Beautiful and sustainable

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• Learning from a garden’s living classroom

  Learning from a garden’s living classroom

  Named for the series of mountains visible in the distance, Garden of the Seven Sisters occupies a gently sloping half-acre adjacent to the University of California Cooperative Extension office. The garden is designed and maintained as a living classroom and working laboratory to teach the home gardener sustainable, science-based gardening practices.

  The sizes of the garden displays are created for the urban backyard. A small kitchen garden display shows how successive plantings in a limited space can provide a remarkable variety and plentiful supply of vegetables all year round.

  The orchard demonstrates how two or three fruit trees, planted in a single hole, can maximize use of limited space and lengthen the season of harvest. The garden also provides a variety of droughttolerant ornamental plants, including many California natives that attract birds, bees, and butterflies.

• Trogdon home in Nipomo: Water, pottery and dogs

  Trogdon home in Nipomo: Water, pottery and dogs

  After establishing his Nipomo-based tropical plant business, Pacific Sun Growers, in 1979, Ben Trogdon wanted to live near his workplace. The lot that he and his wife Robin purchased was part of a large eucalyptus grove. They lived in a trailer house on the property during the two years it took for them to clear an opening and build their house.

  They designed their home with environmental consideration. A south-facing sun room brings solar heat into the open living-kitchen-dining area, and a woodburning stove keeps the home cozy in winter. Solar panels on the roof provide most of their electricity; a photovoltaic system, recently added, supplies energy for the couple’s electric pottery kiln.

  Initially, a lawn surrounded the house. In the backyard, the grass was removed gradually and replaced by the Mexican blue palm, acacias, Catalina cherries, bottlebrush, timber bamboo and Ceanothus that now grow there.

• It’s back! The Cambria Garden Tour and Gourmet Garden Event

  It’s back! The Cambria Garden Tour and Gourmet Garden Event

  The Cambria Garden Tour is back! Taking a one-year hiatus leaves avid gardeners anxiously anticipating this upcoming event. This year, I assisted the tour’s selection committee in identifying seven gardens that represent Cambria’s finest. Without giving away too many secrets, here are the backyard paradises offered on the 2012 garden tour:

  • Need ideas for tough plants that can thrive in salt and wind? Participants will visit the garden of Mark and Chris Landgreen on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The landscape provides a foreground for the vast water view. Low-growing, drought tolerant plants like ceanothus and rockrose provide color. A carpet of dymondia surrounds the rock pavers. There’s a modified Zen garden and an enclosed area for potting and growing grapes, vegetables, and herbs. The seating area and pizza oven by the front door provide a sheltered area to “sit a spell.” An added treat: local classic cars will be on view on the cul-de-sac out front.

  • Around the corner you’ll visit an

• The Barasch home in SLO: The best of both worlds

  The Barasch home in SLO: The best of both worlds

  The San Luis Obispo home of Stephen and Janine Barasch has a split personality: one for the public eye, and one kept discreetly out of view.

  Stephen is an architect with a yen for contemporary designs. So it may seem strange that, when he began contemplating an “empty nest” home for himself and Janine, he looked to the 1950s three-bedroom California bungalow they owned as a rental.

  According to Barasch, the building’s positive attributes included the fact that it was “a significant and familiar structure on aprominent corner lot in a very established neighborhood.”

• Philip Carey home: Turning dreams into reality

  Philip Carey home: Turning dreams into reality

  When Philip Carey studied Exhibit Design at Long Beach State College, he never dreamt that he’d become an artist. But since his retirement 2-1/2 years ago, he has produced three volumes of Dream Books, with cartoonlike drawings based on his “numerous, vivid and wacky dreams.”

  He draws while the images are fresh in his mind the next morning. Two exhibits of his art are scheduled during February, in Morro Bay and San Luis Obispo galleries.

  He began his career in exhibit design at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles, continued at the Roberson Museum in Binghamton. New York, and concluded after 20 years as an exhibit designer for the California State Parks system.