News & Events
They’re Creepy and They’re Kooky, Mysterious and Spooky, They’re All Together Ooky, The Plants of Halloween! (Snap-snap) Macro of two insectivorous venus fly trap (Dionaea muscipula) one tightly closed and one open Let’s talk about oddly unusual plants: plants that…
The Mary Lou Heard Memorial Garden Tour Board meets nine months out of the year, planning and coordinating each year's garden tour. Since the pandemic, we've been meeting on Zoom instead of meeting in person in the Huntington Beach area.…
It's that time of year when you can barely make it down the aisle of your grocery store without encountering Pumpkin Spice something... hot cocoa mix, cereal, cookies, popcorn, breakfast pastries, tea, coffee, coffee creamer, pretzels, ice cream, even air…
There's always a lovely little stream running at Oak Canyon Nature Center “Nuclear summer,” I called the hot, dry fall of Southern California. I claimed, we only have two seasons: 7 months of spring and five months of summer that get worse…
Thank you all SO much for your support for our yearly garden tour honoring our late founder Mary Lou Heard. Even though we had to change the date, and in doing so lost several garden hosts, we saw so many…
It has surely been a wild rollercoaster that we've all unwillingly been traveling on since the "shut-down" began last year in March. We watched in horror as hospitals were overflowing with COVID-19 patients, many of them our loved ones, friends, and…
Admission Booth w/ a living roof! My husband and I always seek out botanical gardens to visit whenever we travel... here's the latest one that I'd like to share with you from the Lone Star State of Texas! We've been…
Growing up in the 1960's PEEPS were a part of of my family's Easter Celebration. Most kids received them in their Easter Basket, but my mom used them for a table decoration. She usually started decorating our dining room table…
Like a Dickens novel - “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” 2020 seemed to start out like any other new year. I do recall it was more fashionable to have a motivational word for…
The reason I found Heard's Gardens oh so many years ago is due to two years of unsuccessfully trying to grow sweet peas. I had friends who grew mass quantities of these butterfly winged beauties and I was quite often the…
Most 19th-century Americans found Christmas trees an oddity. The first record of one being on display was in the 1830s by the German settlers of Pennsylvania, although trees had been a tradition in many German homes much earlier. The Pennsylvania German…
As you know from a past newsletter, I have been walking in my neighborhood during my lunch break to try to keep the COVID-19 "15" from appearing on my hips, tummy, & derriere - you get the picture! Well I've…
