Meet Scot Medbury, Executive Director of Sonoma Botanical Gardens. Scot has managed various public gardens including Brooklyn Botanic Garden and San Francisco Botanical Garden. Additionally, he is excited to share a new personal garden project on the southern Oregon Coast.  Scot currently gardens in Glen Ellen, CA (USDA Zone 9b; Sunset Zones 15 & 16) and Curry County, Oregon (USDA Zone 9b; Sunset Zone 17). What are some of the more unusual plants or genera that I am looking forward to growing in Curry County? Araliads, citrus, Maddenii series rhododendrons; select palms, tree ferns, bromeliads, proteas, and araucariads; mild-temperate Southern… 

Meet Darcy Daniels, garden designer and creator of eGardenGo, a resource she created to help gardeners easily choose beautiful plant combinations to reflect their personal style.  Darcy gardens in NE Portland, USDA Zone 8b, and we are excited to feature her profile on the HPSO blog so we can all get to know her better!  How did I become involved in gardening professionally? I’d always loved plants when I was growing up, but it wasn’t until I bought a house in 1998 that things changed. The house is a small bungalow, and when I moved in, it had no garden… 

ARTICLE BY: AMY CAMPION Amy Campion is a HPSO Board Member, freelance writer, editor, and photographer. She blogs about gardening at amycampion.com. *** They’re a ragtag team, but they help me get a lot of important work done. George, Leonard, and Kevin are my gardening crew, and they’re also my cats. Now, you may think that cats are of little use in the garden. While it’s true they prefer supervising to physical labor, they are good company, and they’ve taught me many valuable gardening lessons. Here are six of them. #1 Save Some Grass There’s a war going on against… 

“Why I Garden” essays appear intermittently in the HPSO Quarterly magazine. We hope you’ll enjoy a few of these stories from our archives and we invite you to submit your own essay on the subject. Contact the Quarterly Editor, Eloise Morgan (rcmelm@aol.com) for submission details. Kim Pokorny’s essay first ran in the Spring 2014 issue… *** I fell in love with the house on the corner, the one with no plants at all. As an avid gardener, I coveted the bare ground and the full sun. I could finally plant the ‘Cecile Brunner’ rose my grandmother had loved. Every spring… 

ARTICLE BY: Barbara Blossom Ashmun Barbara Blossom Ashmun is the author of seven books, most recently Love Letters to My Garden. *** When I first began to garden in the 1970s all I cared about was summer. Give me roses and peonies, cosmos and cleome, salvias and sunflowers. I lived for the culmination of color and fragrance. But as time went by I noticed that winter was when I craved color and fragrance the most. There was so little of it in my February garden that I drove to the florist and bought bouquets of cut flowers to cheer up… 

ARTICLE BY: RICHARD HOFFMAN Richard Hoffman is a member of the HPSO Board and his current interests range from identifying edible wildflowers to working edible plants into a mostly ornamental garden. *** Gardeners help one another in numerous ways, sometime knowingly and at other times, unintentionally. That “aha” moment, when visiting other gardeners, can come at a moment’s notice. This article features my garden experiments set in motion by the influence of other gardeners. Lucy Hardiman, of Perennial Partners, truly influenced my garden experiments over the years. Her garden opened for the Portland Metro’s Gardens of Natural Delights and for… 

ARTICLE BY: ANN AMATO Ann Amato is an ever-changing work-in-progress thanks to improving health. She’s a horticulturist who specializes in seeds with a background in arts management and publishing. She’s been a therapeutic foster parent, an ESL instructor, and she blogs at: Amateur Bot-ann-ist. Currently, she works part-time at Cistus Nursery and sells her own seeds at Milton’s Garden Menagerie on Etsy. *** “My house just happens to be in my garden.” It’s what I say to people, and for the most part, it’s true. Long ago this became a motto for me. The joke though was that there was… 

ARTICLE BY: RICHARD HOFFMAN Richard Hoffman is a member of the HPSO Board and his current interests range from identifying edible wildflowers to working edible plants into a mostly ornamental garden. *** Since childhood, I have taken an interest in edible plants. Getting your food directly from its source provides a unique sense of satisfaction, a connection to the land, and an appeal to the senses. You can try out fruit and vegetables in your own yard that stores do not carry. Some edible plants contribute greatly to the beauty to the landscape. A continuation of the theme of garden… 

ARTICLE BY: KATE McMILLAN Kate McMillan is a HPSO Board member and owner of Cultiverity, a garden design company in Portland. When she’s not working on her own or someone else’s garden, she’s running her web design studio, Outbox Online. She can often be found posting to the HPSO Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter feeds, and coordinating this blog. *** The story of native plants in our gardens is, oddly, a story of adversity. There’s a pervasive idea that somehow a garden of native plants is less beautiful, less interesting, or less elegant because of its regional origins. But that… 

ARTICLE BY: LINDA WISNER Linda Wisner, a designer, and Chet Orloff, an historian, live, work and garden on a 1.3-acre property on Sauvie Island. Linda is a past president of HPSO and currently designs HPSO’s Quarterly magazine, among other volunteer activities. Their garden will be open to HPSO members this year by appointment. *** I’m sitting in our courtyard, shelling fava beans, which is feeling like a very indulgent thing to do on a mid-week afternoon in late June. It’s calmly repetitive and providing me the opportunity to enjoy this space and reflect on its creation. I’m in a comfortable…