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What I've been up to

A few weeks ago, someone asked why the list was so quiet and what everyone was doing.  At the time, I was too busy to respond.  Today, though, I have a break in the action and a chance to report back.

For the last year and a half, I've chaired a committee planning a huge garden festival for my town.  This first ever event featured a self-guided walking tour of 32 gardens in a neighborhood near our historic downtown.  In a nearby park, we setup a  marketplace of vendors selling plants, artwork, worm bins, carnivorous snails, even macadamia nuts.  Local dancers performed both in the marketplace (which was in a park) and in the gardens.  Double decker buses transported participants between the park and the tour neighborhood.

It was a smash hit.  The weather was perfect - warm  but with a constant, cool ocean breeze.   We sold out and had to turn several hundred people away.  People drove from several hours away to participate. A couple of them stopped me and told me that the trip had been well worth it.   Even the folks we modeled our tour after commented that it was the best organized tour they had ever participated in.  

I'm still flying high a week later - as is my fabulous committee.  Event sponsors are already talking to me about what they want to contribute to next year's event.  

Here's what the newspapers had to say about it:


Encinitas Garden Festival a blooming success

 By: RUTH MARVIN WEBSTER - For the North County Times

ENCINITAS ---- Volunteers arrived as early as 4 a.m. Saturday to set up tables and booths in Cottonwood Creek Park in Encinitas. By 7 a.m., the parking lot was full, and a line of people was starting to form. And by 11 a.m., organizers said, all 600 tickets for the first Encinitas Garden Festival had been sold.

 "There was an ambiance of sheer joy here in the park this morning," said Heather Callaghan, a transplant from New Zealand who, like many of the 80-plus volunteers for the event, was too busy working to actually take the tour of the gardens.

"Music was playing, people dancing, children playing and others buying plants ---- all enjoying each other," she said.

 Throughout the day, at the Gardener's Marketplace in the park, merchants offered the latest in plants, tools, and garden products for sale. Nina Fitch, 18, a senior at La Costa Canyon High School handed out brochures she designed herself about the native flora throughout the Encinitas park.

 "They are free at the Encinitas City Hall and the Visitor Center," she said. "I have always loved nature so I made them up as a senior project."

 Hundreds of visitors and amateur gardeners who planned to buy their tickets for the home garden tour at the park were turned away.

 "Some people were very upset that they didn't get a ticket," said Elizabeth Ritter, who volunteered at the welcome table. "Since this is a first-time event, there was no way to gauge how many people would come."

 Nan Sterman, a principal organizer of the event and local garden writer, said that no one could have predicted the garden festival's overwhelming success.

 "(Encinitas Councilwoman) Maggie Houlihan approached me a year and half ago and suggested we put together a garden tour in Encinitas ---- one to celebrate gardening and the horticultural history of Encinitas," Sterman remembered. "Many years ago, there had been a very successful behind-the-scenes tour of local nurseries so we decided to put together a garden committee. And what an awesome group of active people we got! They did the best job."

 Sterman said organizers used the highly successful Mission Hills Garden Club's tour as a model and then went looking for a local neighborhood with interesting, eclectic gardens.

 "We figured if we got 15 gardens, we would be doing great," she said.

 Thirty-two gardens near downtown Encinitas ---- south of D Street and west of the freeway ---- were on display in the Encinitas Garden Festival's walking tour. Many of the home gardens were on Stratford, Cornish, Arden and San Dieguito drives, and McNeill Avenue, and each reflected a different style, passion and history.

 One Mediterranean-style garden designed by Ingrid Rose was updated to include the owners' favorite shades of white and purple. Another on McNeill featured a spectacular, succulent euphorbia probably dating back to the 1910s when the property was an epiphyllum nursery. And in Doug and Cha Cha Wright's Thai garden, palms and tropical fruit trees dominate the landscape.

 Double-decker buses, leaving regularly from Cottonwood Park, made several stops in the tour neighborhood. A handful of gardens were designated as walk-by gardens, meaning that only the gardens in the front were on display, others marked "entire garden" were open, both front and rear, to the public.

 "There were so many different gardens on the tour," said Sheryl Tempchin of Encinitas. "Some are formal like a designer did them and others are funky like your grandmother would put together. They all have definitely inspired me."



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