See you soon August!

Greetings, Hortus friends and fans!

I hope this summer season is treating you all well. For me, I can’t even believe August is around the corner, bringing with it slightly shorter days, some cooler evenings, tons of food, crickets and katydids at night, my birthday, and a big part of the editing process done for our new book, “Hidden Gems for the Home Landscape”, due out March 2027.

Here are a few events happening at Hortus that I want you to know about!

August 1st - Embroidery Class at Hortus with Flax Fiber Farm’s Adrienne Carlile.

An exploration of plants through embroidery, this class consists of a walk through the arboretum, looking closely at some plants, a show-and-tell of different stitch techniques and how to use them for plant designs, and the chance to either design your own plant mini-badge or stitch a pre-designed native flower! Suitable for beginners and advanced embroiderers alike, this is a class about learning how to look at plants and translate their details into stitches.

This class is limited to 10 people.

For more info visit here.

August 9th - Hortus is offering a Native Tour through the Arboretum. Come join us for a 2-hour walk looking at and learning about beautiful ornamental & edible native plants. Click here for tickets.

August 16th - Luke Sarrantonio will be back teaching 2 very different fungi classes at Hortus! We are so lucky to have Luke back teaching two very different classes; both are for all levels of interest. Bring a bagged lunch and picnic here and take both his classes.

Relationships with Fungi… It can seem complicated. For more information, click here.

Forest and Fungi Ecology Walk – Identification and Documentation. For more information, click here.

Are you growing berries? If you have the space and you aren’t, I hope to convince you that maybe you should! Why, you may ask since they can be easily bought at not just your local farmers market, supermarket and even box stores like Walmart, Target and Costco. If you know me you know my aversion to clamshells (not the ones from the beach), filled with berries. Sure, not everyone has the space to grow brambles, and not everyone wants to eat “in season” either. But for those of you who can may I suggest growing some thornless blackberries- a variety like ‘Chester’, ‘Arapaho’ or my favorite ‘Triple Crown’. Most berries are picked way before they are ripe and often are not fully ready for your mouth by the time you’re ready to eat them maybe a few are ripe, while others are on the way to becoming a science project.

This plant is literally dripping with fruit!

Have you ever tried a black raspberry? Once more popular than the ubiquitous red raspberry, these very special fruits are higher in antioxidants than their red relatives and sadly not available at even your local farmer’s market (please correct me if I’m wrong!) It’s probably one of my favorite of all fruits and relatively easy to care for if pruned correctly and given compost early in the season.

I love red raspberries as well, and although admittedly have not tried out tons of different varieties over time because the hardworking variety ‘Caroline’ not only has that quintessential raspberry flavor, the berries are everbearing, large and hang like jewels on almost thornless canes.

If you look closely at the photo below you will notice small “hairs” on the berry. In a previous life I did some foodstyling and was tasked with pulling them out (they are actually the stamens).

For those newer subscribers: Here’s an earlier post that goes into my background a bit which was the reason I started gardening..

Floraporn & foodporn

·

January 1, 2025

As a new year rolls in, most of us are now gaining a few extra seconds a day, and probably some extra calories as major physical gardening chores slow down and for some, even stop. Plant catalogs have been arriving since before Thanksgiving, and if my fingers counted for exerting calories for all of my page-turning, I’d be pretty fit! Diving deep into …

Here’s a super interesting read by the talented food writer Julia Moskin who does a deep dive into the raspberry which she says can be found all over the world. Funny enough I know Watsonville well, the home of Driscoll berries, since my husband Scott was born and raised there. If you want to dig even deeper into all things Rubus - pull out our book ‘Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts’. If you don’t have a copy it can be easily purchased at any fine bookstore.

Come visit the arboretum! We are open on weekends from 10am -4pm. Lots to see including two gorgeous sculptures by the wife-husband team behind Nervous System.

Thanks for reading along. I hope this finds you enjoying whatever outdoor space you find yourself in.

See you in the garden,

Allyson