Mountain Gardener: A peek into local gardening’s past

Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series on historical gardening.
Our gardens reflect who we are. Some of us plant edibles, while others fill gardens with fragrance. Some concentrate on native plants, attracting hummingbirds and wildlife, while others prefer a bit of everything.
Our area is rich in history. I love to look at old photos and try to identify what the early settlers planted around their homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Most of this area was heavily forested until the late 1800s.
Boulder Creek, in 1899, was the fifth-largest shipper of timber in the entire country, and quarry operations used forest trees and shrubs to fuel their lime kilns.
Early logging techniques were very hard on the environment. Clear-cutting was common and included the understory madrone and tan oak. After the broadleaf trees were removed, the conifers were cut. Then, to strip the bark from the logs and thin the shrubbery to facilitate log removal, a fire was set.
That first fire in itself was no problem, as the trees could and would re-sprout from the base. But after the logs were removed by ox teams, another fire was set, and because the fires were uncontrolled, they would burn surrounding areas, as well. The result was a sequence of fires that would kill the growing sprouts and saplings and allow an invasion of shrubs, delaying natural reforestation.
Such fires, plus severe soil erosion, sometimes so damaged the land that it could no longer support trees. In other areas, the forest did not return until after a long succession of brushland to woodland to forest.
So, what could a woman do to make a house a home back in those days? Many settlers arrived from the East Coast, the Midwest and Europe and carried with them seeds and starts of plants.
As early as 1871, nurseries in San Francisco imported plants such as Pittosporum tenuifolium, and the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco made many more plants available to homeowners. Hebes from New Zealand were all the rage. The brochure for the 1915 world fair describes a Palace of Horticulture and Tower of Jewels as “… a great garden, itself a marvel of landscape engineering skill … one side of a magic carpet on which these beautiful palaces are set with its floricultural splendors for a wondrous beauty, has never been equaled.”
My interest in early local horticulture started after looking at a friend’s family photographs from the turn of the century. His family had a resort with a natural spring and rock-lined forest paths close to Highway 9 in southern Felton. That was very near the Big Tree Grove resort (now Toll House) that opened
in 1867.
I remember looking at the photos and marveling at all the flowers surrounding the dwelling. The redwood trees have now grown back, but at that time, there was lots of sunshine, a by-product of clear-cutting. I could see roses, lilacs and Shasta daisies in the photo surrounding the wraparound porch.
Recently, I spent some time in the SLV Museum archives looking at old photos of houses dating from 1892 to 1926. I’ll share what I discovered there about early landscaping next week.
Jan Nelson, a California certified nursery professional at Plant Works in Ben Lomond, will answer questions about gardening in the Santa Cruz Mountains. E-mail her at [email protected].