[ Lost in the Landscape ]

on the road: wine country gardens

The day­light was end­ing as we crossed the bridge into the wine coun­try north of San Francisco.

Things were devel­op­ing that gor­geous warm tint that you only see for a few min­utes of the day. Peo­ple had set aside the next day to visit some winer­ies, and this gor­geous evening was the best prepa­ra­tion you could ask for.

We stopped at three winer­ies, and you pick up pretty quickly that the vine­yards are inter­ested in pro­mot­ing a lifestyle as part of the process of send­ing you home with a few bot­tles of wine. To set the mood, each loca­tion we vis­ited played its own riff on the basic for­mula that winer­ies fol­low: a tast­ing bar, per­son­able servers, a gift shop, and–most inter­est­ing for me–some sort of gar­den set­ting around the facility.

Stop #1 was the largest, most indus­trial place that we were to visit that day, Rod­ney Strong Vine­yards. You could stroll around an ele­vated perch and take a look at the oak casks and the stain­less tanks hold­ing their next bottlings.

Set in the mid­dle of your basic pic­turesque Sonoma County vine­yards, their take seemed to be fairly min­i­mal­ist, that the grapes around the win­ery were gar­den enough. But they did have some attrac­tive planter boxes lin­ing the steps ascend­ing to the tast­ing room.

Being high sum­mer, their plant­i­ngs fea­tured bril­liant zin­nias, marigolds and cal­i­bra­choa in what I’d call a real-world plant­ing, selec­tions that any­one could find at their local gar­den cen­ter, noth­ing too fussy or scary or exotic.

The mes­sage they wanted to con­vey through their set­ting: We want to make your visit plea­sur­able, but we’re pri­mar­ily about the wine. Our wines might be a bet­ter value because we don’t splurge on the unnec­es­sary the­atrics.

Across the park­ing lot was des­ti­na­tion #2, J Vine­yards. The approach to the front door passes casual-looking plant­i­ngs of grasses, sedges and flax.

In Design­ing with Plants by Piet Oudolff and Noel Kings­bury, the authors cau­tion against mix­ing plant­i­ngs of dif­fer­ent grasses. But here the tech­nique of mix­ing dif­fer­ent plants with strong lin­ear forms suc­ceeds beau­ti­fully. (Def­i­nitely a case in point that design guide­lines are meant to be broken.)

To get in the tast­ing room you cross a lit­tle bridge over a pond teem­ing with water plants. The hard­scape is cut through with strong lin­ear ele­ments, but the plants seem to defy the geom­e­try, with clumps of one kind of plant cas­cad­ing from one level to the next, not accen­tu­at­ing the struc­ture like box­woods plant­ing along a dri­ve­way. Winetasting–with optional fin­ger foods–can hap­pen indoors, or on the patio over­look­ing the garden.

The mes­sage they wanted to con­vey through their set­ting: We’re not the least expen­sive win­ery out there, but what’s wrong with an occa­sional splurge every now and then?.

Over­sized pots with spiky plants were a com­mon fea­ture. This blue pot­ted suc­cu­lent was set next to a rough woven vine fence in down­town Healds­burg, where we stopped for lunch. I’m sure their gar­dener pruned the pointy lower leaves off the plant to avoid injury to the masses pass­ing through, but I per­son­ally hate to see gor­geous sym­met­ri­cal plants dis­fig­ured this way.

Our last win­ery stop, Maz­zocco Vine­yards, also fea­tured a spiky plant–a flax–planted in a big pot–this one a model with beau­ti­fully drip­ping glaze.

The small­est of the three stops that day, the win­ery fea­tured low-growing drought-tolerant plants and some annu­als set in a small the­ater set that evoked a casual resort set in the mid­dle of oaked foothills. A berm along the adja­cent road­way cre­ated a sense of shel­ter and avoided the road noises that would have spoiled the mood.

The set­ting was sim­ple and casual, noth­ing so spec­tac­u­lar that you had to stop to look at it, but a pleas­ant place to relax and spend part of an afternoon.

The mes­sage they wanted to con­vey through their set­ting: We’re all about rus­tic ele­gance. Our wines are direct and con­nected to the land. (Their offer­ings hap­pened to offer a large num­ber of vineyard-designated bot­tlings of zin­fan­del, many with its own strong character.)

My favorites that day?
Wines: Maz­zocco. (I didn’t sam­ple at the first stop.)
Gar­dens: J.

But they’d all be worth a visit. (And my thanks to our des­ig­nated dri­ver that day!)

August 15 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Sonoma County • vineyards • winetasting | 3 Comments »

on the road: luther burbank’s farm

His­tory is a frag­ile thing, some­thing that I was reminded of on my recent visit to Sonoma County.

Pio­neer­ing plants­man Luther Bur­bank moved to this area in the mid-1880s, mak­ing his home in Santa Rosa, and estab­lish­ing a plant breed­ing and trial loca­tion nearby on Gold Ridge, in present-day Sebastapol. Over his career, which included over 40 years of work at this loca­tion, he devel­oped and intro­duced hun­dreds of vari­eties of food crops and orna­men­tal plants–including the still-popular Shasta daisy, and was pretty much the Thomas Edi­son of the plant world.

You can visit his main res­i­dence in Santa Rosa, but it was the Gold Ridge Exper­i­ment Farm where the work of com­ing up with the new vari­eties took place. Our host in Sebastapol basi­cally said that there wasn’t much to see of the farm any­more. But I was curi­ous to stand in the mid­dle of hor­ti­cul­tural and agri­cul­tural his­tory, so John and Jenny and I took a short trip to the site.

A small brown sign in down­town Sebastapol points to the farm, .7 miles away, and a sec­ond small brown sign down the road points left towards the loca­tion. The first thing that you see when you turn left, instead of some pas­toral trial farm scene over­flow­ing with his­tor­i­cal flow­ers, is the big­ger sign announc­ing the Bur­bank Heights & Orchards, an anony­mous clus­ter of gray clapboard-sided apart­ment houses. A bit of trail­blaz­ing over the wind­ing lane through the apart­ments even­tu­ally leads to a lit­tle yel­low cot­tage in a clear­ing, along with a match­ing out-building and a green­house that must be as small as the bath­rooms in the sur­round­ing apartments.

If it weren’t for the green­house it’d be hard to know that this was the des­ti­na­tion. But this was it. What’s left of major botan­i­cal his­tory. (You can see the apart­ments in the background.)

The cot­tage dates to 1906, when the San Fran­cisco earth­quake scrapped the orig­i­nal struc­ture. There’s an adja­cent lit­tle cot­tage gar­den, with some exam­ples of Shasta daisies and other plants with ties to Bur­bank and this location.

The hybrid pen­ste­mons here are mod­ern vari­eties, but there’s an inter­est­ing unknown tall night­shade with pur­ple flow­ers that was found grow­ing on the site in 1980. Aside from the Shasta daisies, the plants of major his­tor­i­cal inter­est here aren’t the hor­ti­cul­tural pret­ties as much as the trees and shrubs nearby: Wal­nuts, berries, plums, cher­ries, hawthorns, roses, among many.

Some of the plants aren’t Bur­bank hybrids at all, but are stock that was used in his veg­etable hus­bandry. Burbank’s work was all about improv­ing on nature, not appre­ci­at­ing nature as it exists, so what nature you see in the form of the orig­i­nal species–including the Catalina Cher­ries native to California–were col­lected here for their poten­tial value to what could be made with them.

In an arti­cle, “Luther Bur­bank : A Vic­tim of Hero Wor­ship,” Wal­ter L. Howard writes that “[t]he sci­ence of breed­ing grew and advanced rapidly dur­ing the first two decades of the new cen­tury, and though it may not be gen­er­ally rec­og­nized, the move­ment is trace­able to Bur­bank as a potent acti­va­tor. Pro­fes­sor H. J. Web­ber, a pio­neer plant-breeder and geneti­cist and a con­tem­po­rary of Bur­bank, has declared that through the influ­ence of Bur­bank the sci­ence of plant breed­ing was advanced by at least twenty years and for this accom­plish­ment alone, he deserved a siz­able mon­u­ment to his mem­ory.” (Quoted at the Gold Ridge website.)

Today, Luther Bur­bank isn’t com­pletely for­got­ten. There’s the lit­tle remain­ing farm­stead, and the Bur­bank home in Santa Rosa. Burbank’s Shasta daisy is the offi­cial flower of Sebastapol. And there’s even a stretch of High­way 12 between Santa Rosa and Sebastapol that’s des­ig­nated the Luther Bur­bank Memo­r­ial High­way. But Sonoma County, a region that’s liv­ing large as one of the hotspots of Cal­i­for­nia wine coun­try, seems a lit­tle dis­tracted by other things than to pay large amounts of atten­tion to a fig­ure whose career saw the rise but not the fall of Pro­hi­bi­tion in the United States.

So, should you plan a trip to God Ridge Exper­i­ment Farm? As a des­ti­na­tion unto itself, prob­a­bly not, unless you live nearby. But if you’re here for a visit to the Sonoma and Napa Val­ley winer­ies, sure, take the lit­tle side trip. It might be a lit­tle sad, but you’ll be glad you went.

August 14 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: history • Luther Burbank • Sebastapol • Shasta daisies • Sonoma County | 4 Comments »