Garden

Last Saturday I did something I’d been wanting to do for a long time: I attended a plant sale at UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley. As an on-again, off-again member and somewhat regular visitor (if once or twice a year counts) I’m fairly familiar wit...

Venus and Sara: Gardening Girls Gone WildHello! Welcome to yet another adventure in "Extreme Gardening." This week in the Bird Back 40? It's Garden Girls Gone Wild and guess who the lucky man behind the camera was? If you're guessing a one Bill Bird, y...

A couple of weekends ago I attended the spring plant sale at the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, CA. If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you know that this is one of my favorite public gardens in Northern California and that I tr...

The backyard at the home of Carrie Sage and Paul Miller in Sacramento's Curtis Park neighborhood includes plenty of comfortable shaded seating. The small pool in the background is a hybrid therapy unit equipped with a current mechanism for lap sw...

The botanical highlight of our recent visit to my parents-in-law in Mount Shasta was seeing the manzanitas in bloom. In Mount Shasta manzanitas are everywhere. I don’t think many homeowners plant them; they’re just part of the natural landscape. ...

On our recent spring break trip to Santa Barbara I managed to squeeze in a visit to a nursery that came highly recommended: Terra Sol Garden Center. As it turned out, it was only a couple of miles from our hotel. It’s not a big nursery but the second...

On our way home from our visit to Santa Barbara, we decided to do some exploring in the hinterland of northwestern Ventura County. According to Wikipedia: North of Highway 126, the county is mountainous and mostly uninhabited, and contains some of the...

The Homer All Purpose BucketBetcha can't guess what's in that bucket. You know -- THAT bucket. That Home Depot five gallon Homer bucket located to your immediate right. I have about ten of these things all over the house because, well, they're useful f...

Shelly and Steve Lange of El Dorado Hills and their dog Harvey pose by their soaking pool. Their yard is on the Assistance League garden tour May 4 and 5.At their El Dorado Hills home, Steve and Shelly Lange created a backyard paradise under the ...

← Ganna Walka Lotusland 4 CACTUS GARDEN The last garden I visited at Lotusland is also the last one that was installed. Its beginnings, however, go back many decades. Cactus aficionado Merritt Sigsbee Dunlap started his collection in 1929 and in 1966...