quality soils and plentiful water would be the perfect spot for “47 acres of botanical bliss fronting the Pacific Ocean”. 100,000 people visit this garden every year. In the spring 1000 rhododendrons explode in a spectacular show of color. In the early days of the garden other coastal nurserymen donated their favorite “rhodies” to create an unsurpassed collection and a unique display. There will be a plant sale here April 21-30th. Advance tickets required to view garden but plant sale open to the public.
Retracing your steps inland make a stop at the Preston Farm and Vineyard 9282 W. Dry Creek Rd. in Healdsburg. These 125 acres have been watched over by Lou and Susan Preston for the past 45 years. Starting with grapes they slowly diversified with an eye toward enriching the land. They now grow vegetables, fruits, olives, grain and raise pastured livestock in a “Biodynamic” way - which is one step more rigorous than “organic”. This level of conscientiousness toward the health of the land as well as what the land produces means that everything you get here is very pure. No hangover with Preston wines! In early spring you can buy veggies starts here that are brimming with vitality.
Not too much farther down the road at 1685 Magnolia Dr. also in Healdsburg is Russian River Rose. Michael and Jan Tolmasoff started this “business based in beauty” in the 1990’s. Starting with a cutting from a feral rose clipped on the Mendocino headlands there are now 650 varieties of roses in their glorious rose garden along with many companion plants that support hummingbirds, bees and butterflies. A visit and tour of the garden is by appointment but you are always welcome to drop by to shop in the nursery. Russian River Rose is truly a peaceful oasis in a frantic world.
Back on 101 to get to the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens at 204 Santa Rosa Ave. in Santa Rosa. Burbank was an amazing plant propagator who created 800 new plants in his lifetime. His method was to plant 10,000 seeds and pick between one and 50 of the seedlings to plant again and then pick the best to plant again and so on until he got the plant with the characteristics he wanted. One example of this was a chestnut that normally took 25 years to bear nuts. By his selective method he reduced the wait to three years. You can imagine the commercial implications of this for a chestnut farmer. We have probably all eaten fruit that Luther Burbank had a hand in modifying. Most of his work was done at his experimentation center at 7777 Bodega Ave. in Sebastopol. Like his home the experiment station is open to the public. There will be a plant sale in Santa Rosa on May 6th.
The last dreamer I discovered was Jane Davenport Jansen who founded the Sonoma Botanical Gardens in 1987. She bought a played out sandstone quarry 12841 Sonoma Highway in Glen Ellen and made it a repository for the plants of temperate East Asia. She sponsored 20 trips to China, 6 to Japan and also trips to Nepal, India and Taiwan for seed collection. None of these seeds went into the 20 acres of grounds until 1990. The garden is a hidden jewel and a complete habitat for 25,000 species. More recently and after her death at the age of 60 Native Californian species have been added to the mix.
None of these gardens would have been possible without the dreams, explorations and hard work of these botanical visionaries. Just like a plant starts from one small seed these gardens filled with beauty were built from one original creative impulse. Just like a seed - nurturing was necessary and these dreamers really put their “all” into their gardens. These are the gardens we enjoy today long after most of them have died. They all truly left a legacy of beauty behind.
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