Going Deep; The Locally Native Experience
Date & Time
March 12 2024 from 1:30pm to 3:30pm
Venue
Zoom
United States
About the Event
Judith Lowry, proprietor of Larner Seeds in Bolinas for 47 years, will describe various aspects of what she has learned in the fields of backyard restoration gardening, seed-growing, and interaction with the gardening public. Her particular focus for this presentation is on the locally native, - what happens once the bones of the garden, the trees and shrubs, are established. It is understandable that nurseries will tend to focus on those species that reliably thrive in a wide range of California climates and soils. But that can be just the beginning.
Many plants that are not classified as rare, endangered, or threatened have already experienced local extinctions. We can make refugia for these species in our gardens, and while doing so, they may provide solutions to garden problems not previously thought of. This has been one of the most rewarding parts of her years in the Larner Seeds Demonstration Garden.
The payment link is: https://surveys.ucanr.edu/survey.cfm?surveynumber=40204
Judith Lowry grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, spending summers in the hardwood forests of the Ozark Mountains. She graduated from Bennington College in Vermont with a major in anthropology and then lived on a farm with no electricity in midstate New York. (This experience prepared her for living with the many power outages she would soon experience in California). Her interest in native plants began when she was informed that
her land included the largest shagbark hickory tree in her county. And when she found in the hills young sprouting American chestnut trees.
When she moved to California, she apprenticed with Craig Dremann at the Redwood City Seed Company in Palo Alto, while taking horticulture classes at Foothill College. With Dremann’s encouragement, and with the directions he gave her to the Board of Equalization, she founded Larner Seeds in 1977. At the same time, she worked as seed propagator at Yerba Buena Nursery in Woodside, California, under the tutelage of owner Gerda Isenbeg. Moving to Bolinas in West Marin in 1984, she began to focus on
wildland seed collecting, grow-outs of species not yet in the trade, and on the benefits and unique pleasures of using local models and local native plant palettes in the many gardens she consulted on.