The Cambria Garden Club has hosted an overnight annual spring trip for the past 30 years. This year it was no different. For most of the thirty years, the club has alternated between northern and southern California, visiting such places as the Huntington Gardens, Golden Gate Park and Botanical Gardens, Sunset Magazine Gardens, The Flower Show, and commercial nurseries like Annie’s Annuals in Richmond.
Last week, thirty-five women and community members loaded into a bus and headed to the northern California town of Petaluma for the usual viewing of gardens, nurseries, and the historic downtown. I lived in Petaluma, 40 miles north of San Francisco, for five years, so I was no stranger to the area. It has been known as the egg capital of the world, connected to the San Francisco Bay via river. Poultry houses dot the countryside with rolling green hills as their backdrop. In outlying farms, black and white Guernsey cows walk in lines to their milking stations and quaint Victorian homes line the streets of the residential oldtown.
We visited the Garden Valley Ranch where thousands of roses are organically grown. We strolled through herb gardens and restored pergola with columns of climbing roses. At the Cottage Garden Nursery we saw succulent displays and folk art garden structures. While I’m not into garden art as much as plants themselves the colorful metal animals were amusing. The “stepping stone pillows” were popular with our group and many came home to Cambria.
On the second morning, we made our way to the Marin French Cheese Factory founded in 1865 where we toured, sampled and bought cheese to take home. Next, a visit to the Baker Seed Bank, housed in a historic 1920’s bank building. They had an assortment of seeds that were not to be believed! Visit their website at www.RareSeeds.com. and order their seed catalogue that is more like a coffee table book than a catalogue.
Women always have fun on trips such as these. They relax and let committee members take charge, they
enjoy each other’s company and share in visual delights that surround them in the natural world. Many participants are artists as well as gardeners. We who love gardens, growing, learning and sharing our passion for gardening are already looking forward to the trip next spring!
