These pages contain information for the various internet (and other) things I have been working on over the years. They help me keep track of projects as well as explain those projects to others who express an interest. The arrangement of the pages may change over time and I am also in the process of migrating information from other web entities I have used for this purpose in the past.
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.
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).
Our friends, Olivier Filippi and his wife Clara, owners of a well-known nursery in the South of France, were to visit us in California during the month of June. While here, I asked if Olivier would like to speak to our local California Horticultural Society. He was very happy at the opportunity to meet so many gardeners and address them regarding his ideas and the plants he was growing in his nursery.
There was enough lead time to get him onto the speaker schedule and the society was pleased to be able to feature someone traveling from so far (they bumped up their normally very modest stipend). Everything seemed so easy to arrange . . .
I was asked to introduce Olivier to the group – most of whom were unfamiliar with his work and prestige among European gardeners. I thought this would be simple, that is until I mounted the stage and started to describe my friend, who was sitting right in front of me. Stage fright was not a problem – I had addressed this crown many times before and was already a seasoned speaker myself. No, it was trying to find the appropriate words to describe the important work Olivier was doing. I suddenly felt I would get it wrong, miss-speak, or I might even offend him! I nearly froze!! I was so surprised!
How I managed to get through it, I am not sure, but Olivier thanked me later so I must not have messed up very badly. It was interesting to see these California gardeners reacting to Olivier talk (he spoke mainly on Cistus species and cultivars that are good garden subjects). He showed many beautiful slides of his test garden where he evaluates plants. The audience was clearly impressed with how well these plants looked, so compact and well-formed, and interrupted him about what horticultural techniques he used to get them to look that way.
Olivier was confused at first – he did not understand the questions: “When do you prune?”, “What sort of fertilizers do you use?”, etc. I smiled in the dark, understanding the problem. Finally, he caught on also. “Oh! I don’t water this garden.” “What do you mean?!” several audience members said all at once. “I don’t believe in watering gardens. I just let them grow and if they fail to thrive on natural rainfall, then we do not carry them in the nursery.” Suddenly there was a lot of mumbling around me. Clearly this was hard to many of them to comprehend.
Many gardeners don’t even consider for a moment that plants would be able to fend for themselves after being planted. This was one of the messages I had been trying to convey to the group for some time now and here they were hearing it from an important nurseryman with an international reputation. I know many of the society members found ways to discount Olivier’s statements, but it does seem that at least of few started to think in this way at last.
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.
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!
More posters I created for the California Horticultural Society’s speaker series, this time for 1993. (see my post of the 1991 series for more information)
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!!
More posters I created for the California Horticultural Society’s speaker series, this time for 1992. (see my post of the 1991 series for more information)
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).
One of my earliest memories is of my grandmother’s garden. She lived in Fresno and we often spent weeks during summer at her house. Our home was in Santa Clara, which was fairly moderate during the warmer months due to the occasional coastal fog creeping over the Santa Cruz mountains. Fresno in the summer seemed almost too hot to support life!
This one morning I recall that the air conditioning was already at full-bore. My older brother and sister were watching cartoon reruns on the television. My brother just younger was not around, nor were my parents, so I expect this was one of those times when James was ‘sickly’, which would place my age around 3-4 years. I was a big boy already and always wanting to explore the world. Disliking the tin-tasting air-condition air in the house, I was sneaking out into the back yard through the door off the kitchen.
I could just reach and turn the handle, opening it enough to slip through and pull it closed. The threshold was a step up from the landing, and as I slipped down, I stared up at the doorknob out of my reach, realizing that I might not be able to get back into the house, now that the door was shut!
As I turned to look around me, I was struck by how much hotter it was than I had imagined! The bright sun was piercing through the vine covering a screen of diagonal lath shading one side of the landing. This vine I learned many years later was star jasmine, Trachelospermum jasminoides. I distinctly recall its leathery leaves and almost over-powering fragrance (to this day, my nose still is ‘assaulted’ by this type of fragrance).
I sat on the top step of the short flight of stairs to the yard level and gazed longingly at the destination I had in mind – the covered porch off the side of the garage in the rear. The white-hot concrete driveway lead to the shadowed oasis with its couch swing and cool shade. I looked down at my brand new nickle ‘flip-flops’, our standard footwear during the summer. The flimsy rubber I was sure would immediately melt if I set foot on the hot pavement, leaving me to scorch my bare feet!
I looked out over the yard. Unlike our garden at home, there was no lawn, no open space – every square foot of soil supported a number of plants clambering over each other. To the left of where I was sitting, was a gravel path wandering into the undergrowth. Brick-lined beds on either scarcely contained the riot of plants. Amid the overgrown stems arching over this walkway from either side there was an ample amount of shaded parts. Though it was a much longer route – circling the back of the house and the far side of the yard – I knew it ultimately would bring me to my desired place of rest.
As I pushed my way through the leafy foliage, I became intimately acquainted with each plant. Some were delicate but thorny (e.g. Asparagus setaceus), others smelly (e.g. tomato plants), some fragrant (an old fashioned form of Sweet Alyssum, Lobularia maritima). Somehow, I can visually recall all of these plants and many others I saw as a child, only learning their actual names many years later.
In the sunnier central section of the garden, I can remember a Kumquat (Fortunella japonica) with its small oval fruits and a very strange shaped citrus that might have been an Etrog (Citrus medica), though I can’t imagine why a Pennsylvannia Dutch woman from Illinois would be growing a fruit used in traditional Jewish festivals! The supple stems of Butcher’s Broom (Ruscus hypoglossum) arched into the pathway at one point, with their curious little flowers sprouting from the center of a ‘leaf’ (actually a flatted stem).
With such an interesting array of unusual plants, my grandmother was obviously quite the plants-woman! I was just beginning to become interested in plant life when she passed beyond our reach. Many times I have wished that she could have been around to teach me what she knew about our shared passion. You might be wondering how I made it out of my grandma’s garden – well, I never did, I continue to wander there to this day!
Seán A O'Hara 