The mediterranean climate gardening FB group

On March 6th, 2013, I created a new Facebook group called mediterranean climate gardening.  I thought it might be a good adjunct to the Medit-Plants e-mail forum, but it became an entity in itself!  (who knew!)  The nice thing about this group is that once you join, you can see all of the group’s activity – new and old.  And this content can be searched!  Participants range from total plant nerds, professionals in the landscape industry, to novices (and everything in between).  The focus of posts just needs to be centered on the challenges, problems, and advantages of gardening in one of the world’s mediterranean climates.

While there are some who feel their climate is similar to a scientifically designated mediterranean climate, discussion should not be about why that might be true.  But those members are welcome to glean what they might find useful.

As of the end of 2016, the number of members is over 2,000!!  And still growing!  There are many members from California, southern Europe, Australia, and even some from South Africa.

Flickr photo sharing

In the Spring of 2006, I got my first digital camera.  I had been taking pictures for years, but developing film/slides was cumbersome and limited the use of my camera.  As with many people, going digital changed everything!

Looking for an online place to share my photos, I gave Flickr a try.  I found the version available in 2006 easy to use and was excited to also find that there were photo sharing groups and communities as well!  It seemed that many plant people had already found Flickr and where discussing various types of rare plants and showing photos of gardens, etc.  I joined in and even started a few groups of my own.

I was very active on Flickr for a number of years.  Then, in 2013, Flickr made radical changes to their platform.  I found it very cumbersome to use and ‘high bandwidth’.  It also more or less pushed many of the things I enjoyed about Flickr into the background.  I used it less and less.  I rarely use it today (2017) but my account is still active.

I regularly get notifications that my photos on Flickr are marked as a ‘favorite’ by other people, and my number of ‘followers’ increases – all this in spite of my inactivity.  I may try to get back to using this platform for my photos, but not before I upgrade my internet connection (something I plan to do soon anyway).

Medit-Plants e-mail forum

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

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.

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!

Meeting Jim Symon

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!!