Spring is springing in the Pacific Northwest. One of the earliest signs of spring is the flowering of the native hazelnut trees, Corylus cornuta. It’s long golden catkins dangle from slender branches and catch the sunlight, lighting up the forest where it grows.

Tiny female flowers are housed separately from the long, supple catkin filled with male flowers. The female flowers will mature into tasty nuts. We once watched a pair of magnificent Stellar’s jays methodically harvest every single nut from the tree outside our dining room window. They buried them in the forest floor, much like squirrels do, to preserve them for food in winter.

Indian plum

Another early sign of spring is the leafing out of the Indian plum, Oemleria cerasiformis. This prettly little shrub is just now leafing out in the Pacific Northwest in mid February. In less than a month it will be in full bloom with dangling clusters of small white flowers.

Both the hazel and the Indian plum let us know that spring is just around the corner.

On a tour of secret gardens in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kathryn and I peek behind adobe walls for tantalizing glimpses of hidden treasures. Organized by the Santa Fe Botanical Gardens, the tour provides access to several small urban gardens not normally visible to passersby.

A beautifully sophisticated yet rustic fence made of reddish twigs defines the boundary between the garden and the natural environment beyond. This very low maintenance garden, features a beautiful mix of native and exotic plant materials all well adapted to local climate conditions and low rainfall. This is a xeriscape garden. Many people think that a xeriscape consists of a cactus and a couple of rocks surrounded by gravel. Obviously, a xeriscape can be much more than that.

In the beautifully designed private garden of the Richardson home an aesthetically appealing yet functional patio provides a transition between home and garden. This garden places all higher maintenance plantings needing supplemental water within the privacy of the backyard. Kathryn and I designed this garden several years ago.

A Montmorency pie cherry tree and a dwarf peach tree provide fresh fruit in season. The fruit trees are adjacent to the patio in the photo above.

The Richardson home also features a small section of the backyard garden devoted to vegetables such as tomatoes and chili peppers. Blue Penstemon strictus, and yellow Aquilegia chrysantha (yellow columbine) are native wildflowers mixed in with the vegetables.

In the front yard of the Richardson home we see a water conserving xeriscape of native wildflowers, shrubs, and succulents in dramatic contrast to the lush greenness of the private backyard. This portion of the garden faces south and is exposed to the intense heat of full desert sun. The function of the dry streambed is to direct and control excess rainwater from summer thunderstorms.

One aspect of gardening in the high desert of New Mexico is that most of the rainfall occurs during the “monsoon season” in the summertime. Snow in winter also provides some water, but most of the water arrives in torrential summer thunderstorms. All the precipitation (snow, hail, rain) that runs off the roof of the house is captured by downspouts and fed into cisterns which store the water in this garden. An extensive drip-trickle system distributes the water to organically grown vegetables.

Another water management technique is the sunken garden shown here. The rainwater and snowmelt which runs off of impervious surfaces such as the roof of the house is directed into these pit gardens which are sunken well below grade. A Russian olive tree rooted in the bottom of the pit shades the garden and provides a moist, shady microclimate for the plants surrounding it.

This adobe wall and dramatic blue gate provide access to a small urban garden featuring permeable paving using flagstones and creeping thyme. Permeable paving allows precipitation to percolate into groundwater without being shunted off into municipal stormwater drainage systems.

Today we pay tribute to David’s father, Lawrence Edwin Deardorff, who passed away on May 11 at the age of 97. Larry first took David into the garden when he was 6 years old, and he learned about the world of plants at his father’s side. Larry was an avid gardener his entire life, and became our partner when David and I owned Island Biotropix, an orchid nursery and tissue culture lab in Hawaii. Thank you, Dad. We will miss you terribly.

David wrote this memory of his Dad last year and we’d like to share it with you today:

 My father’s huge hands scooped a small hole in the rich garden soil and placed a tomato seedling in it. He mopped his brow, sweating in the humid afternoon of an Ohio spring. As instructed, I knelt beside him, scraped soil around the root ball with my small eight year old hands, and pressed it down. My first lesson in how to be a good provider. A man’s job.  Our backyard vegetable garden became an important source of food for a big family with a meager income.

 Dad hammered a wooden stake into the ground beside the plant, showing me how to place the stake to avoid damaging the roots. More interested in completing my bug collection than in embracing the moment, my mind wandered and precious moments with my father melted away like winter snow.

 I loosely tied three or four strips of an old sheet to each stake, optimistically anticipating the eventual height of the tomato plants. As spring passed into summer the tomato patch became a jungle and helping Dad tie each plant to its stake as the plant grew taller was my responsibility.

 On a hot summer afternoon when Dad was at work, I walked into the garden alone. “Keep Out” he had decreed. Ah, but he was not home and I was a bad boy.

 The evocative aroma of the tomato plants enveloped me as I brushed past their leaves. Taller than me, the exuberant vines hid me as I hunted for bugs. Large green fruit hung down in clusters on all sides. A solitary fire-engine red tomato, like a buoy in that sea of green, called out to me. Furtively, I snatched it from the vine.

The fruit radiated heat from the sun into my hands.  I took a bite. The flavor exploded in my mouth. Incredibly complex acidity, sweetness, and aroma. It was magnificent, and so vivid it is burned into my memory banks. I have never forgotten the taste of that forbidden fruit.

 When Dad came home he went directly to the garden. I’m sure he’d been dreaming about that ripe tomato, the first of the season, all day long. He must have stared in disbelief at the empty space where it had been. I can imagine the storm clouds gathering in his face and almost hear thunderous bellowing that came after. But I wasn’t there to see. Long gone, I played at a neighbor’s house, and missed the outburst.

Later that evening, at supper, Dad brooded, certain that one of us children had stolen his tomato. His dark mood infected the house. He didn’t know which of us had done it. All of us were suspect. Safe behind Mom’s protection, all my sisters maintained their innocence. As of course, did I.

 We moved out west in 1957, where summer nights are cool and dry, and not as friendly to tomatoes. I’ve grown tomatoes in the west for more than fifty years, but I’ve never duplicated the sensational taste or size of that stolen tomato of my childhood.

 Dad planted a vegetable garden every year. He even bought the vacant lot next door and turned that into food production as well. As he aged he began to complain about the hard work. Each year he swore he would never plant a garden again and yet, by summer his garden would always be in full production. Throughout the growing season he distributed baskets of onions, squash, beans and tomatoes to all of his children.

As I matured and put down roots thousands of miles away to found my own family, my father and I remained close. We conversed for hours about orchids, birch trees, and tomatoes. We debated the merits of fertilizers, hand tools, and special cultivars. I convinced him to try native wildflowers in the flower beds, he convinced me to grow his favorite open-pollinated pimiento. The garden has been a conduit for our love for almost sixty years. 

 Over all that time I never told Dad that I was the one who ate that tomato. He would laugh about it now, if it were possible for him to understand me. But it’s too late.

After ninety six years he’s gone away, leaving his body behind. The doctors call it senile dementia, not Alzheimer’s, but the result is the same. He has no memory of any of his children, of his wife of seventy-one years, or of anything to do with gardening. I am a stranger to him now. Just a nice guy who brought him the last ripe tomato of the season.