The first MGS meeting in California!!

I came across this e-mail while searching the Medit-Plants e-mail forum archives and thought it would be best to let is speak for itself here.  The event being discussed was the beginning of the Northern California Branch of The Mediterranean Garden Society.

Note that there is mention of a new MGS website – with the help and encouragement of Hugo Latymer, I had created the first web presence for the Society within the website we were building as part of the Medit-Plant initiative.

To: medit-plants@ucdavis.edu
Subject: Successful MGS meeting last week
From: “Sean A. O’Hara”
Date: Mon, 05 Oct 1998 13:21:07 -0700

Fellow Medit-Plants-persons –

As previously announced, there was a Mediterranean Garden Society meeting here in the S.F. Bay Area last week – the fist of its kind in California. Turns out that I had to lead more of the meeting than I had previously imagined, but it went very well in any case. 😉 There were some very notable people in attendance – Heidi Gildemeister, the President from Mallorca, Spain; Joan Tesei from Italy; Dick Turner & George Waters, the current and retired editors of Pacific Horticulture respectively; Bill Grant from the UCSC Arboretum; Warren Roberts & Mary Burke from the UC Davis Arboretum, Elly Bade & Peter Klement from the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden; Peter Dallman, author of the new book Plant Life in the World’s Mediterranean Climates; Charmain Giuliani, a teacher at Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco; Glen Keator, author of many books on native plants; Ernie Wasson who you know from Medit-Plants and The Bay Area Gardener web site, Katherine Greenberg, author and garden designer; and other enthusiastic horticulturists interested in the MGS.

It was a great ‘kick-off’ meeting and much was learned through discussion and questionnaire. There will be other events in the near future, likely about every quarter, so there will be other opportunities to come and find out more about this new, well-connected, and important group. If you haven’t already, consider joining the Mediterranean Garden Society which will help you keep informed about upcoming events. If some of you are interested in attending a future event to find out more, please let me know and I will add you to the mailing list. To provide diversity and more opportunity to members in outlying areas, we are planning each event in a different part of the Bay Area – if you have suggestions, we’d like to hear them

Right now, this new, informal ‘Chapter’ of the Society is very free form and casual, until we gather more members and organize more officially. So it is a good time to ‘get in on the ground floor’ and help mold the group to meet specific needs you might feel are lacking in Northern California’s horticultural community.

regards,
Sean O.

Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 17:18:48 -0700
To: medit-plants@ucdavis.edu
From: “Sean A. O’Hara” <sean.ohara@poboxes.com>
Subject: the first MGS meeting in California!!

Fellow Medit-Planters –

At the end of September, the current Mediterranean Garden Society president, Heidi Gildemeister, will be visiting the Bay Area as a speaker at the ‘Gardening Under Mediterranean Skies’ symposium, hosted by Pacific Horticulture and Strybing Arboretum.

While she is here, she has requested the opportunity to meet and address the local MGS membership. To accommodate her during her short visit, a meeting has been scheduled to take place in Berkeley on Monday morning, September 28th, from 10am-noon. This is the first meeting of MGS membership in California (there is also a Southern California meeting scheduled for October 10th, after she speaks at the L.A. Garden Show). The meeting is free to all, interested parties are welcome to attend. There will be light refreshments, Heidi will address the group, we will have all of the MGS Journals on hand to view, and a demonstration of the new MGS Web Site is planned.

To RSVP or for more information, contact Katherine Greenberg or myself before Sept. 21st – we need to know the number of people attending as the meeting room has limited accommodation.

This is an exciting opportunity to get to know more about the MGS and meet the local membership. There will be the opportunity to sign up for membership during the meeting.

Medit-Plants e-mail forum

medit-plants

Around this time (summer 1995), I found a host institution for a ‘listserv’ e-mail forum idea I had a year or so before.  A professor at UC Davis decided that an e-mail discussion group focused on the mediterranean climates of the world was a good augment to their Ornamental Horticulture curriculum.  Thus began the Medit-Plants listserv.

The initial e-mail thread has apparently been lost (if anyone find messages before the start of 1997, please contact me!), but most of the messages have been archived on the Hort.net site, where they can be browsed or searched.  It is still a wealth of information.

For those unfamiliar with e-mail listservs – basically you send an e-mail to an address with specific commands to ‘subscribe’ you to the list; then whenever someone sends a message to the group address, all subscribers receive a copy.  In current technology, you might think of it as an expanded form of Twitter, where you could ‘follow’ something but what you received was not limited to 140 characters!  It was a true discussion and many people, at various levels of expertise, asked each other questions, talked about their experiences, etc.

It was here that I met so many interesting people – Olivier Filippi, Gary Matson, Hugo Latymer, and many others.  They each had their own projects and interests that dovetailed into mine, and we discussed many interesting ideas and approaches to furthering all of our efforts.

As moderator, I would occasionally need to intervene and lay out rules of etiquette, etc.  I would even sometimes need to remove someone from the list of subscribers.  But by and large, it was a peaceful group or 300-400 people at any given moment.  As of 2016, this e-mail forum is still in existence, but it has become dormant.  This type of discussion now takes place in the mediterranean climate gardening Facebook group, which I started in 2013.

Titan arum seedlings

titanum-seedlings

I was not expecting a package, and the ‘sender’ label was somewhat damaged so I could not quite make out who it might be from. We were just leaving the house for the rest of the day so I set it aside to open later. Next morning, as I was drinking my tea, I found it again beneath a short stack of yesterday’s mail on the dining room table. Fairly light weight, I opened it carefully, uncertain of what I might find inside. A gradual unpacking of the mystery parcel produced a single plastic, zip-lock bag full of strange, mushy fruits, with a simple hand-written label of ‘A. titanum‘.

Suddenly I recalled my meeting with Jim Symon. Obviously during his recent visit to Sumatra with David Attenborough, he had been able to harvest some fruit of this elusive botanical rarity. And here they were now, in my hands!! I was stunned. I had no idea this might happen. I also felt I was in no position to shoulder the burden and responsibility conferred with the possession of these seeds!

I immediately started calling all of the local botanical institutions I could think of – UC Berkeley Botanical Garden, Strybing Arboretum, UC Davis Arboretum, etc. Explaining that I had received these seeds from Jim Symon, the person on the other end of the line would often say something like “Oh yes, we’ve received ours as well – isn’t it exciting!” Looked like Jim had organized a major distribution of the Amorphopallus seeds. Soon e-mail discussions were also humming with various announcements of receipt of seeds, and encouragement to all recipients to keep all informed of the progress of growing them.

Still trying to pass this precious burden along, I continued to make calls but was still unable to find anyone who would be willing to take responsibility. Little was known about this plant in the mid-90s and I am sure that even the most eager horticulturists were as daunted as I regarding how to successfully sprout such seeds. Visits to the expansive UC Berkeley Libraries (these were pre-Google days) produced little information about how to grow even this plant, much less grow it from seed.

img_titan
The life cycle and flowering of Amorphophallus titanum, courtesy of UC Davis.  Based on their experience growing them from Jim Symon’s seed distribution.

Getting busy at work, the package sat on my desk and was eventually buried under paperwork. About a month or two later, while cleaning up my work space, I rediscovered the package! What had I done!! Now the zip-lock bag seemed to have turned into black slime. They are ruined, I thought. Noticing an expired potted houseplant on my desk (something I tried to save for a co-worker), I pulled its withered stem, broke up the dry soil, and squeezed the black ‘goo’ onto the soil surface, watering it in well. Maybe one or two of the seeds might have a chance.

Within days, seedlings came up like grass!! Oh no! Now I had almost a hundred little plantlets to care for!! They grew quickly and soon needed transplanting into individual small pots. The little nursery of seedlings attracted little notice from my work mates – they were familiar with my botanical exploits and often called me the ‘staff botanist’. But as the numerous larger potted specimens of the same plant increased in size, inquiries began. Ever the educator, I created a single page of information about these plants and explained how they came to be in my possession.

The name Amorphophallus of course generated some snickering, but of more concern to those in the office was the potentially smelly, large flowering! I continued to give away individual plants to any horticultural types I could find that showed enthusiasm, some of whom traveled from distant cities within the San Francisco Bay Area to pick up their new charges. I even handed one off via the local Bart station (the recipient did not even leave the paid area of the system – I handed it to him over the dividing fence while we chatted face to face!).

Office mates were relieved to see the shear number of plants in the office diminish, but the longer they lingered in our shared space (my wife refused to allow me to bring them into our home!), the more they became concerned about the eventual flowering. I assured them that it would take a number of years for this to happen and that I planned to find homes for those remaining.  Today, there is regular news about the flowering of one of these plants at this or that institution, offering the public a chance to see (and smell) the even for themselves.

Just before I handed off the final two plants, I saw an announcement from the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden of a special event featuring an auction of some of their seedlings, starting at $200 each!

CalHort ad art

In 1992, I was asked to come up with a new Pacific Horticulture ad for the California Horticultural Society.  The society was getting ready to celebrate their 60th anniversary (in 1993).  As an active member during this time, I created new ad art as a member gift to the society.  I still have the Pacific Horticulture issue where I apparently took notes on the creation of the new ad – text to be modified, additions, subtractions.

calhort-ad-smaller

Looking over other current ads in the magazine, I considered an approach that would cause the new add to distinguish itself in relation to other page content.  The old add was relatively nondescript with a mere bulleted list of reasons to join the group.  While this was not to change, I wanted more graphic appeal.

I chose a stylized representation of Sollya (now Billardiera) heterophylla, which was a relatively new plant in local gardens at the time.  I made the flowers white – there is a white form of this species – and the foliage black, to increase the graphic contrast.  This ad art was done in the old style of cut-and-paste, with the text produced using a computer mark-up language and pasted right onto the drawing.  The line border with rounded edges was done by the magazine’s ad art group using their standard template.

This ad ran in Pacific Horticulture from 1993-2003.  I recall that it was assumed to contribute to a rise in membership during the beginning of the period.  Even during its final year, it was always easy to spot in the publication, in spite of many neighboring ads having been ‘improved’ during that time.

Meeting Jim Symon

jimsymon1993
David Attenborough (left), Jim Symon (front), Wilbert Hetterscheid (rear), and an Amorphophallus titanum inflorescence, in Sumatra in 1993

I had never actually been in the expensive Seacliff neighborhood of San Francisco, so as I drove down its wide boulevards surrounded by large, mansion-like homes, it was somewhat intimidating. As I checked the house numbers carefully, I was passed by a private security patrol car (I am sure that my small Honda hatchback was not typical of the vehicles normally seen on these streets).

Walking up to Jim Symon’s house – as stately as any other on the block, in spite of an unkempt yard – I saw the front door open and an arm wave me inside. As I entered the foyer and closed the door, I could hear a voice talking on the phone. Following the sound, through several rooms, I came into a spacious kitchen cluttered with piles of papers, folders, mailed packages. In a corner I spotted Jim Symon, the cordless landline phone held to his face by his shoulder as he used both hands to sort through one of the stacks of paper. The person on the other end of the line he addressed as “David” – I was to learn much later in my visit that this was none other than Sir David Attenborough, the famous English broadcaster and naturalist.

I had found Jim’s phone number and called him out of the blue at the encouragement of various Aroid enthusiasts I was in touch with through an e-mail discussion group. When they realized that I was in California, and very near San Francisco, they asked if I might contact Mr. Symon about his passionate work relating to the giant titan arum, Amorphophallus titanum. This rare Sumatran bulb was little known at the time even within its native haunts. Jim became nearly obsessed with this strange plant years before and felt it was in danger of extinction due to over-collecting of wild bulbs for use in cosmetics and candies.

I had my list of questions at the ready, but there was not one moment in which I was in control of this interview. Jim peppered me with random queries about myself, my own interest in plants, my experiences, my family. The entire time we talked, he would walk to one corner of the room and pull a sheet of paper off a fax machine, scribble something on it, and then feed it back into the machine. While still conversing with me, he then would walk over to a chess board and make a move, then return to the counter where we were sitting, drinking coffee. He was non-stop.

Once while he excused himself to take another phone call, I stretched my feet a bit walking around the kitchen. By the fax machine was a pile of papers with handwritten comments – some in blue ink, others in faxed ink. Apparently, Jim and someone named Wilbert had not only been playing chess via this fax machine, they had also been having a separate conversation about some tropical Aroid species unknown to me! [this was before e-mail was a common mode of communication]

After an hour or more, I excused myself and thanked him for the interview. He asked for my contact information, which I happily gave him. I expected I might receive future information about his plans to travel again to Sumatra, this time with David Attenborough to film a segment for his “Secret Life of Plants” TV series. What I got instead was quite a surprise!!

CalHort poster art – 1991

During one of the CalHort meetings, I heard that they were looking for someone to take over the job of producing posters for the monthly meetings.  These posters were then sent to various nurseries, libraries and other public place throughout the San Francisco Bay Area to publicize the upcoming speaker program.  Having done a lot of graphic design in the past decade or more, I thought it seemed like something I could contribute.

This kind of event announcement might seem strange today – in the age of the online event calendars, e-mailing lists, Facebook events – but that is how we still did things during the early 1990s.  Google and the internet as we now know it did not even start until later in the 1990s, and even then most people were still unaware of the emerging online world.

After I volunteered, I learned what else apparently went with the task!  Not only was I to design and create the poster, I also had to chase down the information for each speaker program – usually directly from the speaker.  This part I actually found interesting – it was an opportunity to connect one-on-one with someone who had something valuable to share with others.  For the most part, all of them were relatively pleasant to work with, though occasionally their busy schedules made contact difficult.

The other part of the process I only became aware of after I finished my first poster.  It was only then that I was informed that I was in charge of the printing of the poster and mailing labels, preparing them for mailing, and then actually mailing them using our non-profit USPS code at a specific post office in San Francisco!  Managing the mailing list was unexpected, but again, it gave me the location of many nurseries I had never visited.  I also had the opportunity to update this list with many other institutions that I knew would welcome information about these meetings.

The artwork for this posters was largely done by hand.  I was able to produce most of the text (except the large font left sidebar CALHORT SOCIETY, which was hand-drawn) using a mark-up language – i.e. you had to send it to a mainframe computer to process and then it had to print before you knew if it was what you wanted.  The artwork was executed using various forms of cut-and-paste (it the fully literal sense!) methods I had been using for years.

Below are two of the early posters I did at the end of 1991 (I continued producing and distributing these speaker program announcements through 1992 & 1993).

The EB Kitchen Tour

Both of our children attended the local French-American – l’Ecole Bilingue de Berkeley. We enjoyed being part of that community and would volunteer at times to help with daily activities or fundraising.

The fact that I had graphic arts experience slipped out at a parent meeting and I was immediately made aware that there was a need to help produce various materials for the annual Kitchen Tour – a well-regarded event that was one of the first in the Bay Area.

I started by doing drawings of the various kitchens that would be on the tour as well as other locations that were part of the event. I enjoyed meeting the home owners well ahead of the tour date. It was usually pretty clear to me what the best viewing angle would be for each kitchen and I took copious photos (using a film camera) which I collaged together (physically) to give me perspective reference points for my final drawing. It was fun to figure it all out and execute these interior views. Here are some of my favorites.

Wedding in the redwoods

sanborn-skyline-redwoods

My wife and I were married in a natural circle of redwood trees at Sanborn Skyline Park, on Saturday, August 20th, 1977.  I remember clearly when we asked the rangers on duty how to reserve this spot, they responded “Wait, you want to get married here?”  At that time, this was merely a circle of trees adjacent to a small parking lot – no pathways, just bare dirt covered in redwood duff.  They just said “go for it!” and all we needed to do what give them the date (i.e. no charge!!).

Redwood circles are the natural occurrence of how Sequoia sempervirens grows.  Older trees regularly sprout shoots at their base, which often grow into full sized trees as the original tree declines.  Eventually, over a long period, this habit can create a circle of trees that are all clones of the original.  The circle at this park is an almost perfect example.  We were able to fit just under 200 folding chairs into the open, cathedral-like space in the center, with plenty of room for the wedding party at one end.

Our guest were surprised when they arrived at the location – faced with a large sign talking about hike-in campsites, they all looked down at their fancy shoes!!  Relief was universal when it was explained that the only ‘hike’ required was a 30ft to the side of the parking lot.  It was a lovely ceremony and a once-in-a-lifetime moment for many of my wife’s family who had traveled from the Caribbean for the event!

Having told this story periodically over a couple of decades, I thought I should check in with the park rangers to see if anyone else ever decided to do a wedding at this locale.  I found the phone number and rang them up one afternoon.  “Oh yes, we have weddings here all the time, in fact we have a wedding planner on site, a reception area with lots of picnic tables, changing rooms for the bridal party, . . .” (etc., etc.)

Huh.  Guess we were trendsetters!