Garden Tour Time!
“Now it’s time to build out the four major gardens near the entrance,” Max told me, “and finish the greenhouse, and get an admission kiosk set up.” Much of this will be accomplished with a grant from Coast Central Credit Union, and once it’s done, the garden will — at long last — start to walk and talk like a botanical garden. The gardens will be lush and mature. They’ll charge admission. They’ll have plant sales and classes in the greenhouse. A trail system, which is underway now, will allow people to more easily wander through a wider swath of the garden. Then, over the years, the rest of the 44-acre site can be planted in accordance with the design they’ve already laid out.
Whew. It’s nice to see this thing finally take off. Max looks to the Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden for inspiration. “They get 60,000 visitors a year through that garden,” he said. “That’s a huge amount of economic activity.” Getting just a fraction of that kind of tourism through the garden would be a big accomplishment, but there’s more to do first, including launching a capital campaign to fund the various phases of construction and expanding the garden’s membership to help support its day-to-day operation. Much of this will be kicked off in September, when they plan a gala event in the greenhouse, the grand opening of the ornamental terrace garden, and a celebration of the ‘soft opening’ of the garden to the public.
“But through it all,” Max said, “we want to continue our educational mission.” With the garden located right next to College of the Redwoods, there are plenty of opportunities for classes, workshops and experiments on the garden’s grounds. If you’ve got ideas, time or resources to contribute, I’m sure Max would love to hear from you. He’ll be at the Bayside Grange on the day of the garden tour, so get over there and introduce yourself. As I travel the country and visit botanical gardens, I’m constantly reminded that most botanical gardens get their start when a wealthy plant lover endows their estate or their fortune for the purpose of starting a garden. It’s unusual to do what we’ve done here in Humboldt — to bootstrap the thing together, hold plant sales and fundraisers, and make something out of nothing. But it’s coming together at last, in its own idiosyncratic Lost Coast style.
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STAFF PICK / outdoors / 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Meet at Pacific Union School. Help remove non-native invasives at the Lanphere Dunes Unit of the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Tools and gloves provided, wear work clothes and bring water. Carpool to the protected site. 444-1397.
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Organic Gardening Seminar
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ONE Comments
Comment / By Gardener fan / June 14, 2009, 3:08 p.m.
thanks for the detailed coverage of the garden tour and the botanical garden. However, Amy chose to spend one whole paragraph on the business background of Max Abrahamsen, the new botanical gardens director… but said nothing about Terry Kramer, the on-site gardener. The fact that Terry Kramer wrote the Journal’s gardening column years before Amy did, that she has written the gardening column for the Times-Standard for 2 decades, and that she is a trained horticulturalist, should have warranted at least a little paragraph, and the interest of Journal readers.