The Center for Urban Horticulture

Today my hat's off to Dave Fujino, Executive Director of The Center
For Urban Horticulture (CFUH) at UC Davis.

Their mission is to help develop more sustainable gardens, landscapes,
and public parks with timely horticultural information. They're doing
this with partners in academia, industry, and the public, with groups and
institutions like UC Cooperative Extension, Master Gardeners, the
College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences at UCDavis,
California Department of Food and Agriculture, American Nursery and
Landscape Association, United States Department of Agriculture,
California Garden Clubs, and The Nature Conservancy.

They have the right people sitting at the table and they've
introduced a new program called The Arboretum All-Stars, a
list of 100 plants that are drought tolerant, not chemical dependent,
and suitable for home and commercial gardens in our great dry state.
Many of these plants aren't currently available at retail/wholesale
nurseries.

One of the goals of CFUH is to help make these All-Stars more available
to the public. They are also working with Master Gardeners of
California to get feedback on what kinds of gardening tips they
might share after gardening with these plants.

I met Dave this week at Ladies Night Out at Summerwinds Nursery in San
Jose. His booth was next to mine where he was promoting his All Stars.
Mike Craib, from Suncrest Nurseries, and I were promoting gardening
with and growing California natives.

Although this blog is a praise to CFUH, I cannot hide my
disappointment that of his list of 100, only a third were native
plants. And nowhere in their announcement of this program were the
phrases "ecology-based gardening" or "native plant communities" or
"gardening for your local soils, climate, and wildlife" mentioned.

For those of us working every day to persuade folks that the most
sustainable gardening approach is with natives, it is a discouraging
development. It is especially important to emphasize to gardeners and
growers alike that the most sustainable and drought-tolerant plants
are those that have evolved in the local soils and climate. These are
the plants that are members of our diversified local plant communities
from all the regions of California.

Even though a plant from one of the four other Mediterranean regions in
the world may be drought tolerant, it has been removed from its own
ecosystem and introduced into ours. Gardening with plants from other
ecosystems is not the most sustainable model for our future health or
the future health of the planet. Somehow gardeners feel they are
giving up something intangible like beauty, or fragrance, or symmetry
if they choose natives.

What I continually discover each day is the great number of choices
that are available. Currently in my design practice, I'm working with
about 250 species. Suncrest Nurseries grows over 600 natives. There
is no lack of beauty, fragrance, color, texture or symmetry with this
many choices! If I had more clients living in different regions of
California in homes with different styles of architecture, different
cultural preferences, or more institutional clients in different
microclimates and regions of California, I know I would push the
envelope even further. There is certainly the potential to garden with
at least 1500 species of California native plants.
Shouldn't academic institutions and professional organizations like
CFUH be promoting the ecology-based, plant community approach to
gardening?

Did you know that ornamental plants will probably soon replace dairy
as the number one agricultural industry in California? People buy more plants for their home gardens and commercial
landscapes than all the grapes that are grown and sold to produce our
impressive California wines. Approximately 4 billion dollars is spent on plants in California every year!

I told Dave that I was disappointed that his list had so few natives.
He invited me up to talk to the folks at CFUH. I'd like to come for a
visit, but I propose a visit with a group of us who would like to see
more natives as California's All-Stars. In fact, I propose an all-star
list of natives according to your region of California.

Will you join me? Let's begin a dialog with CFUH and see if we can
persuade them to talk about the ecology-based gardening approach and
expand their list to include plants suitable for urban horticulture
from the major plant communities of all the regions of California and
let's help get our great state on the true path to sustainable
gardening!