Plant Talk

A Food Forest, Native Plants and Permaculture In One Garden - at the Portland Yard, Garden & Patio Show

"Abundant Nature - an Enchanted Food Forest" was an award winner, and my favorite garden at Portland's garden show last weekend. I was there to speak on healing gardens and on the Garden Writer's panel, but managed to squeeze in a few happy hours touring the show, which is smaller, sweeter, and less commercial than the Seattle Show, in part, no doubt, because it's put on by the Oregon Association of Nurseries. So many individuals and gardening groups are active in putting it on, and it shows in the camraderie, the stunning display of bits and pieces in bloom from area gardens, and the human scale of the show.

The edible garden was a marvel of integration, with fragrant sprays of cedar underfoot, a mossy mound with portholes, and a miniature garden to intrigue children as well as adults. The garden was a collaboration, with lead design by Amy Whitworth of Plan-It Earth Design.

How did she include a native habitat garden, a ruin, a fairy garden, play space, hobbit mound, blueberries, coldframe, arbor, keyhole garden and herbal spiral into one garden (albeit a very long one...) without it looking disparate? With great attention to detail and a consistent aesthetic...well, take a look....

Kale and lettuces ran in ribbons through raised beds...

The tripod built of branches expresses the garden's rustic aesthetic, with herbs and lettuces in beds trimmed out in mossy bark

Don't you love this simple and heartfelt description of permaculture?

A play on scale with a giant nest near the ruin -

The hobbit mound and a different style of raised beds...

The native plant garden was effective sheltering one end of the garden with a flowery grove that included a brush pile to attract birds and insects...

And here's the designers explanation and inspiration for a garden both beautiful and educative...

 

 

 

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Longwood front-yard farmer stands by his permaculture plot

Need a Spring Fix Before the NWF&G Show? Head South...Portland's Show Opens Feb 8

Our Seattle garden show is a little later than usual this year...if you just can't wait, Portland's Yard, Garden and Patio Show comes first this year, is smaller than ours, easier to navigate, less commercial. And you get to spend the weekend in Portland....

I spoke at the Portland show last year, which was a real treat. The seminars are run by my dear friends Lucy Hardiman and Nancy Goldman, and this year they've lured Dan Hinkley and Ciscoe Morris down to speak, as well as Dan Heims of Terra Nova Nursery, edible expert Willi Galloway, and Maurice Horn of Joy Creek Nursery. See the full schedule here.

Be sure and track down the Cracked Pots booth, which is full of garden items cleverly crafted of recyclables and repurposed materials. And then there's the winter display from the Hardy Plant Society, with tables full of bits and blooming pieces cut fresh from the garden...such an extravagent, fragrant look at real-time winter (all those witch hazel twigs in full bloom...heavenly).

Last year YGP's urban edible garden alone was well worth the price of admission. ..this year their take on food gardening is described as "modern and sustainable in design but comfortable, tangible, and full of ideas to make edible gardening a joy." Designed by Carol Senna of Melingo Studio Landscape Design, it features reclaimed lumber and perennial edibles. You'll find an urban orchard and a tea garden, roomy gathering spaces for dining, cold frames and raised beds.

The show runs February 8 - 10 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

Here are a few scenes of last year's edible garden, including the dining table that centered it...

Francoise Weeks's inspired, Brussel sprout laden centerpiece...

and the canning corner of the garden....what edible garden could do without that little chicken??

Beyond Carrots and Corn - How About an Early-Ripening Fig and a Petite Eggplant?

If the daffodils are pushing up out of the ground and the grocery stores are selling primroses, it must be time to start thinking about new plants....our acquisitive instincts rise with the sap...and no wonder with all the tempting new plants introduced every spring.

In late winter I have the welcome chore of sorting through hundreds of fresh, new kinds of plants for a series of columns in Pacific Northwest magazine. I try to figure out which ones might be worth growing - are they especially fragrant, dwarf, more variegated, bloom earlier or later, stay compact, or more likely to ripen in our cool summers? All these questions come into play. Sure, my choices are subjective, I'm influenced by the visuals and a bit by the marketing hype...but I hope mostly by more years of gardening experience than I prefer to claim.  

The series runs in the magazine starting in early April....in the meantime, here are a couple of flashy new edibles that didn't make it into the column on food plants. Not because they aren't exciting, and perhaps well suited to our climate, but when writing for the old media (on paper) it's always a question of space...how I wish I could have squeezed these two beauties into the mix....

Eggplant ‘Pot Black’ (Solanum melongena) produces glossy black fruit that weigh only 2-3 oz, so they're smaller than Japanese eggplant. The plants fit into a container, so are perfect for the sunniest spot on your deck, preferably where they'll get reflected sunshine. Expect each plant to produce about 30 eggplant, 58-62 days to harvest. Grown by wholesaler Log House Plants in Eugene, Oregon, these covetable little eggplants should be available in most area nurseries later this spring.

This 'Celestial' fig tree (Ficus caricus) is new from Monrovia, even though figs are some of the oldest plants cultivated by humans. 'Celestial' sounds like a smart pick for our climate and smaller gardens, for it stays fairly compact, and requires less heat and time to ripen. The splayed leaves are handsome, the tree grows vigorously to 5-10 feet, and it's reliably hardy to zone 7. The fruit is small and sweet, with purplish-brown skin and white flesh...and they supposedly ripen by mid-June...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Food and Creativity Grow at the Portland Yard, Garden & Patio Show this Weekend

  After coming off days at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show (any stats yet on attendance? Can't wait to hear if the numbers are up...) I headed down to Portland last Thursday with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for yet more doo dah.

However, the moment I walked into Portland's Convention Center, with its warm lighting and more human scale, my enthusiasm bounced back. In the three years since I last spoke in Portland, this smaller, sweeter show, put on by the Oregon Association of Nurseries, has grown up. This was a banner year, with exciting plants, one of the best display gardens I've seen at any show ever, lots of local vendors,  and, as always, the Hardy Plant Society's display of branches and flowers cut from member's gardens.

This simple display brings real sophistication and a needed educational component for plant-centered gardeners, for the range and variety of the plants is so impressive.

I especially loved walking down the aisles sniffing dozens of different kinds of witch hazel, writing down names of viburnum...it's like a haze of a real winter garden, gathered together to remind us what's possible in our climate, even in mid-February. You can just picture devoted gardeners out cutting a branch here, a fragrant flower there, plucking one of their prize hellebores, forcing a twig of Daphne odora, and bringing their garden's bounty down to the convention center to share with the rest of us...

The show feels more real than ours, perhaps because of the lighting, and its more manageable size (about half the attendance). I love having the lights turned up so you can see plants and people (enough of the theatrics at our show! Give us light!), and that the commercial, display and educational components of the show are well integrated. In one aisle, I bought begonias, fingered some beautiful scarves, mooned over lilies, and picked up literature on hardy succulents, right before I wandered through the fabulous "Garden To Table" display of edibles.

This garden is so believable, so modern in its sensibilities, design and materials. Inspired by the French potager style, it meanders along the back wall of the convention center,  divided into a series of rooms, a style that worked as well for fruits and vegetables as it does for ornamentals. The use of repurposed materials added to the garden multi-dimensionality, as did twiggy arbors and a lenghty old barn ladder hung as an arbor over the rustic dining table (above, left).  A little greenhouse with citrus plants, a chicken chateau, bee hive, and a canning kitchen, let alone espaliered fruit, herbs and vegetables add up to a productive, earthy, fun and sophisticated display by designer Karen Schwarrz. Calendula Garden Design and Carol Senna of Melingo Studio Landscape Design.

You'll want to settle right down at the dining table, admire the coolest centerpiece I've about ever seen (note to Ciscoe - check out the brussels sprouts at the heart of the arrangement), press a few apples in the cider press, stir a pot of jam in the outdoor kitchen....I'm still pondering how the designers made this garden so welcoming, utilitarian, and believeable, yet sophisticated in its sensibilities and use of materials.  This might be the display garden that helps us re-think our use of garden space, materials and emphasis....and alone is worth a trip to Portland...you still have time, the show runs through 5 p.m. tomorrow...

The low, horizontal centerpiece on the outdoor table is an inspired mix of edibles, herbs and flowers

The kitchen components are utilitarian, homey, comfortable and decorative - with unfussy details like the green wall and ceramics that are perfectly suited to the garden in scale and spirit...

The plants are ornamentally arranged in raised beds; as each garden room unfolds into the next, you have the feeling of productivity and every square inch gracefully and cleverly used to grow food. There's nothing self-consciously ornamental about how these edibles are used, but they're planted to show off the inherent beauty of each plant...

I'll post more photos and impressions of the show over the next few days, but wanted to get word out about this fabulous garden in case you still have time to make it to the Portland....