Home & Garden Columns

Having had the unhappy occasion to take an airline flight recently, I got to feast my jaded eyes on something called “Skymall.” This is a catalogue one finds stuffed along with the airline’s house magazine and a leftover napkin into the pocket of the seat ahead, pressing on one’s sore knees even if one is, as I am, built like a fireplug.  

The catalogue encompasses offerings from a number of companies, including the likes of Sharper Image and Hammacher Schlemmer. One can expect gadgets from such sources that push the limits of ingenuity well into the territory of weirdness. One can still be surprised.  

Presumably, somewhere in the world (or perhaps just above it) people are buying travel toothbrush sanitizers, license plate frames with scrolling customizable LED-lettered messages, motorized tie racks, and pop-up hotdog cookers. Whatever else the late-capitalist era is, it’s entertaining—rather like California elections.  

There are garden tchotchkes in the catalogue too, if you really want a glass-topped table with a “resin” (i.e. plastic) base in the shape of a sumo wrestler, a really dumb face to nail to an innocent tree, or a radio-controlled swimming robot shark for your koi pond. Wait, that looks pretty cool; maybe I want one.  

But gardeners have a longstanding tradition of spending winter evenings curled up with seed and bulb catalogues, where we find ingenuity and weirdness of a different sort. These are so entertaining, we don’t need to confine them to being winter wishbooks; I picked up a few at the San Francisco Garden Show just to keep track of what’s new—and what’s old. 

My favorite comes in the mail, because I’m a member of Native Seeds/SEARCH. That Tucson-based nonprofit sends a holiday catalogue that emphasizes NS/S’s other offerings—great nonstandard culinary chiles, chile powders, beans, and other foodstuffs; basketry and carved implements; books and clothing.  

The spring seedlisting is for the optimistic few in the fog zone, or for those of us with reliable sun and heat, mostly east of the hills. NS/S gathers and grows out rare varieties of such desert staples as beans and peas, melons, corn, squash, chilipeppers, gourds, okra, onions, amaranth and sorghum, tomatoes, greens, and tobacco. 

More locally, Annie’s Annuals has a colorful and jolly catalogue, and the two Annies and their confederates certainly come up with new and gorgeous flowering plants, natives, exotics, and hybrids. Their catalogue includes the dates of the nursery’s several annual parties—the next one’s April 13, 14, and 15—and some good garden advice too. 

You can find Kitazawa seeds on the racks in garden shops and places like the Berkeley Bowl, but the company catalogue has more varieties in it than any display can hold, and recipes too. Kitazawa, based in the Bay Area, started out selling vegetable seeds to a largely Japanese-American clientele, seeds of goods like daikon and pak choi that they couldn’t easily find in the markets 90 years ago.  

The current expanded inventory includes all that and seven Thai basil varieties, tomatoes including the sweet ‘Odoriko’ variety, Armenian cucumbers, and Egyptian molokhia.  

Order these catalogues and see other offerings at www.nativeseeds.org, www.anniesannuals.com and www.kitazawaseed.com.  

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. “Green Neighbors,” her column on East Bay trees, appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.