Our friend Debra Prinzing is coming to the nursery on Sunday, May 13, to help us celebrate Mother’s Day. She’ll be discussing her new book (with gorgeous photos by David E. Perry), The 50 Mile Bouquet, at 1pm. (Get your brunch in early!) She has written about folks who are leading the movement toward growing and using locally sourced flowers, many of them in Northern California. Our own Susie Nadler, the linchpin of our Cutting Garden floral design practice, was featured in Debra’s book and will be talking with her on Sunday, sharing her thoughts about designing with local materials as well as some tips on doing your own flower arranging.

Debra’s Eco-Friendly Floral Design Tips

Background: As more florists and designers discover the negatives of that green foam block (also called Florist’s Foam or Oasis), they are returning to some tried-and-true techniques for stabilizing stems in a vase. The problem with the foam is that it is a formaldehyde-based product that does not break down in landfills. Many designers I’ve interviewed express concern about breathing and/or exposing their skin to the material.

Alternatives:

• Vintage and new flower frogs: (I started collecting these years ago and they’re easy to find at tag sales and vintage flea markets for under $5 or $10). Use and reuse!
• Pebbles, glass beads, marbles
• Excelsior fibers: Also called wood aspen, you can find this packing material through craft stores or wine shops. Insert a tangle of the fibers in your vase and then you can stick stems through the fibers to stabilize. When you’re finished with the arrangement – this can go into the compost pile with other clippings.
• Chicken wire: I have a $15 roll of 15-in.by 5-ft .poultry fencing that I use over and over again. Just use wire clippers to cut off a 12-inch section of the wire so you have an approximate square. Form it into a loose ball to fit the interior dimensions of your container [see my first 2 photos of a wide-mouth, square compote]. If the container is shallow, use sticky clay (available in the floral department at Michael’s or other craft stores) to anchor the chicken wire in place. My second photo shows how I created a full, lush arrangement with winter greens from my garden and locally-grown organic tulips. This is the type of arrangement you would have traditionally seen stuck in florists foam – but the chicken wire does the trick beautifully!
• Twigs/branches: I learned this technique from several designers I interviewed for The 50 Mile Bouquet. As a first step. arrange a framework of decorative twigs inside your vase, placing each one at an angle that crosses over the next. This interior matrix is then perfect for inserting other floral branches and foliage – and the twigs become part of the design. See photos 3 (twigs in vase) and 4 (finished arrangement with black-stemmed pussy willow, maidenhair fern and spring daffodils).

Other eco-design tips:

1. Use recycled containers and vases. My girlfriend stocks up on $1 glass vases at the Goodwill or Salvation Army and has them on hand all year long. When visitors come to see her amazing rose garden, she sends them home with a beautiful rose arrangement of just-clipped flowers and a recycled vase.

2. Use greenery from your own garden. Broadleaf or needled evergreen foliage, ornamental grasses, perennial foliage and herbs are all unique foliage sources – straight from your garden. If you buy flowers from the farmer’s market or another local source (many supermarkets are beginning to source from local flower farms, for example), add them to your own foliage to create a naturalistic, fresh-picked bouquet.

–Debra Prinzing

Debra’s book makes a perfect gift for mothers, and a signed copy would be extra-special. There will be lots on hand for you to take home.

Other Bay Area designers that Debra has included in the book include the amazing Lila B. Design (the book has a great shot of their potted flower farm South of Market) and our friend Max Gill. We feel super-lucky to be hosting one of Debra’s appearances here.

This upcoming Saturday, April 14, at 7pm, we’re co-hosting a fundraiser here at the store for my son’s school, the Potrero Hill Nursery School. It’ll be our first evening event this spring, taking advantage of the lengthening days for a party with a performance by the Kronos Quartet. There will be an auction as well. If you might like to join us, tickets are still available.

 

Matti & Megan live by the sea, where they go walking with their dog, Max, and pick up beautiful pieces of driftwood that they’ve made into these beautiful mounts for staghorn ferns. Matti’s allowed us to sell a few of them and we’re thrilled. Come take a look, and if you haven’t read their award-winning blog, Far Out Flora, you’re in for quite a treat.

If you love someone who loves nature, we have lots of gift ideas for Valentine’s Day. Many of them are handmade in our store. Some are available in our Web Shop.

Little Heart-Shaped World

It’s a classic Aerium that shows your love.

What could be more lovely than cultivating beauty in a heart-shaped vessel? The tiny tillandsia air plant arranged with mossy twigs and lichens captured my imagination when we first started playing with Aeriums, and when we discovered these glass hearts, the combination felt like the perfect expression of love. We have more information in our Web Shop.

The Bird Cage Aerium

A steel bird cage makes a 3D frame for an open-air composition of tillandias, lichens, and mossy twigs. The sadness of the caged bird is quickly dispatched by the quiet beauty of a focused fragment of the forest. It’s super-easy to care for: Just spritz the plants and provide plentiful light indoors. It’s a pleasure to groom and rework the composition, like any garden. Come see them or make your own in the store, or take a look in our Web Shop. We’re also offering a class this Saturday, February 11, at 11am on creating and caring for your own. You can register for the class online.

 

True Heart Wall Panel

Artist Dave Marcoullier’s woodwork covers many subjects, but this anatomical portrayal of a human heart carries a special poignancy. At once cool and confrontational, it conjures the deepest of links we share with our loved ones. We have one size in our Web Shop; we have two sizes in the store as well as other subjects, like the Muni LRV car that Muni Diaries recently wrote about.

Tiny Cube Pot

Caring for a tiny plant on a desk or windowsill brings a welcome pause to the day. These tiny cubes in porcelain capture the exquisite forms of tillandsias and succulents especially well. We’ve got plenty of tiny plants and pots that you can make your own combinations with here in the store. You can also buy them in our Web Shop.

My honey, Kevin Smith, is a skilled woodworker, builder, and artist. One of his pieces that has attracted a lot of attention is this wall sculpture. It’s assembled from foraged organic materials and reclaimed scrap, and it’s a habitat-in-waiting for bees, birds, and other native animals. The patterns of holes and partitions allows many different species of small animals to inhabit the sculpture, whether it’s mounted on an apartment terrace 16 stories above the street or next to a backyard patio. Inspired by the Urban Hedgerow campaign, Kevin interprets the invitation to urban wilderness in a really beautiful way, one that seduces us into contemplating how much wild nature we want to interact with in our human-centered habitat. Kevin has made several of these pieces for our customers. If you’d like to contact him about building one for you, email us at buyers@floragrubb.com. If you’d like more information about the Urban Hedgerow campaign, go to http://urbanhedgerow.com/.

We have a big load of special aeoniums in the store right now. These Canary Island succulent treelets are peerless in their ease of care and graphic impact in the garden.

The cultivar Zwartkop, meaning “black head” in Dutch, bears deep-purple-red leaves that in full flush start out apple-green. As winter ages into spring, larger plants will develop cones of acid-yellow flowers out of the centers of the crowns for a long-lasting show. Below you can see the background plant beginning to develop conical flowerheads.

One of the gratifying features of aeoniums is that they grow during the winter rainy season. This year’s been rather dry, but just a little bit of irrigation keeps them bustling along, expanding the disc of their leaves and developing the charming mini-tree look that works so well in containers and small-scale gardens.

Few plants are easier to care for in mostly frost-free climates of California. In cool-summer zones, water them occasionally in summer to keep them lush. You can leave them almost completely dry if you’re nerdily enchanted (as we are) by their crowns’ cyclical shrinkage down to silver-dollar-size discs. The cliffs of Telegraph Hill are peppered with aeoniums left completely to the whims of rain: from summer to winter they change dramatically.

Beachside, they’re prime, but they’re also at home in brighter woodsy gardens, too. Plant them in sun or shade, in soil that drains well, and watch them expand, grow, and bloom. Like most succulents, they’re easy to root from cuttings and they’ll persist in a container indefinitely. Many of our Succulent Ornaments use aeonium cuttings and are a great way to start your own aeonium plant.

Hard frosts will damage or kill aeoniums, but if enough mass remains on your plant, it can sometimes regrow. If your garden gets a lo of frost, grow them in pots and move them into protected spots or cover with frost cloth on cold nights. Frost cloth can help protect from the hail that can pock-mark the leaves; you’ll be surprised how fast they grow out of the damage. If your tastes tend toward neatness, cut off or groom the spent flowerstalks — they will sometimes branch out after blooming. Slugs and snails can nibble aeoniums but generally pose minor problems. Lightly rooting, especially in the dry season, they sometimes need staking.

Our current stock of specimens is a seasonal treat, not always available. Year-round we keep in stock a wide array in containers ranging from two-inch to seven-gallon-size. Some types, like Aeonium canariense, are big, low, glossy and green, and others, like Aeonium haworthii, make colonies of small intricate crowns. Hybridizers frequently introduce delicious new variations.

What a Lineup This Year!

We’ve worked really hard to bring in an adorable collection of Christmas tree ornaments this year. Come into to the store and pick up a house gift for a party or something for your own holiday tree!

Creatures of All Kinds

The array this year includes peacocks, owls, giraffes, whales, and even octopus. Each is lovable in its unique way–but they don’t need a college fund.

 

 

 

We’re selling them pretty quickly, so best come in soon to get the best selection.

The Aerium Is Inspired by the Terrarium

We created the name “Aerium” to describe a living plant world enclosed in glass (normally called a terrarium) that contains no “terra,” the Latin word for earth.

An Aerium contains tillandsias, plants that in nature grow without soil (usually on the branches of trees). That’s why tillandsias are known as air plants. Thus, “Aerium” is their miniature world. We sell them both in the nursery at in our Web Shop.

Tillandsias are part of the bromeliad family. Tillandsias are bromeliads, but not all bromeliads are tillandsias. For example pineapples are bromeliads but are not tillandsias.

They can be found growing wild in the forests, mountains, and deserts of Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. Most are tender plants and don’t like cold weather.

Aerium Care
Aeriums do best when they are kept at a mild temperature–not too hot, and not too cold. They thrive in bright areas, but not in direct sunlight.

Mist your Aerium with water once every two weeks (weekly during hot or dry periods) using a spray bottle. It is not necessary to soak the tillandsia. Focus the nozzle through the hole in the Aerium and spritz lightly. The nozzle doesn’t actually have to fit through the hole — only the spritzed water. Take care not to leave standing water inside the Aerium. Tillandsias do not like standing water, and may rot or wither if they are exposed to too much moisture. Allow the Aerium to dry fully before watering again.

To clear water droplets off the inside surface of the glass, try using a cotton swab. To rearrange the natural elements, use a pencil or long-handled tweezers.

When it’s mature and thriving, your tillandsia might flower! In optimal conditions its lifespan can be decades long, depending on the species.

Our Aerium Bar
If you’d like to make your own Aerium, we have a DIY station here in the nursery where you can come in and select from natural materials we’ve gathered for you to create your own Aerium composition. It’s open every day, a new permanent fixture here, because people have been having so much fun making their own Aeriums! You can also buy pre-made Aeriums in our Web Shop. We are always happy to help you here in the store with any questions you might have about Aeriums and tillandsias.

 

One of the most exciting events we held this year was a September book talk and demonstration by Rebecca Burgess, author of Harvesting Color. It was so popular and her presentation so eye-opening, that we’ve invited Rebecca to return to the nursery on Sunday, December 4, at 11am.

An accomplished artisan, Rebecca focuses on the life of fiber, dye, and fabric in our human ecology. She compassionately teaches us how to draw upon local riches to create gorgeous garments. Harvesting Color is both a beautifully accessible guidebook to creating your own dyes and fiber from local materials, and an enchanting argument for living within our “fibershed.” The book is a marvelous gift for people interested in craft, plants, clothing, and human ecology.

That term — fibershed — means the geographic range from which one’s fiber, dye, and fabrics are drawn and fabricated. It’s a notion like watershed or foodshed: the region through which our essential and potentially renewable resource cycles.

Our watershed and the water cycle within it are usually traceable. In the case of San Francisco, our municipal water comes from Yosemite National Park though an aqueduct to reservoirs in San Mateo County. Meanwhile, the watershed we actually inhabit, drained by the city’s creeks and lakes into the bay and ocean, persists amid pavement and parkland, and receives the effluent of our imported water and sewage treatment process.

Just as San Franciscans (and the vast majority of Westerners) subsist on imported water, so do almost all of us in industrial society clothe ourselves in imported fiber and dye. Costs aside, by drawing on locally sourced fabric constituents, we can attend to the very specific beauty of our own Bay Area habitat. We can make and wear that beauty!

We’re at a fascinating, even dramatic, moment in the flow of ideas about how our first-world societies are evolving. The fate of the earth, the direction of change, the risks of complacency — they’re all up for fervent discussion right now. Rebecca Burgess makes a wise and moving contribution to that discussion.

Please come hear Rebecca Burgess discuss her work and ideas on Sunday.

No one forgets a gift you made yourself. And everyone can keep a succulent growing. What better gift than something you made with succulents?

 

That’s why we’re offering up our garden design specialist, Patrick Lannan, to give you a demonstration of the some of things you can create using succulents. It would take him all day to cover all the ways  to get creative with succulents (we’ve only got about an hour for his talk), but the possibilities include dish gardens, branch sculptures, vertical gardens, terrariums, and flower arrangements.

Not just a boffo garden designer, Patrick is also an amazing watercolor artist (check out his beautiful cards in the store), gourmet cook, and floral designer. He’s offering his demonstration during our Thanksgiving Open House on Sunday, November 27, at 11am, and on Saturday, December 11, at 11am. It’s a great opportunity to get inspired to make some beautiful, durable, and easy-to-care-for gifts at home.

 

We often call them “forever flowers” around here because they’ll stay lovely for weeks or months after cutting. The bouquet above can easily generate a new planting that will bring your gift recipient a whole new phase of appreciation.

Our friends at MAC, the chic shop in the Yellow Building in the Dogpatch, have had such fun admiring the succulent branch Patrick created for their front window using rhipsalis, a tiny jungle cactus. Something about incorporating succulents and tillandsia air plants into a lichen- and moss-encrusted branch turns these naturally beautiful woodland artifacts into magical gardens, each like a living architectural model of an aerie in the jungle. Patrick will show you how to make your own.

 

Succulents are among the best plants for terrariums, because they hold up so well over time, feature fascinating detail, and effect delightful sleights of scale for that landscape-in-a-bottle feeling.

 

 

Planting succulent compositions allows you to create miniature landscapes with the air of bonsai but without bonsai’s intricacies of care. It takes time to get these right, but it’s a really fun process of figuring how to combine varied textures, scales, and colors.

 

For the patient, growing a succulent vertical garden allows you to create your own painterly designs that you can watch grow and change over time, like a happier version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Much happier.

 

I’m hoping this gallery of succulent craft inspires you to make something for yourself or a loved one. Come get some inspiration here at the nursery!