Olivier Filippi speaks to CalHort

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.

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.