Letter from the Executive Director |
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I hope all of you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving with your family or friends. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. I grew up in rural northwest Missouri and I associate Thanksgiving with chilly, crisp air, the faint honking of ducks and geese migrating above, fresh apple cider, and the smell of burning leaves – a rich sensory backdrop for the Thanksgiving holiday. Furthermore, Thanksgiving felt naturally embedded in our lives as a community of farmers. Every year sometime before Thanksgiving our church had a 'Lord's Acre' sale, with farmers' wagons full of donated corn, soybeans, and hay lining the street outside the church along with tables full of homemade pies and cakes and cookies, all potent illustrations of a bounty for which to give thanks, and for which thanks had been given by donating to the church.
Thanksgiving at the Garden lacks some of the environmental cues that heightened it for me in Missouri, but there is no shortage of riches to be thankful for. I'm grateful every day for the effort that our staff puts in for the purpose of making the garden better. It's a committed group of people who genuinely care about its well being. I’m grateful for John Fairey’s generosity and desire to make the Garden accessible to the public. I'm grateful for the public who take advantage of John's generosity and visit the Garden. I’m grateful that I get to live in the Garden and consider myself privileged to be able to walk the grounds and intimately observe its beauty and diversity.
I've recently been looking at some past Garden documents and correspondence and it was humbling to see how many people over the years have had a connection with the Garden in some capacity – as supporters, visitors, board members, nursery owners, fellow plant collectors, gardeners – from the US and abroad. It was particularly gratifying to see names of people who were there at the beginning and still actively supporting the Garden. If you’re reading this, please know that your longstanding patronage is especially appreciated.
The Garden wouldn’t be what it is today without all of the people – past and present – who have donated their time and money, shared knowledge, visited the Garden on a private tour or Open Day, became members, subscribed to the newsletter, bought plants in the Nursery, contributed to Taking Root, or any number of other acts of support.
I'm thankful for the role all of you have played in the history of the Garden so far, and I am eager to see where you will help us go in the future.
Warm regards,
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This is the time of year when we ask our community to consider supporting the Garden by making a financial contribution in response to our Annual Appeal. Your donation will help us pay for a long list of necessities for maintaining and preserving the Garden. Any amount helps. Thank you for support. |
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Book of Garden Photographs Now Available |
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We're pleased to announce the availability of volume one of 'BEHELD,' a book of photographs of the Garden taken by Executive Director, Randy Twaddle. The book is signed by the author and published in a limited edition of 100. BEHELD has a hardbound cover, is 8" square, and contains 42 pages. Copies are $30 for members, $35 for non-members. Shipping cost will be additional. If you'd like to purchase a copy, please email our Office Manager, Kara, to make arrangements for payment and shipping. Five images from the book are shown below.
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Notes from John Fairey's Mexico plant collecting journals |
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Trip #53 - Monday, December 27, 1993 - January 7, 1994
Trip 53 was a busy and thorough collecting trip with almost twenty distinct collecting areas visited. John and Carl's guests were the late Parker Sanderson, who at the time was manager of the University of California Arboretum at Davis, and Sean Hogan, who was then curator of collections at the University of California Botanic Garden in Berkeley. Hogan now operates Cistus Nursery, a renowned retail micro-nursery he founded, located on Sauvie Island, 15 miles northwest of Portland, Oregon.
One of the Garden's loveliest Mahonias, Mahonia chochoca 'curly leaf' was collected on New Year's Day, at 5200' elevation near the town of Miqhuihuana, Tamaulipas, in the northern Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains in Mexico.
Along with its distinctive bark, as its name indicates, this Mahonia has a curly leaf form, shown below. This Mahonia is found in the North Dry Garden just across the creek behind the Colonial Blue wall. As you can see, it's full of buds and should be awash in yellow very soon.
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Planting Concludes for the Year |
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As winter approaches (calendar-wise, at least), Adolfo and crew have finished their planting for the year. This fall they put 171 woody plants in the ground, both to replace plants that died either from the drought or as a delayed reaction to the 2021 freeze, and also to add plants to the property, particularly in and around the area where the Budding Out Plant Sale & Festival occurs. |
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New Plant Tags in the Garden |
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Observant guests may have noticed new plant tags in the Garden. We have recently begun the lengthy process of replacing lost ones or adding to existing ones.The original tags designed by John Fairey and Carl Schoenfeld are elegant and non-obtrusive but information was put on them with a #2 pencil, and eventually became difficult to read as the led faded (see below). Labels written by hand can also be hard to decipher. Our new labels are anodized aluminum with the text embedded, making them robust and easy to read. Information on the label includes the accession number and species. Future iterations will also indicate where the plant came from or, if wild collected in Mexico, the trip number and date of collection. As you can see from the image below, if there is an existing original tag, we are leaving it on the stake. |
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