THE DESERT NORTHWEST [blog]

Horticulture and the “Shop Local” Movement

08 Dec 2011 4 Comments

by Ian in hortitorture industry backwardness

We’re hearing it all the time nowadays. “Shop local. It matters!” “Buy locally and keep money in your community!” We even had “Small Business Saturday” (sponsored by that really small, local business American Express – oh well, we’ll take whatever help we can get) in the midst of the holiday shopping rush that this supposedly peaceful season has become. So, what’s a gardener to do? Now that I have given this quite a lot of thought, I would say two starting points for this discussion come to the surface. First, it’s truly a personal issue for me, since I am the owner of a small, local business. Second, it’s also a very complex issue, and one where sweeping generalizations about “what one should do” have the potential to be unhelpful and only create divisiveness, which is counterproductive: open-minded and balanced dialogue is in order. On the other hand, it is still possible to pick out profound implications of various trends, which we do in conclusion.

Let’s take a look at what’s going on in the realm of horticulture that pertains to this discussion. To start with, we can observe that “the big box stores” are often viewed as being in fierce competition with “small, independent, local” (etc.) businesses for consumer dollars. Consumers should therefore “vote with their dollars” about what kinds of businesses they would prefer to keep around, and whether their next trip to the big box isn’t just supporting some CEO’s lavish lifestyle. This assertion, however, leads to all kinds of sub-issues that need to be fleshed out individually.

First, you have the question of whether big businesses and their executives and upper management are inherently “bad” somehow. Many people today would say “yes,” believing them to be inevitably driven by corporate greed (hence the “occupy” movement). Nevertheless it’s ridiculous to expect all of society to agree on whether such businesses deserve support from consumers, or how they should be taxed, or how big a business has to become before it is taxed differently. One independent garden center owner I know makes over $300,000 per year for a salary. Let us suppose that he has worked hard all his life to get to that point and knows how to take great care of his employees. Should he be taxed the same as corporate members of huge businesses? How big does a business like this have to grow before it becomes no longer small, local, or beneficial and public sentiment turns against it? Is it big when it brings in $5 million per year in gross sales? 50 million? I ask these questions to point out that the difference between a “small,” “local,” and/or “independent” business and a big, “evil” one is ultimately quite arbitrary and difficult to define.

Then on top of that you have those who think there is nothing really wrong with what big business is doing, for the most part. This may be a defensible position depending on one’s broader philosophical and religious views, but I won’t get into that here. One hopes that people who hold to this position will still at the very least spend a proportion of their dollars at small, local businesses. Then you have those – probably a significant percentage – who think big businesses may often be doing bad things but just plain don’t care enough to change their shopping habits, or feel they can’t afford to. The affordability of shopping at local small businesses depends so much on one’s individual situation, it’s nearly impossible to generalize about that.

The potential for hypocrisy here is considerable. We’ve all seen those pictures of “occupy” protesters sporting a diverse array of products, clothing and devices manufactured by the very same large companies whose greedy and self-serving ways they are protesting. So it is throughout our society, if we stop to think about where everything we consume originates. Small business owners (and I speak from experience) are often guilty of a different but parallel kind of hypocrisy. I will admit that in the early days of the Desert Northwest I was still buying most of my non-specialized nursery supplies; such as wood for building greenhouses and tables, irrigation components, and perlite; at the big box. It really is all too easy for business owners, or for anyone, to shop from large companies for their needs without a second thought. Their names and images associated with them are so pervasive to our thought because of their prominence in society, that it takes a deliberate effort, and ultimately a shift in overall mentality, to consider somewhere else we might want to do business that would suit our needs.

To add a further layer of complexity to that part of the discussion, it may be noted that there are many cases in which huge businesses and small businesses are offering for sale the same product from the same manufacturer. In such cases, how much difference does it really make when one giant manufacturer is behind it all? Should these manufacturers that sell to small and large businesses be supported (indirectly, for the end consumer) at all? This is a raging question in the nursery business, as certain manufacturers (and I include some wholesale nurseries in this category) try to balance selling the same product to independent small nurseries as to the big box stores; who then offer the same thing for a lower price, because they negotiate quantity discounts, and because they (often) pay their employees less. (More on that in a future post.) Then on top of all that we have a problem when many small independent stores with the best of intentions simply find over time that the market isn’t there to support specialty, quality products offered at appropriately higher prices (or in some cases they may be shut out of the supply chain for other reasons). All too often the end result with independent merchants is that by attempting to compete on price, they compromise on quality leading to a downward spiral of ineptitude in their product offerings.

Now, backing up just a bit: a certain faction of people would have changed the direction of this discussion a few paragraphs ago by emphasizing their belief that this concept of direct competition between the big box and independent/local nurseries and garden centers is a myth. This assertion is based on the theory that successful independent nurseries will have differentiated (in their product lines, overall shopping experience, and services) to the point that they are not really competing for the same customer dollars. From this mindset comes the idea that the real competition about which the horticulture industry ought to be truly concerned is that people are abandoning gardening and related pursuits for other types of leisure activities. Some among these, even including some independent nursery owners I have heard from, would even take that concept so far as to conclude that everyone in the industry (regardless of size and business practices) ought to work together to promote gardening in general without concern for which particular businesses get the benefits of such promotions; and that the “bickering” back an forth about whether box stores and their suppliers should be promoted or patronized is a waste of time and effort.

I can see value in some way or another to all of these perspectives. But one other important thing to note is that the power the box stores have puts them at an indisputable, unfair competitive advantage against independent and small businesses. To me this is sort of the trump card that tips me in favor of supporting independent and small businesses as much as I can, in the name of fairness. (Not that life is always fair, as we all learned in third grade, but why help to make it even less fair than it is already?)

Lest anyone think the numerous closures of local businesses in the past few years, and all the locally created jobs lost along the way, are not already evidence enough of this power; I provide a story to demonstrate this point. This is a true story, and originally I was going to withhold the names of those involved for the sake of focusing on the issue in a general sense, rather than the perpetrator; but since it’s all over the internet anyways now, I’ll point out this link to where you can read enough to get the gist of it.

Now the person describing the story in the above link is clearly biased against garden bloggers, but (comparatively speaking) lets PW off the hook. My point here is not really to negatively criticize garden bloggers. While much more could be said about them, and their role in all this; it is a bit beyond my area of personal expertise to do so myself, and tangential to the point I wish to highlight.

Rather, I want to focus on the business end of things. Let’s take a look at PW’s tactics here. As soon as they got wind of this negative post, they sent a whole bunch of garden bloggers to counter the negative feedback on her blog. And they sent the blogger who produced the negative review a nasty note essentially “firing” her from any future involvement from the company. All this over one under-performing plant which they still continue to promote, and have not pulled from their offerings. This kind of “manipulative marketing” (let us call it) is deceptively clever and requires a network far beyond the capacity of most local small businesses.

So what, you say? PW is just protecting its own interests, as any business would. Well, here are a few things I consider to be problematic about this. One, that this company has demonstrated they wish to compromise honesty about their products to protect themselves, at (so far) whatever expense is necessary. Second, it follows that they really don’t care at all what effects their actions might have on the personal reputations of garden bloggers involved. Finally, what happens when they pull this off is that they are able to continue selling crap material to naïve customers and getting away with it. As I had discussed in an earlier blog post (and others have discussed elsewhere), many newer plants going around in the trade simply aren’t bred for survival in the garden, or tested extensively enough prior to their release. All too often the customer will read great reviews about a plant and blame themselves when something goes wrong. With this sort of thing happening, is it any wonder that people are giving up on gardening in favor of other pursuits? And how many normal gardeners or nursery shoppers really have a clue that all this is going on?

Anyway, imagine a local, small business trying to pull off something like this. Even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t get away with it. A small, local business with disingenuous and heavy-handed practices seldom remains in business for long.

So, where does this leave us a the Desert Northwest? Well, we do, in fact, believe that shopping local is usually beneficial in the grand scheme, as more money is kept circulating locally, and less goes overseas or into the pockets of people who already have more than they know what to do with (though we don’t think that vanishing breed of people who have become wealthy while practicing business with integrity are somehow evil just because they are rich). So we now make an effort to do as much business as possible with locally owned independent merchants, without getting too legalistic about it or compromising on access to quality products as needed. We do this because we want to support real people in the community who depend on each other for their livelihoods. We think it helps to make life a bit more fair for society in general. We also recognize that since mail-order is such a big part of our business, we are not truly a local business to many of our customers. But we are small, and independently owned, no matter how you slice it – and that is still much in this day and age.

To discuss whether we consider the Desert Northwest to be in direct competition with box stores is more complex than it may at first seem. We don’t sell anything besides plants, so we don’t compete on other gardening products (though we still encourage anyone to buy them from a local merchant, rather than at the box). As to where people obtain plants for their gardens, we see ourselves as one tiny piece of a larger societal movement where public sentiment very gradually turns against large corporations and towards small businesses over a long period of time. It’s true that we offer pretty much none of the same plants you can find at a box store, and thus might be considered not to be competing with them. Still, if we didn’t think our plants were more interesting or superior in other ways to what you can get at the box, we would not be growing what we do. We would encourage anyone to give our plants – our entire gardening mindset, for that matter – a try, yet we don’t really expect to “win” customers from box stores any faster than the creeping changes in societal trends and favoritism.

With that in mind, we think the best thing to do for the time being is to continue spreading our message and not worry too much about competition, while hoping that the fruit of our labor will be realized in the distant future. And what is our message? Well you can read back on our blog and gather quite a bit of it. We also provide this brief summary of what we are about. If it sounds at all interesting to you, please consider doing business with us! Or, at least, consider choosing your local, independently owned nursery or garden center over the big box whenever possible.

In other news (yet related, appropriately enough), Facebook has done small businesses throughout the world a major disservice by hiding the majority of business wall posts from the majority of personal users. This started almost three months ago and seems unlikely to change as it has not done so yet. If that was what people had wanted they could just “unlike” businesses or block their wall posts at any time. But hey, it wouldn’t be the first time Facebook didn’t care enough about its users to listen to what they actually want. Perhaps one ought not to complain about what was an optional, free service to begin with; but this is clearly a move to compel small businesses to purchase Facebook ads – in short, nothing better than a money grab. We’re not going to play their games, but we will maintain our Facebook page as long as that’s where everyone is. As far as I can tell, they have not allowed for a way to be certain you are getting our updates in Facebook, though it may help if you go to our page and interact in some way. We figure we can’t worry too much about things like this. Anyone can still read our blog, or sign up for our e-mail list; these will remain our primary means of keeping in touch with those interested in our doings. To those of you who have done so, we thank you!

Suggestions for improving college horticulture programs

23 Nov 2011 6 Comments

by Ian in hortitorture industry backwardness

So it’s been nearly ten years now since I graduated from college, all ready (or not?) to enter the, uh, real world, or something like that. And with all the experiences I have had during that time, I thought it might be fun to reflect on how my college experience might have better prepared me – and anyone in the program, for that matter – for a career in horticulture.

I fully acknowledge that I might have made some better school and work choices along the way, but that is not really what I want to emphasize here. I am just trying to offer some helpful feedback. Additionally, it should be noted that I mostly enjoyed my experience at WSU. If I sound snotty or cantankerous, it is only because of the topic I’m choosing to emphasize in this particular post. I learned many valuable things in each of my courses and feel that it certainly benefited me greatly compared to not going.

As best as I can remember, my course work broke down something like this.
ornamental horticulture (25%)
fruit/vegetable horticulture (20%)
botany/plant physiology (10%)
related sciences (including chemistry, entomology, soils) (15%)
Gen Ed and electives (30%)

As I look back I think two major things are missing from the horticulture program that fail to prepare students for the (ahem) “real world.” I mean if you’re going to pay all this money for a four-year education rather than a community college you might as well get as many relevant industry skills as possible out of it. If you don’t, at best you have an excellent chance of landing a mediocre job with associates’ degree pay; at worst employers will pass you by thinking a four-year degree means you’re simply an over-priced know-it-all who still (usually) lacks the right experience.

The first thing horticulture programs should add would be extensive course work in business management. Of course, it is possible to get a business minor, and many hort students do. But I am thinking something that operates within the hort program might be in order. This is because the hort industry has, I think, many specialized needs differentiating it from most other kinds of businesses. It should be as extensive as possible including everything from the financial management of the business, to managing employees, to marketing, to everything else – but all tailored to the uniqueness of the hort industry. Is that a tall order or what? Most importantly, it should be mandatory. It’s hard to imagine how this could not be relevant even for someone who ends up with an academic or government career. If you’re not into the business end of things you might as well get a botany degree with a horticulture emphasis.

The second would be to offer an emphasis or minor in one of two choices (perhaps we could think of more?), which might be called systems managemen and public relations. A college graduate should either have the ability to plan, construct and develop nursery infrastructure and fix things when they break; or some great public relations skills which might include anything from public speaking (including rhetoric), to volunteer and docent coordination and tours (think botanic gardens), communications, and marketing. For certain jobs, having both sets of skills doesn’t hurt!

So with that in mind, a better mix might be something like
ornamental/environmental hort 20% (5% for a fruit/veg hort major)
business management, including accounting 15%
systems management/maintenance OR public relations 15%
botany/plant phys 10%
landscape design 5%
fruit/vegetable horticulture 5% (20% for a fruit/veg hort major)
related sciences 15%
Gen Ed and electives 15%

The only way I can see justifying bypassing some of the business, systems and public relations courses would be if a student has a decided interest in research only and pursues a career within academia. But I think to do so would only further isolate academia from the real world, something I see quite a bit of and really don’t like.

I would also note that ornamental hort majors have better things to do than spend too much time studying fruit and vegetable horticulture, and vice versa. Perhaps about two courses in the non-emphasized area would be good but there just isn’t a whole lot of overlap in those areas in the real world.

I still consider botany, plant physiology, chemistry, entomology, soils, and related sciences to be very important. Botany in particular I would not change much except perhaps to add a systematics course or two as required (I took one as an elective). It seems a lot of people in the hort. Industry are unaware that plants exist in the wild and have degrees of relation to each other, and these subjects have profound implications throughout the field of horticulture.

Gen Ed courses are great but there was too much redundancy with high school and among the courses themselves. If you were to eliminate all that redundancy it might drop off almost to my 15% from that alone.

But perhaps the most worthless class I had (with apologies to Dr. Hillier – he was a nice professor) was a one-credit course called “Preparing yourself to enter the field of horticulture” or something like that. We had mock job interviews and discussions about how to find a job. The problem was that the course assumed a 1960′s production-based economy which is long gone. I did not recognize that at the time, and if anyone thinks things haven’t changed since the 1960′s perhaps they should ask themselves why so many college graduates can’t find reasonably-paying work. The world has changed. If I had better ideas for how to develop a similar course today, I’d give them to you, but honestly it’s still not easy for me to figure out even now.

One last idea would be to strongly encourage or reward multiple internships during or even after college. I was only required one summer’s worth of “interning” which was actually a job at a nursery I didn’t particularly like, and didn’t really do much for me. To push this a little harder might improve students ability to make better career choices having discovered what kinds of things they like and are good at, as well as providing the experience they need to make themselves more marketable. (Here I should mention that at the Desert Northwest we are very open to providing internships for seriously aspiring horticulture students. We hope you like it, but if you find out you don’t; well, you don’t have to come back, and you will have learned something.)

I know a college education is something where you get out of it pretty much what you put in. Some of my fellow graduates are employed with companies that sell soil or other products I can’t imagine getting excited about. I recognize that the difficulty of creating a helpful and focused college horticulture program reflects the fragmentation of the horticulture business in general. Combine that with the vastly differing goals and interests of students and a very small program overall, and you can see why it would be difficult for a college horticulture program to please everyone. But those are my thoughts: what are yours?

In other news…

I have produced yet another plant hunting trip report. This one is loaded with pictures of our native manzanitas, and will be my last such expedition for 2011. Check it out!

Big, Unruly Plants: The Gardener’s Deepest Fear?

21 Sep 2011 2 Comments

by Ian in hortitorture industry backwardness

I’d be rich if I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say “Oh, I’d love to grow that, but it gets too big for my garden!” What exactly do people mean when they say a certain plant gets “too big?” Well, having talked to many gardeners and carefully considered the possibilities, I believe there are numerous possible answers to that question. Let us name as many as we can and consider whether they have merit, followed by some analysis of how this phenomenon has come about, whether some form of action is warranted, and what our response might be. In this post I am thinking mostly of woody plants (shrubs and trees), but the same principles could be applied to plants of all types.

Here are a few legitimate reasons to call a plant “too big.” “It gets too big because I don’t want a giant tree two feet away from my house.” “It gets too big because it’s going to block a view.” (Well, people don’t always stop to consider that plants can all be used to frame views, but that’s another story.) “It gets too big because I don’t want its roots to invade my septic system.” “It gets too big because it will grow into the power lines.” OK, I don’t have a problem with any of those. All well thought out; right plant, right place, and all that. We wouldn’t want to have to butcher something later and/or create a constant maintenance headache. Then we have “it gets too big because I want to fit as many different plants into my garden as possible.” For some reason (I can’t imagine why!) this reason is a personal favorite of mine, but I don’t hear it very much because the few people who think that way usually don’t want to admit it.

Then we have some rather ambiguous reasons which depend on the situation and warrant individual discussion.

“It gets too big because it’s out of proportion with the rest of my design.” Truly, this has the potential to be a good reason in many cases, but let’s consider what determines this sense of proportion. Is it based on what everyone else’s yard looks like? Or the one we saw in Sunset Magazine? Let’s hope not. Something good designers remember, but homeowners often forget, is that a garden should not be in proportion just with itself, but also with its surroundings. More about this below.

Related to that is “It gets too big because it will crowd the plants around it.” That may be true but it depends on the case. Perhaps the plants around it are, in fact, too small for the overall scale. Perhaps the combination is fine but they just need to be spaced farther apart. Perhaps the other plants “deserve” to be crowded out by something that is cooler anyways.

Then we have “It gets too big because I don’t want to deal with the constant maintenance hassle of pruning it or have to remove it at some point.” This sounds like a great reason on the surface – we’ve all seen plants that grew too large for their space and had to be severely pruned into ugliness or just removed – but again we must stop to consider the how’s and why’s. If you’re choosing a plant for a confined space, it is indeed important not to plant something that will grow too broad. As for plant height in confined spaces, I notice it is often considered as a practical concern when it ought to be only an aesthetic concern. (And, I might add, even then, aesthetic concerns may be influenced by a subconscious appeal to perceived practical concerns with no factual basis. Is a tall tree in a tight spot considered to “look bad” because it’s going to make people uncomfortable who think a tall tree, just because it’s tall, is more likely to fall on them than a short tree?) So confined spaces are one thing. But when you’re working with a relatively open space, who decides whether something is too big? And what is there to be afraid of when you plant something big in an open space? It has all the room it needs. It can be free to be spectacular. And how many times have you seen a tree growing in an open space severely butchered for no reason other than someone thought it was getting “too big?” Now that’s an atrocity.

“It gets too big because it will be difficult to remove if it dies.” Whatever. I hear this one a lot because people sometimes expect the plants we sell to freeze and die in a cold winter. We recognize that this happens sometimes, but we believe that gardener’s concerns or fears about our plants freezing are frequently based on a lack of familiarity, both in the personal sense and from reading references written by people who are also unfamiliar with them and carry a suspicious bias against them. Put another way, the same person who liberally uses dubiously hardy Hebe, Cistus, Ceanothus*, Escallonia and Cotoneaster species all over his garden will shy away from equally dubiously hardy Grevillea, Callistemon, Pittosporum and Olearia. Why the inconsistent standards? No one wants to lose a big Grevillea in a freeze, but then does anyone want to lose a big Escallonia? It happens. We won’t fault you for giving up on Grevillea if you lose one in a freeze, so long as you give up all your Ceanothus* too. In this case, an appropriate sense of proportion is needed concerning plant hardiness, but this is another subject for another post.

So there are some good, and some potentially good, reasons for shying away from plants that grow “too large.” Yet those reasons don’t seem to cover all the bases. I still get the feeling something else is at work here. Is it fear? Is it unfounded distaste? Prejucide? I don’t know; you tell me. I’ll give you my theory, though: it is about control. There’s still a subconscious thing about people wanting to control nature, that infringes upon gardening style. Of course we all want to have an adequate measure of control over our garden, as we choose what goes into it and how it is arranged. But I think many gardeners then make the logical jump that using plants that grow large, or fail to stop at a certain size prescribed by the tag (now there’s yet another fun subject for another day), are “out of control” and therefore should be avoided in general. Gardeners want to know just how big it will get and when it will stop, and to be confident that something will not outgrow its allotted space. This leads to strong feelings against large plants which could be lumped into the “unfounded distaste” category. All of a sudden large plants are inherently “messy,” “out of proportion,” “overpowering,” “unruly” and worse! When did people start thinking this way about large plants? Maybe, just maybe, those plants are cool, and useful, and they’re just doing their thing.

Coming at this from another angle entirely, it doesn’t help that is trend largely an economic one driven by large growers and horticultural big-wigs. Two things are going on. First, growers think that for potted plants to sell, they need to be as small, compact, and cute as possible and bloom in a pot. In other words, plants for sale need to appeal to impulsive people who want to see in front of them everything the plant is going to do, rather than researching it or experimenting. Along a similar vein, Annie’s Annuals blog – and this is a great read I highly recommend – discusses what we might call “boink-ism” to describe sorry, overbred dwarf versions of plants that were historically thought of as vigorous and beautiful (referring mainly to annuals and perennials) and the manner in which they are used. The other factor is that growers wish to encourage small plants, because if they sell plants that take up less space, they can sell more of them and turn more profit, plain and simple. Don’t believe me? Look at all the new introductions among woody plants in the last 20 years. How many of them are deliberately bred to be smaller than their predecessors? And how many are bred to be larger? You could probably count those in the latter category on one hand, if indeed there are any at all. True, certain perennials have been bred to be larger, but hey, not being woody they’re considered more expendable, often appealing to a different market, and many of these remain specialty items anyhow.

Consider Rhododendrons as a familiar example. Fifty years ago small-tree-sized (15-25′) Rhododendron cultivars (‘David’ is one of my favorites) were standard fare in the trade. Today if you go to a nursery to shop for Rhododendrons you’re lucky to find any cultivar that grows taller than 6′ (or at least that’s what the tag says – and heaven forbid a plant exceed the dimensions on the tag!). True, it might be considered disingenuous to market these as shrubs, but they’re still fabulous plants and not worthy of going nearly extinct in cultivation, as seems to be happening now. Has someone missed out on a major marketing opportunity for showy, compact broad-leaf evergreen trees?

A parallel trend is that sales to gardeners of large ornamental and shade trees is way down in the past ten years. This is partly the result of increasingly small lot sizes, and the tendency for landscapers to install these trees rather than homeowners/gardeners. But the subconscious “I don’t want a big messy tree in my yard” mentality that I hear so much may also be a factor. Trees are great. They make shade and mulch, and provide housing for birds and other wildlife. Many have flowers or spectacular fall color. What more could you ask for?

You might think it would be in my personal interest to promote smaller plants since I have a nursery and I want to you buy more plants. However I also believe the larger horticulture industry should seek to meet existing demand rather than to indirectly control the way gardeners think, or play off their “fears” of large plants. I am led to conclude that we have been “pulled a fast one” by the industry which has flooded the market with certain types of plants they have an interest in selling. Don’t get me wrong; most of these are great plants. But then so are many other great plants we no longer use because they have mysteriously fallen out of popularity.

So, to take a shot at bringing things back home here: the end result of this avoidance of large plants is that in attempting to find our sense of proportion and control in the garden we actually lose it. If everything in your garden is small and compact, the result is an inward-focused garden with little visual impact or appeal. If everything in your garden is small to medium-sized, the medium stuff seems big. This can work in smaller gardens on small lots but to me is still inappropriate for larger lots and those with a backdrop of established trees or other plantings, because then proportion goes out the window. Broadly speaking, a successful and visually appealing garden both fits into the setting that surrounds it, and combines plants of all shapes, sizes and textures, except in certain special situations where a dramatic effect of some sort is desired. We feel that plants should be free to grow as big and awesome as they want to, free from the inhibitions of reckless pruning, improper siting, overcrowding, and financially motivated, genetically imposed dwarfism; and that gardeners can appreciate large growing plants for what they are rather than constantly viewing them as cases for improvement by making them smaller.

In conclusion, all we ask is that before you write off a certain plant as growing “too big,” take time to consider the reasons why you feel this way. What does “too big” mean for you? Who told you it was too big? (It sure wasn’t us!) Is there really a legitimate reason, or is it ultimately about control or fear? And if you’re feeling really brave, go ahead and plant something with a tag that doesn’t tell you exactly how big it gets!

I’d better stop since I’m starting to be afraid of how long and out of control this post is getting.

*I refer specifically to the popular hybrids originating from California Ceanothus species, such as ‘Point Reyes’, ‘Dark Star’ and ‘Skylark’ (Victoria). The much hardier native Ceanothus are still quite rare in gardens.