— Nan Sterman On the last garden tour I led to England, I was impressed to see how all the gardens, both formal and informal, included spaces for bees and other pollinator insects. Every private garden we saw included wild grasses and blooming wildflowers – what US gardeners wou

— By Nan Sterman This week’s episode of A Growing Passion is “Distant Roots and Tasty Shoots,” a visit to the San Diego Zoo’s amazing plant collections. We tour the Zoo’s orchid house in one of the segments. The orchid house is actually two small greenhouses and an outside area

This week’s episode of A Growing Passion takes us behind the scenes with the San Diego Zoo and Zoo Safari Park’s amazing horticulture staff. My long time friend Stephanie Shigematsu is the Zoological Society’s Curator of Horticulture, which means she oversees everything plants.

Gardens and art were part of this past week’s adventure as I worked on recharging, reinvesting, and reinventing myself at the annual conference of the GWA, the Association of Garden Communicators (www.gardenwriters.org). This year, more than 300 of us gathered in Atlanta, Georgi

— Nan Sterman After our group of enthusiastic garden travelers left Cordoba, Spain we went on to Seville. We toured Seville’s historic old city on foot, then headed to the Alcazar, one of my favorite gardens in the world. These gardens also hugely influenced San Diego arch

— Nan Sterman   Thirty-six people, nine days, five cities, more than 35 gardens, and nearly 3,000 photos. Those are the numbers for the tour I co-led last month to visit the romantic gardens of Spain. We toured by private coach, starting in Malaga, a beautiful seaside town

— Nan Sterman How often a gardener sends me a photo, asking me if the bug in the picture is a “good bug” or a “bad bug.” Most people assume  every bug is bad but the truth is, most of the insects in our gardens are “good,” or at least, they aren’t “bad.” In my garden, this is an

Celebrating Balboa Park – Part V: The Exposition and Its Legacy — Nan Sterman On January 1, 1915, 50,000 bright red poinsettias welcomed visitors to the Panama-California Exposition. The choice of plants was a bit prophetic since San Diego County would soon be known as the epice

Celebrating Balboa Park – Part IV: Farms and Gardens — Nan Sterman While Balboa Park’s planners and designers were jockeying for position, the park’s horticulturists were scurrying to propagate plants for the exposition gardens. They had only five years to landscape

Celebrating Balboa Park – Part III: Work Begins — Nan Sterman By 1909, the park’s design began to take shape. The Chamber of Commerce came up with the idea to create a World’s Fair to celebrate the 1915 opening of the Panama Canal. It would help boost the city’s economy, which h