A couple of recipes

“Hot Ginger-Echinacea Lemonade”

A recipe from Growing 101 Herbs That Heal

This tea is a great expectorant and a sore throat soother. Also, it tastes good.

2 cups boiling water

1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh ginger root

1 teaspoon dried echinacea flowers or roots

(find these at herbs stores or online)

Juice of 1 freshly squeezed lemon

1 teaspoon honey

In a bowl or teapot, pour the boiling water over the echinacea and ginger root. Cover and steep for 10-15 minutes. Add the lemon juice and boney and stir. Serve warm.

Zucchini-Banana Bread

As a side note, I thought I would add a recipe to help take care of all of those monstrous zucchinis growing in your garden. This is adapted from a few different recipes.

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

3 cups flour

2-3 cups grated zucchini

3 ripe, mashed bananas

2 tablespoons oil

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 tablespoon cinnamon and nutmeg

1 tablespoon vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Mix the butter, sugar, and vanilla in a bowl. Beat in the eggs, oil, then the bananas and shredded zucchini and spices. Mix all of the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl. Combine dry ingredients with the wet. Place in a well greased glass pan. Cook for 45 minutes to an hour. Because of the bananas and zucchini, this bread will be moist verging on pudding. Let cool before eating.

Roberta's latest client

Summer Pleasures

Having lived in Sacramento for nearly thirty years now, Roberta has learned to survive the grueling summers by way of air-conditioning, cool bodies of water and innumerable glasses of lemonade. This summer she has decided to elaborate on her heat escaping schemes here on this blog. We have compiled a very short list of Sacramento eateries that can provide a shady spot in the garden to enjoy a meal or a coffee. Over the next couple of months you will find a smattering of these garden related articles to match the season. It is an experiment, so bare with us. We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions. Enjoy!

the Tower Cafe

Tower Café:

www.towercafe.com

1518 Broadway

Sacramento

Sun-Thurs: 8am - 11pm

(desserts and drinks from 10pm-11pm)

Fri- Sat 8am - 12am

(desserts and drinks from 11pm-12am)

The Tower Café is a local treasure, something to keep in ones pocket when friends ask what to do in the city. Between the consistently tasty food to the titillating décor to the rare and head turning garden, the Tower café has no equal within one hundred miles. As soon as we get close Roberta starts to make note of the garden, like an emerald mirage floating in heat waves and concrete. There is always something to have piqued her attention anew – a particularly full Acer, yet another gigantic cerulean pot, more topiary junipers… We marvel at the lushness of this little oasis and the genius that has gone into it.

The Tower Café, opened in 1990, is named after the Tower Drugs store that once occupied the space that the cafe took over. The Tower franchise of the Solomon family: Tower Books, Tower Records, etc., was born from this same Tower Drugs store. The Tower café and the adjacent theater are both memorial to and singular survivors of the Tower legacy. The theater was built during a moment of the uninhibited and curvaceous lines of Art Deco - making it the oldest theater still functioning in Sacramento, né 1938. Today the Tower theater plays independent flicks and it was there that I first saw and fell in love with Amélie. At ten o’clock pm when the movie finished, the café was still open for coffee and dessert - the décor of the café offering an appropriate follow up to the fantasy of a movie.

There is not a corner of the Tower Cafe that is not host to a gaggle of competing sculptures. the devotees of innumerable creeds, cast in concrete and wood, pray and genuflect amid ficus trees, orchids and busts of Frida Kahlo. The ceiling is hung with lanterns and streamers, wall hangings, tapestries and vases with four foot sprays of gladiolas - a cavern of chlorophyl stalagmites and woven stalactites. The motif is undeniably South American with a twist of the indiscriminate antiquarian. There is an air of the English study brimming with stolen goods and appropriated culture – it’s rich, decadent. The idea is for the cafe to be “Sacramento’s own little global village”. The cuisine is also a mélange of tender appropriation and imagination: Mexican hot chocolate in a four-inch saucer, “Eggs Tower” - a version of the classic Benedict, the “Greek” breakfast, Chile Relleno, Chinese chicken or Brazilian Chicken salads.

Naturally Roberta and I sit outside whenever possible, even if it means asking for a heat lamp to be turned on in the early morning. The patio, or garden area, is brick. The tables totter in the middle of this patio, surrounded by a dense planting that shields the patrons from the road. A fence of Italian Cypress towering thirty feet high, Acers (Japanese Maples), Thujas, Elephant Ear, Yucca, tree ferns and a giant Cedar comprise the verdant wall, all of which is belted by a delicate metal fence covered in Morning Glories. Sitting amid this hand forged jungle it is easy to forget that one is practically swimming upstream a Sacramento thoroughfare at the corner of Broadway and sixteenth street. The Tower café is a magical urban grotto of lush indulgence, local history and sumptuous food. Take comfort in their ambience that transcends, as if by magic, the harsh seasons.

the Coffee Garden

Coffee Garden:

www.thecoffeegarden.com

(916) 457-5507

2904 Franklin Blvd.

Sacramento

Mon- Sat 6am-11pm

Sun 7am-10pm

You may have overlooked the stucco façade of the Coffee Garden on first pass. It is camouflaged by a lack of décor common in most Sacramento strip-malls. A string of lights and a few potted palms have been placed outside the front door, something like balloons tacked to a mailbox, signaling that there is more going on inside than meets the eye.

Beyond the deceptive exterior there is indeed more to be had. Inside the Coffee Garden there is a jumble of small tables, comfy chairs and artwork all higgledy-piggledy about the room. The jolly staff is helpful - quick to make drinks and answer questions.

Roberta and I visited on a mild Wednesday afternoon. We ordered and took our enormous cups, overflowing with foam, to the back garden. We found a table in the courtyard which is carpeted by decomposed granite and skirted by a vine-covered fence. The foliage is mainly comprised of plants in pots – tropical ferns, palms, orchids, and hibiscus. The owner and gardener had been an exotic plant dealer before opening the Coffee Garden.

We sipped our coffee, contentedly swaddled in the back-yard atmosphere. The muffled crunch of footsteps on decomposed granite, a low murmur from the patrons and a diverse family of flora to keep our eyes moving over the landscape made for a lovely setting. The Coffee Garden made our list of public gardens to escape to during the summer.

High-Hand Nursery

High-Hand Nursery

(916) 652-2065

www.highhand.com

3750 Taylor Rd.

Loomis, CA 95650

Open: Mon-Sat 9am-5pm

Sun 9am-4pm

This is undoubtedly the Disney Land of nurseries. We went to High-Hand – the name references a high-hand in cards - for lunch on a Sunday afternoon and found it bursting with people. The restaurant structure resembles a barn converted to a solarium. The walls on two sides are open to the nursery and the entire thing is topped in glass. Bright yellow and orange umbrellas dapple a completely outdoor section of seating and inside old world charm competes with new world functionality - rolling metal doors lock down the facility when it is shut. Upon arriving we were handed a beeper as the host told us that we should expect a twenty minute wait. Neither of us was upset, we were looking forward to exploring the nursery.

The grounds, departing from the restaurant to cover a broad expanse of land, looks more like Pleasantville on steroids than a plant nursery. There are fully grown trees with black Mondo grass and Sedum Ogon tumbling from their planters. Shrubs are stacked like presents in a tantalizing array of colors and shapes - like a Bengal Tiger rooming with a King Penguin these specimens share living quarters for the sake of the show, in blatant disregard of natural order. We were startled by a life-size bronze boy pushing a cart through a patch of petunias. Even someone with no interest in plants could appreciate this show. We explored the isles of Echinacea and Acorus grass, bright red Roses and yellow Peonies. Across the yard we came to another barn-like structure that contained mountains of ceramic pots in glistening umbers and navy blues. By the time our buzzer went off we were dizzy from all of the marveling we had done.

The food however, was not to be upstaged. I was prepared to bet that the ambience had taken precedence over the cuisine, likely relegated to a third rate chef and iceberg lettuce. Me of little faith – our lunch, much of it grown on location – was delicious. My green-bean salad in pesto was delicate and well thought out. Roberta’s prawn salad was equally fresh and interesting. It is rare to be able to interact with nature and a garden while dining out. High Hand offers a uniquely intimate experience - eating in the midst of a nursery, flanked by the grounds growing supplying our meal. I was pleasantly surprised by the whole experience.

The Secrets Behind Success: Roberta's connection to Sierra View Nursery

Sierra View Nursery is a wholesale nursery - a growing ground that provides plants to landscapers and designers. The nursery itself is set against the ridge of a hill - the bank of a railroad track as it happens, in Loomis, California. Sierra View Nursery is comprised of two small, shingled huts with flower boxes – resembling leftover movie props - that act as sentries in the Orlando vicinity of the Florida shaped nursery. Those huts are where Lara, Sierra View’s owner, does her business. Generally there are two or three large trucks nosing in on the porch: a delivery truck, a nursery employee vehicle, and perhaps a visitor. The atmosphere is serene: the nursery hums with sprinklers and the occasional train.

 

It was a warm day when we visited Lara’s nursery.  She escorted us through the long, narrow expanse of the grounds, stopping to point out plants of interest along the way. “That’s a California Anemone, it’s a California native,” Lara pointed to a tall flowering shrub. “Do you want to see my cauliflower?” Lara asked us, and of course we did. In the middle of Sierra View Nursery - maybe Polk county, if you’re still with me on the Florida reference - Lara has created an example garden of the plants she carries.  We walked through a living trellis of apple trees to a round bed of metallic blue foliage. Lara bent down and pulled open a group of leaves to show us the knobby head of a beautiful, white cauliflower. “I tie the leaves up, it’s supposed to keep the bugs out. It’s probably going to make the cabbage grow into a funny shape though,” Lara commented. We continued on, and Lara, amongst day lilies and rows of tomatoes, would bend down to pull weeds from the bases of plants. “She’ll be doing that all day,” Roberta said in smiling approval, referring to Lara’s plant preening.

 

Roberta and Lara have been working together for the better part of seven years. They have cycled through contractors and landscape crews, attended children’s birthday parties, graduations and a myriad of other social gatherings. Before Lara and Sierra View Nursery, Roberta’s designs were at the mercy of the limited stock of other local nurseries. There was always something being substituted, something too small and twiggy, something that had to be brought in from that other nursery, even though “I can’t stand working with them!” Roberta would lament. The problem was, other nurseries stocked for their retail customers that generally wanted colorful annuals, large varieties of shrubs that Roberta avoids such as privets and camillias – plants that require shaping and copious amounts of water, and usually didn’t have drought tolerant sections. Roberta works with specimen plants, dwarf varieties that have the same shape and color but are half the size or less maintenance than their giant counterparts. When Roberta was introduced to Lara, through a friend incidentally, her use of other nurseries died off almost immediately. Lara stocks specimen and drought tolerant plants, California natives as well as landscape workhorses such as miscanthus, pennisetums, junipers and berberis. Another thrilling aspect of her plant stock for Roberta was the size and quality of Lara’s plants. “I like to wait,” Lara said in regards to how lovely her plants always look, “and in fact I think I tend to wait too long with some of them.” Even the one-gallon pots - a standard size for plants that will go into a new landscape - are nearly bursting through their containers. The effect is, when a client sees her newly planted yard, the plants she has just spent thousands of dollars on are identifiable, not a field of barely-living-stems.

            Lara’s care of plants began in January of 1999, more as a happy mistake than anything else. Her father suggested that she start selling some tree starts and well, “someone has to be with plants all the time” Lara remarked, and thus she became the full-time caretaker of what was to become Sierra View Nursery. It wasn’t a complete left field decision though – Lara has a degree in plant science from the University of California Davis. Though Lara’s nursery is strictly wholesale, she brings her wares to the farmer’s market. She sells her flowers, some vegetables and vegetable starts along with anything else that happens to be looking good. Being at the farmer’s market is a way for Lara to interface with the public, which she can’t always do from her out-of-the-way location in Loomis. The market helps her bring awareness to the existence of her nursery, as well as bring in business via the designers and contractors she works with, “I have a brochure with the names of landscapers and designers I work with for people to take… although that needs to be updated,” she said slightly apologetically. The landscaping world is tough, as both Lara and Roberta know, and finding a contractor that can maintain the quality of work as well as the ethic that they desire is difficult. 

             The symbiotic relationship between Roberta and Lara has evolved over time. Walking down the aisles of bursting roses and rambling sedums, Roberta picked up a Salvia East Friesland she wanted for her own yard, “I’ve been using these a lot because I know you have so many of them, and they’re just as beautiful as May Night.”

“Good,” Lara said, “but we’re nearly done with those, just so you know. Have you ever used this plant?” She asked pointing towards a red-barked tree, nearly four feet tall and decked with tiny white, bell-like flowers. The tree is a Styrax or “Japanese Snowball Tree,” Lara informed us.

Roberta got giddy over the new specimen, “Wait, let me get a pen to write down the name.” Lara’s stock is influenced by what Roberta uses, just as Roberta’s plantings will change depending on what’s in season and thriving at Sierra View Nursery. When questioned about her drought tolerant selection, Lara rattled off a few plant names before saying, “I try to have what Roberta uses.”

As we loaded up Roberta’s truck with the plants she had chosen, I carefully leaned the two tomato plants that Lara had insisted I take against the back seat, excited and nervous to test their metal back in the big city where I live. One was already sporting two striped and shiny green tomatoes. We waved goodbye to Lara and she waved back before ducking into the little shingled office to continue on with the day’s work.

 

Sierra View Nursery

(916) 652-3908 ph/fax

lara@infostations.net

3170 Delmar Avenue

 Loomis, CA 95650

http://www.sierraviewnsy.com/