Why grow flowers?

Most obsessions are formed early in life, but 40 years into a passion for gardening which has led me down a fragrant, if financially imprudent path, I’m still wondering how I got here. Until the age of ten my floral universe was pretty much a blank, relegated to what I saw at weddings or funerals. Except for my friend Dave's crazy uncle who grew orchids in a greenhouse he rarely left, no one I knew had a house full of roses, much less a garden to cut them from. 

As it happens, I had been born somewhere with exotic, sensual flora and sometimes, exploring the canyons above the Pacific, I’d come across a bloom growing wild that stirred a memory. Then one afternoon on a school trip to the newly opened LA County Museum I wandered away from the group and found myself in a room filled with Dutch still life paintings. A canvas on the far wall depicted flowers in a vase, but oh, what extraordinary things they were - tight buds, opulent blooms, and one wilting rose whose molding petals were so luminous they seemed rendered in pearl. There were a few pieces of fruit on the table beneath the vase, grapes and a half eaten pear which had begun to rot, drawing a single black fly with filigree wings as intricate as old lace, transparent as glass. There was nothing still about the painting. It pulsated with dangerous, beautiful life. 

From that moment on I began to really look at flowers - how their symmetry and myriad of textures delighted the eye and eased my brain, slaking a deep thirst for natural color that living life in the fast lane of big gray cities had engendered. It would be years before I wandered into the gardens at Sissinghurst wanting to know more about the kinship between Virginia Woolf and the great diarist and gardener Vita Sackville West and discovered in myself not just the need to look at beautiful gardens, but the desire to get my hands dirty. To echo, if only in the smallest way, some of the intrinsic beauty I began to see in great gardens all over the world.

I've always felt a connection with the untamable parts of the natural world. Jungles, forests, and bodies of water you cannot see across test one's bravery, feed a boy's own (and girl's!) desire for adventure - they astound with a fearsome, beautiful inevitability. The untamed world is a Russian novel. A tended, truly loved garden, no matter how large or small, is a middling poem striving to be a great haiku.

And while the pride I've felt harvesting crops and orchards is inestimable, it's prosaic. Grow food and the result, a full stomach, is its own reward. A flower garden feeds something else. You must suffer through many cuts and something that looks an awful lot like death to get there, but as counter intuitive as it seems the end result - a garden in bloom -  does not just fill you with it's beauty, it's also incredibly optimistic. For a soul like mine that leaned toward the melancholic, flowering gardens held a sort of salvation. They were the opposite of Virginia's pocketful of stones. 

In a wonderful short piece which appeared in the NY Times Magazine last June the horticulturist Umberto Pasti writes “To become a gardener means to try, to fail, to stubbornly plug away at something, to endure serious disappointments and small triumphs that encourage you to try and fail again.” It also sounds like the quintessential definition of a romantic. Or an artist. Or a mother.

What the garden doesn’t do in so many words, that partners and children can and do, is talk back. It speaks of itself or for itself, but in its total obliviousness to your imprudence in trying to control it, frees you in a way that loved ones and work - which depend on approbation -  cannot. It encourages you to risk, to take chances. Even when some grand plan fails, you know winter is coming and with it rain and spring and something remarkable rising from the soil. It’s hard to remember that happiness follows sorrow in life, but it can and more often than not does. The garden is a reminder of this, and the great truth that sometimes what doesn’t grow in one place often thrives in another. 

For me, time spent in the gardens is a guiltless way to recharge an appetite for joy and in a roundabout way, to dig away at sorrow. It's a place where you learn not to take yourself too seriously. It may be a garden you've created and encouraged to thrive, but Nature rules and you inevitably contend with the truth that you are not much more than a part of the equation. I see this as a good thing. Being constantly self-referential is a boomerang, not a kite.  

Of course once you succumb to a garden’s magic, it will take all you have to give it, in both time and money. I could have circled the globe a dozen times for the amount I’ve spend in four decades fighting, then learning to work in tandem with the wild forests that surround our gardens on Greenwood Ridge. It has never felt, not for an instant, like time or money ill spent. The flower gardens have been my emotional tuning fork in life. Just below the sound of the wind and in among the bees, whose buzzing happily attests my irrelevance, is a place where I can really hear myself think. 

There is a prescient line in Sherry Turkle’s Ted Talk about how technology has made being alone feel like a problem that needs to be solved. It isn’t, it’s a solution, for to be comfortable in your own skin and to do so (sometimes at least) without other people is to be receptive to a state of being honestly alive, free from false exigencies. 

The art of being yourself and losing yourself, this is what I find when I wander my gardens now, especially in the early morning or just before dark. Whether I am filling buckets for the restaurant arrangements, raising the camera, or just wandering, I do not really have a predetermined agenda. For while gardening reawakens the recognition that all we have is time, it reaffirms there is no time to waste. The preciousness of the present is so easily lost in the rushed way we are incessantly encouraged to live our lives, it's a message you need to hear whatever your age. I think this was the whisper I heard from that painted vase of flowers I came upon so many years ago. In any case, it is a meditation that lingers.

Moving forward...

2016 is going to be an even more exciting year for florals in Barndiva.  

For the past two years Daniel Carlson has been Head Mover of Soil at the farm and Instigator in Chief behind apple cider production, while overseeing the edible floral beds in the Studio Garden.  In the same time frame he has also been designing extraordinary floral displays for weddings and private parties across the country on his own and under the auspices of our great friend Danielle Rowe at Brown Paper Design. This year Dan will launch an in-house floral program at Barndiva and offer his exquisitely designed natural arrangements to all of Barndiva's dinner parties and weddings, large and small. He can be reached directly through his new website: www.dcwestgarden.com

A short list of "local" FLORAL RESOURCES

NOW is the time to start thinking about expanding or even starting a flower garden. Some of our favorite flower farms and nurseries offer retail accounts and fantastic educational opportunities. When it comes to buying seeds and flats remember: Like most everything else in life, you get what you pay for.

Dragonfly Floral is both a resource and an inspiration, it always tops our local list. They are not a nursery but do everything else: you can order an arrangement to be delivered, buy loose blooms directly from the farm, take a class or a degree oriented series, or ask advice from Bonnie Z, Dragonfly's beloved owner and a muse for three generations of Healdsburg gardeners. You're even welcome to stop and smell the roses in their magnificent gardens on Westside Road. www.dragonflyhealdsburg.com

Emerisa  is a great nursery that works both wholesale and retail lanes Don't expect a lot of help- do your homework first. www.emerisa.com

Goodness Grows in Boonville is Dan and Lukka's favorite "local" nursery in Anderson Valley, always helpful and they will order for you. 11201 Anderson Valley Way, Boonville.

Digging Dog Nursery all the way out in Albion is an acquired taste, but one you should acquire if you have any esoteric aspirations for your garden at all. Check they're open, and don't expect a lot of help, but it's always worth a visit for their unique plants. www.diggingdog.com

Occidental Arts and Ecology  - Become a member. Their plant sales in spring - though they have others- is a rite of passage. But get there early and leave time for a walk.  (Just don't trust they can look after your stash, even once you pay. Stuff your treasures in a back seat, with the window cracked.) www.oaec.org

CalFlora is worth a trip because it's one of the Bay Area's oldest California native plant nurseries. www.calfloranursery.com

Even farther down the road in Richmond but also worth the trip is Annie's Annuals for it's impressive table displays. They always have plants in all stages of bloom, so you can see what you're committing to.  www.anniesannuals.com

Finally, a second organic local farm where you can source superb cut flowers. Front Porch is a relative newcomer to the scene, but driven by the flower mad Mimi Buckley it has become one of our favorite suppliers. Front Porch grows over 60 varieties throughout the year for events, but they are equally happy to fill small custom orders that can be picked up at their beautiful farm. Contact zoe@fpfarm.com

From the Garden

(originally posted February 24, 2010)

Writing about gardening last week I felt overwhelmed with the space restrictions of this web-blog WTF format ~ not to mention what I can fairly expect of your attention span when I suspect most of you get dozens of newsletters a week. I lay in bed wondering: Did I make it clear that while I believe growing food may be the most sensible thing you can do in the dirt, it might not, does not, have to be the trigger to get you started? I feel almost guilty with how much time and energy I’ve spent indulging my passion for growing flowers and vines over the years, but there you have it. The life cycle from seed to wilt of almost any non-hybrid flora can get me jonesin’ like almost nothing else ~ god (or Irving Penn) only knows why.

The renaissance in back yard food gardening we are witnessing is a truly powerful thing. Transforming lawns that suck water like drunks on holiday can give you something approaching ultimate security. “I can feed myself’ is probably the most empowering sentence in the English language, especially now that “I am rich” as a marker has thankfully imploded (somewhat). But. The nourishment you will get digging in your garden over the years does not necessarily have anything to do with literal sustenance. Something else is afoot but don’t look for it. Spend enough time in your garden and it. will. find. you.

When I first moved to Healdsburg seven years ago I certainly wasn’t looking for new friends. One of the few real benefits of being older is that you don’t have to truck in euphemistic social bullshit anymore, your toddlers don’t need friends and hopefully your work life is based upon what you produce, making business socializing passé. But when the eldest called me up one day a few weeks after he had followed us here from England and said “I met a woman you have to know,” followed by “she has an incredible garden,” I jumped. Why?

I have honestly never met a true plants woman I didn’t want to hang out with. Irascible, yes, opinionated, most definitely, but you always have something to talk about with farmers and gardeners. Turns out Bonnie Z was all of the above, and dragonfly wasn’t a garden so much as seven acres of rose filled heaven. As has often happened in a blessed life, the garden interests soon lead to real friendship. Same thing when I moved to the ridge. The kids were little then and I was looking for friends for them as they were going to be stuck on a mountaintop, out of the city, for the first time in their lives. I befriended the woman down the road who had just moved to Philo as well, and had two of the most unaffected charming kids I’d ever met. Over the past three decades I have watched Karen Bates grow The Apple Farm in Philo into one of the more superlative farms ~ with flowers gardens ~ in the country. She and Bonnie work their acreage full time, while I do not, but I have grown through knowing them in ways that friendships not based on shared passions are at a loss to match.

I’ve picked both their brains for the shortlist below of our must read garden tomes ~ some very odd titles perhaps but books we return to for inspiration over the years. Lucky you….lucky me.

Happy reading.

Jil’s Short List: The Metamorphosis of Plants Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Well Tempered Garden Christopher Lloyd In Your Garden & In Your Garden Again Vita Sackville West Green Thoughts Eleanor Perenyi Down the Garden Path Beverly Nichols Planting Diarmuid Gavin & Terence Conran Chefs Garden Terence Conran Allotment Handbook The Royal Horticultural Society The Dry Garden Beth Chatto

Bonnie Z’s Short List: Vintage Pellegrini Angelo Pellegrini Honey From a Weed Patience Gray Cooking From the Garden Rosalind Creasey Green Thoughts Eleanor Perenyi Compost Preparations and Sprays E.E. Pfeiffer Great Garden Formulas Rodale Press Book edited by Joan Benjamin and Deborah Martin The Worm Digest

Karen’s Short List: In and Out of the Garden Sara Midda Painted Garden Sara Midda The Unprejudiced Palate Angelo Pellegrini   Everything by Penelope Hobhouse

Barndiva Gardens

(Originally posted February 17, 2010)

I was 16 when I read Andrew Marvel’s poem ‘The Garden’ and the line “to a green thought in a green shade” jumped out at me. It was the first inkling I ever had that gardens were somehow different from other spaces. Living in big cities all my life, it had honestly never occurred to me. And while I did not seriously start tilling the soil until I bought a fruit & nut farm on a ridge in Philo 15 years later, even that huge commitment (I was at the time living 500 miles away) came more from a desire to have my boys run wild and free than to grow my own food, or fill my rooms with flowers. Well into my 20’s the only edible thing I had ever tried to grow was a $1.29 pot of basil and I watered that sucker to death. Oh, grasshopper, you have so much to learn.

But as is so often the case in life, sometimes the things we think we choose to sustain us are really things that choose us, like a mutt looking for a master so it can find somewhere to call home. Even well into my 30’s, living in Britain & only returning to the farm in Philo every summer, owning a garden ~ or rather having it own me ~ was more a literary pursuit than a life’s commitment. It was a casual interest in the affaire between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West that lead me to read Vita’s old gardening columns she had written for the Observer the last fifteen years of her life. I was charmed with the confessional, confidence building voice she used to describe this world that held such unparalleled delights. Vita moved plants around like they were so much furniture in a drawing room. She made mistakes each season but took them in stride, and did not find any contradiction in a natural world that was both ruthless yet forgiving. The first time I visited her estate at Sissinghurst I knew I had found a road map of what it might be like to create art out of nature. That it would take the rest of my life to become good at it was not beside the point. It was the point.

If you have yet to fall into a garden’s spell, there is no time like the present. Do not be dissuaded by how little you know or how small your plot…Get your hands dirty. Fill your lungs with the loamy smell of soil. Order seed catalogues and leave them by your bed. Talk to strangers in the nursery that you find hanging around plants you think you might like to grow. Read gardening journals by great writers. Never become competitive ~ gardening is not a sport. The only thing you are competing against is the voice inside your head that wants to know what’s taking so long. Tell it to shut up. Unlike everything else in life where time really is stacked against you, in your garden the return of a season brings with it an abiding optimism that instant gratification can never give. Gardens are Valium in landscape form, bringing with them Marvell’s “delicious solitude,” where the mind, “withdraws into it’s happiness,” and the world, and your role in it, will fall into place.

Happy Digging.

Speed Dating with Fork & Shovel in Healdsburg

(originally posted March 3, 2010)

Writing about gardens last week all my reference points seemed to be pulling from old friends and dead writers? A bit maudlin, no? Luckily, on Tuesday night Barndiva hosted Fork & Shovel’s annual get-together ~ a speed dating evening between the county’s best sustainable farmers and the chefs who rely on them. It was (excuse me for tempting fate) a hopeful evening in the extreme. Screw maudlin.

Fork & Shovel is primarily an Internet grange, but once a year we face off, flirting shamelessly about our varieties, heirlooms and breeds. A barn dance, without the music. A chance to build a definition of sustainable that can’t be co-opted. This is a crowd that doesn’t just know its food, it grows its food. Then cooks it.

But we really do live in different time zones. Think the Early Bird & the Owl on bio-dynamic crack.

The evening started a bit awkwardly ~ with everyone soaked from the rain and fumbling with name tags with either a fork or a shovel stamped on them. There were loads of new (young) faces. Luckily, Spencer had filled a huge punchbowl with one of his vodka and blood orange concoctions (this one held about 80 portions) and before long the drink wasn’t the only thing flowing. The evening officially began with a hilarious improv between Deborah Walton (Canvas Ranch) and Sondra Bernstein (Girl an the Fig) ~ issues of pricing, and delivery and how much mud a commercial kitchen can handle were deftly raised, then put to one side as farmers took to the podium, one by one. They had 30 seconds to charm chefs, tiny pencils hovering above Fork & Shovel pads.

John had brought the wood burning Rosso oven and before long crispy-edged pizzas laden with examples of the produce we’d just heard farmers singing the praises of started arriving on the bar. Even Mr. Hales, who is not known to enjoy anything he can’t eat with a knife and fork, seemed to be tasting one of each. (One of the nicer moments of the evening for me was sharing the Rosso energy under the makeshift tent during a sudden deluge ~ the smell of warm crust, wild mushrooms, arugula, chorizo, fontina was transporting).

We drank many bottles of wine ~ this is a great BYOB crowd ~ they bring it and they drink it. Bellwether contributed three gorgeous mounds of their new ricotta to taste, there was Big Dream Ranch Honey, Apple Farm Cider and Syrup and toward the end of the evening Doug Lipton opened bottles of his exquisite Home Ranch ’07 Muscat Blanc. If all that weren’t enough, everyone brought an old fashioned dessert ~ double stacked platters of cookies and fruit bars, spice cakes, cheese cakes, Hungarian “these are the walnuts I grow” layer cakes. Somewhere in heaven, Fanny Farmer was smiling down.

We are a Gossipy crowd: doll sheep, who already has tomato starts in the ground (lots of dubious eyebrow raising), how long before Sofia’s plow horses would be fully trained, and whoa, what to make of the sudden interest in classes on how to butcher whole animals? By the end of the evening Barndiva’s contract planting list had doubled, we had finally made it onto Liam Gallagher’s baby lamb allocation list, Karen agreed (though I doubt she will remember) to sell us a pig and do a cooking class with it in the new studio space, and I had collected the names of several goat farmers that swore they would serial call Chef Ryan. (My repeated efforts to bring this lean, light on the land source of protein to Barndiva’s menus have not, up to now, been successful.)

Fork & Shovel is about farmers and chefs working together to create an honorable business model that brings our enthusiasm to the public through increased sales. But we also share a landscape, a view. We are all trying to survive, to thrive even, in this difficult recession, growing beautiful food and cooking it with commitment and passion. We ended the evening with a promise to launch a series of First Sunday Fork & Shovel Dinners across the county.

I suppose maudlin serves a purpose, but what keeps me going in this business does not reside in looking backward. It is knowing that everything these farmers plant tomorrow, any animal they raise, might eventually land on a plate somewhere in my kitchen, eye to eye with Chef Ryan, to be blessed by his talent before being sent out for you to devour in the dining room. “Eat the view” is the most heartening three words in my vocabulary.

Here is the list of Barndiva’s fellow speed daters on Feb. 23, 2010.

Reminder: even if you were born to it and have your parent's experience to pull on, farming is crazy hard work with very few pots of gold at the end of the day. (Pots of poop is more like it. Which is gold to them). Support these sustainable farmers by frequenting the talented chefs who feature their food.

(The list below represents about half our membership. For a full list, visit www.forkandshovel.com and become a supporting member!)

Fork & Shovel Farmers who speed dated Tuesday Feb. 23 @ Barndiva

Bellwether Farms, Big Dream Ranch, Blankety Blank Farms, Canvas Ranch, Cultivating Impact, De Vero, Dragonfly, Early Girl Farms, Eastside Farm, Foggy River Farm, Gleason Ranch, Gretchen Giles (editor of The Bohemian), Healdsburg Eggs, Home Farm, Jim Leonardis Organics, Linda Peterson (representing Farm-Link), Mendocino Organics, Mix, Nana Mae Organics, Owen Family Farm, Oliver’s Market, Paula Downing (F&S Steering Committee, SR and Sebastapol Farmers Market Director), Quetzal, Sky Saddle, Sonoma Meat Buying Club, The Philo Apple Farm,Weed Farm

List of Restaurants Chefs they flirted unabashedly with:

Barndiva, Boon Eat & Drink, Cyrus, Dry Creek Kitchen, Inn at the Tides, Jimtown, Mateo Granados Catering, Mayacamas, Nick’s Cove, Park Ave Catering, Ralph’s Bistro, Relish Culinary School, Rosso Pizzeria and Wine Bar, Santi, The Girl & the Fig/ ESTATE/ The Girl & The Fig Cafe, Vintage Valley Catering, Zazu, Zin

All text and photography, Jil Hales (unless otherwise noted)