June 2025 Newsletter: Spring in Northern California

Greetings, friends –

It has been a wonderful spring here in Northern California. After good winter rains and mild spring temperatures, the gardens are as good as we have ever seen. We admit that the turmoil in the world has given us rose-colored glasses when walking into the garden, which is all the more reason to hope you’re finding those glasses to see the wonder in your own world.

Make an appointment, right now, to get outside, to get out in your own garden, to get out to a public garden, to get out into the wild. While we all hope that gardens can make a difference in promoting a sustainable culture, most importantly they make a difference to us. Get outside.

Get out now—it’s June and the lushest time. Gardens are peaking and the long, hot days of summer are nigh. We had the early spring wildflowers, the perennials and the mid-spring shrubs are done, and now the plants in our summer-dry climates will soon begin to shut down. Summer has its own beauty and distinctive aesthetic, which we have learned to love, but it is not lush.

While we are speaking of lush, we draw your attention to a special tour of Greece next spring that we have added to our Links We Like below.

~ Saxon Holt and Nora Harlow

June’s Blog – Lupines

To much of the world, lupines (genus Lupinus) are a traditional source of food and fodder and a common means of improving agricultural soils. To forward-thinking plant breeders and entrepreneurs, they are a promising source of high-quality protein, oils, and biomass for a wide range of green industries. To gardeners, lupines are a reliable source of dramatic form and color in springtime beds and borders.

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Instagram Memories

June 18, 2022

“Clarkia are now in bloom, long after most spring wildflowers are done. This California native, here Clarkia unguiculata (Elegant Clarkia), always surprises coming on so late in the season, here @sfbotanicalgarden.”

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Design Idea – Lupines in a Meadow Garden

This tiny front yard meadow using native plants for Washington State is the home of Tess Schiavone, a landscape architect with GGN in Seattle.

Yes, Seattle is in a summer-dry climate; its reputation as rainy is well deserved for the long, wet winters, but it IS dry all summer (a secret they would just as soon you did not know). It should never be confused as a mediterranean climate because of those abundant cold winter rains, but sustainable gardeners understand that summers are predictably dry.

By taking advantage of those rain patterns and using native plants, an unwatered garden like this looks great well into June. Incorporating native lupines extends the bloom time and will create striking interest throughout the summer as the grasses die back. Here we see riverbank lupine (Lupinus rivularis).

Broadleaf lupine (Lupinus polyphyllus) is also native to Washington, though Tess suspects some of the plants in her garden have crossed with ornamental cultivars, producing a wider color range than she expected.

It is a really bold plant—looking great here with the delicate Roemer’s fescue grass (Festuca idahoensis ssp. roemeri)—that gardeners in drier climates can consider if given supplemental irrigation in the spring.

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Links We Like

Greece has been on our bucket list for a lifetime and going on a tour of gardens in the country that is home to the Mediterranean Garden Society! Led by Lefteris Dariotis, one of the most renowned horticulturists in the world, including a visit to his home turf in Crete?! And photography tips with Saxon Holt, our photographer and official escort for Pacific Horticulture? This is going to be fun! Next April into May 2026.

This link is to the Pacific Horticulture travel page. Sticker shock aside, this is going to sell out and the reason we are putting a link on our newsletter is that we’re hoping to give you a chance to go. This is the vacation a summer-dry climate gardener dreams about and Saxon can’t wait to go—and hopes some of you can join in.

We would love to hear about any resources you would like to pass along. We all get these snippets from our news feeds and inboxes. Let’s share the best and we will keep the running list so you can find them later on the Links We Like page.