"Climate-Resilient Gardening," with Cricket Riley (Best of "The Secrets of Mastery")

On this episode of "The Secrets of Mastery," from Craftsmanship Magazine, we walk into the world of drought-resistant gardening at the Ruth Bancroft Garden and Nursery in Walnut Creek, California.

Cricket Riley, former design services director for the garden, gives us a tour of the 3-acre oasis of succulents, cacti, and herbaceous plants that need very little water. Then we sit down for a chat about the unique horticultural design principles of the late Ruth Bancroft, and how her love of succulents turned into an international model of climate-resilient gardening.

When she died in 2017, Ruth Bancroft was 109 years old. She worked in the garden 8 to 10 hours a day into her late 80s, according to a New York Times profile. 

Ruth Bancroft’s garden design sensibility was unusual for her time. She started planting succulents back in the early 1970s, when succulents weren't in style. 

Ruth created visual interest, Riley says, by blending plant texture, such as the angular, coarse texture of agaves with the finer texture of herbaceous plants. 

The Bancroft garden is also noted for a sense of seamlessness. There are no retaining walls or landscaping edging. Three-to-four-foot mounds provide plants with adequate drainage and create smaller “rooms” for visitors to wind through. 

When Ruth started the succulent garden, her family was limiting water use on the part of the farm designated for her pleasure garden. Instead of seeing that as a limitation, Ruth used the parameter to create a stunning landscape for any Mediterranean climate. 

“She didn't do it for like an altruistic idea,” said Riley. “It was this idea that ‘I'm going to create this garden that will be able to withstand the conditions of this place.’ And isn't that what climate resilience is?”

Over the years, Ruth Bancroft took meticulous notes about the horticulture project and the trial and error she practiced. In the 1990s, the garden opened to the public. And since then it has become an example of what everyone can do to reduce their carbon footprint and use fewer resources in the garden. 

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The “Secrets of Mastery” podcast is a production of Craftsmanship Magazine. It's a series of conversations with artisans and innovators about what it takes to master their craft, and what their journey has taught them.

Craftsmanship Magazine is a multimedia publication about artisans and innovators who are creating a world built to last. For more Secrets of Mastery episodes, or more stories about craft, check out Craftsmanship.net. 

Music in this series is from Blue Dot Sessions. Pauline Bartolone is the senior audio editor for Craftsmanship.net. Managing editor for the magazine is Laurie Weed, and Todd Oppenheimer is the founding editor and executive director. 

LINKS: 

Ruth Bancroft Garden and Nursery

Cricket Riley’s forthcoming book, “Designing The Lush Dry Garden,” co-authored with Alice Kitajima & Kier Holmes. 

Transcript

(This is a computer generated transcript. While it is lightly edited, there may be errors)

Pauline Bartolone: You're listening to The Secrets of Mastery, a series of conversations with artisans about what it takes to master their craft and what their journey has taught them. I'm Pauline Bartolone and this is a production of Craftsmanship Magazine, a multimedia publication about artisans and innovators who are creating a world built to last.

On this episode, we're walking into the world of drought resistant gardening at the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, California.

Cricket Riley: Where we enter the garden now was the back of the garden when Ruth planted it.

Pauline Bartolone: We'll learn about the unique horticultural design principles of the late Ruth Bancroft, and about how her love of succulents turned into an international model of climate resilient gardening.

You might recognize the name Bancroft if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ruth was related to the publisher whose books started UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library. Ruth was a force in her own right, though. She lived to be 109 years old. She died just a few years ago. The New York Times profiled her, reporting that she worked in the garden 8 to 10 hours a day into her late 80s.

Her garden design sensibility was unusual for her time. Ruth really planted this garden because she liked

I had been to the Ruth Bancroft Garden before, in the East San Francisco Bay Area, but never with an educated guide. Cricket Riley, Design Services Director at Bancroft Garden, agreed to show me around the three acre oasis of succulents, cacti, and herbaceous plants that need very little water.

Cricket Riley: electric purple penstemon, right? Desert penstemon that's in bloom and buzzing with bees.

Pauline Bartolone: This landscape is just stunning. As Riley points out, it's both spiky and lush, flowering and rocky, tiny and towering plants coexist.

Cricket Riley: A lot of what she liked to do for visual interest was to blend texture. So the coarse texture of the agave with the finer texture of these herbaceous plants.

Pauline Bartolone: Ruth Bancroft started planting succulents back in the early 1970s. Back then, succulents weren't in style. She just liked the look of them. And her family had decided to limit water use on this part of the farm. We'll hear more about that later in the episode. Over the years, Ruth Bancroft took meticulous notes about the horticulture project and the trial and error she practiced. In the 1990s, the garden opened to the public. And since then It has become an example of what everyone can do to reduce their carbon footprint and use fewer resources in the garden. But Riley says Ruth wasn't intending to be a trendsetter.

Cricket Riley: She didn't do it for like an altruistic idea of I'm gonna be this example of like of climate resilience, right? It was this idea that I'm going to create this garden that will be able to withstand the conditions of this place. And isn't that what climate resilience is?

Pauline Bartolone: Ruth had studied architecture at UC Berkeley in the 1920s, and her design sensibility shows here.

Cricket Riley: One of the things that really appealed to her about these succulents were their architectural shapes. And that's something that you can see here. There's the rosette of the agave and the rosette of the yucca. And those repeat throughout and kind of jump from one to the other.

Pauline Bartolone: To be clear, the Bancroft Garden is not a native California plant garden. That wasn't Ruth's aesthetic, or intent for the garden. So you wouldn't find a thirsty California redwood here, but you would find low water plants from all over the world.

Cricket Riley: Africa, South America, um, North America, Australia, right? The, the regions that you normally think of as those Mediterranean dry climates,

Pauline Bartolone: but there are There are other design principles here that really set Ruth Bancroft's green spaces apart.

Cricket Riley: For one, a sense of seamlessness. Almost all of the plants here are on a raised bed, but without the retaining walls typically used for raised bed gardens. There's a lot of mounting. This This was a two fold feature. One, it was to raise the planting beds up for sharp drainage for the horticultural needs of the plants. The other was creating a naturalistic look with a lot of rooms, right?

Pauline Bartolone: The mounds, just a few feet high, create movement and fluidity that lead people through this garden that's always in bloom.

Cricket Riley: Um, paths, rooms, this sort of winding through is a botanic garden in sort of air quotes, but really it was designed as a pleasure garden,

Pauline Bartolone: Her pleasure garden has been featured in publications all over the world, from Germany to Martha Stewart magazine have studied this space.

I am personally a big fan of this style of dry gardening. And I've taken advantage of the non profit's design services and webinars for my own garden. For Craftsmanship, I wanted to know more about what drove Ruth Bancroft's design principles. So, I sat down with Cricket Riley to hear more. Cricket Riley, thanks so much for talking with us today.

Cricket Riley: Of course, I'm happy to. So the garden was started as a pleasure garden by Ruth. It was started in 1972. Her husband, Phil, they came from a long family of farmers. There was a farm here starting in the 1800s, Paris and Walnuts. And his big caveat with her starting this three acre garden was that they didn't tap into city water, that they only, that continued to use well water.

So whatever she planted on these, this large garden had to survive with. With low water, with the water from the well. So that really was the starting point of that conservation, right? So we see it now as something you do for the climate or to conserve resources. And it was that for them as well, but, but purely for that conservation of resources.

So it's changed over the years. We really feel now 50 plus years into this garden that it's an example of what a beautiful garden you can have while still being really aware of what you're using up, what you're taking from the environment.

Pauline Bartolone: This sounds like kind of a basic question, but when we say that this is a drought tolerant and climate resilient garden, what does that actually mean?

Cricket Riley: Climate resiliency is not just about water, right? Or the lack of water. It's about drastic changes in the weather. It's about drought, but also about atmospheric rivers. It's about it being really mild one day and the temperature suddenly dropping and it freezing the next day. And what we're seeing, unfortunately, is that these Drastic changes in weather are becoming more and more common.

So how can we plant our gardens to survive that and thrive in that? And there are things that Ruth did. Simply, I think, just because she was curious and was trying things and wanted to kind of push plants to their limits, where with the mounding, the plants can survive extra water and do okay, because that water doesn't sit on their roots.

So when we have an atmospheric river, we might get less damage than we would if those plants had been planted directly in the ground, or having, being really aware of where you put trees to provide shade, but also to provide protection from frost. You gave two very good examples. Are there other ways that you think this garden is climate resilient?

I think it's really important to pick plants that are suited for where you live. I think that one of the keys to this garden, um, is that the plant palette is very particular to this part of the Bay Area. So, really being aware of native plants, but not just native plants that are native to your entire state, but really locally native plants.

Those are good plants to look at. Plants that come from places around the globe that have similar conditions. Um, it's, it's being really aware of your microclimate, of that's those specific factors that, that play into the growing conditions of your garden. And then being really intentional in, in what you choose.

And in the long run, you know, another thing we have to think about is waste, right? The way that the nursery industry currently works, it's a wasteful industry. Nursery pots are wasteful, fertilizers are wasteful, right? Trucking plants is wasteful. So as much as you can sort of plant something and it do well and you kind of step back and just enjoy it, that's overall the best for the environment and that's going to be a plant fit.

is appropriate for your space.

Pauline Bartolone: So in this series, the secrets of mastery, we just had an interview with a compost maker. We've interviewed woodworkers and horsehair hitcher, and a lot of them have talked about like trial and error and how, and how important that is. And I read that, that was part of. Ruth Bancroft's experience and maybe if you could tell me a little bit about Trial and error and how that's come into play in the creation of this garden

Cricket Riley: Oh, I mean it was huge and I think that One of the things that really drew me has over the years has drawn me to Ruth and I think a lot of people To her and her experience was that she didn't see Failure as failure, right? She saw it as an opportunity to learn And early on when she planted the garden, she, uh, planted a bunch of succulents, and there was a big freeze. Like, this was in like the first year of the garden, and a bunch of plants died. And she could have easily, the garden was just starting, she could have easily just given up, and said, okay, I'm not gonna do this.

But instead she said, okay, I'm gonna figure out how, what maybe went wrong, I'm gonna study it, and I'm going to, See if I can figure out how to make it work going forward. And that was something that was a huge part of this garden. It was a garden very much of experimentation, right? And learning basically where she was, what would do well, and how to have grow in the best possible conditions.

So over the years that frost was one, but there was many other things that came up with pathogens in the soil. And it had been farmland for many years. So there were a lot of pathogens in the soil. And so over the years trying to figure out how to, um, fix those things or work around them as the develop the garden developed.

Pauline Bartolone: Is there a historical precedence to, Gardens like this drought creating drought tolerant gardens or climate resilient gardens, or is this kind of a new thing?

Cricket Riley: They're sprinkled throughout. I mean Throughout Europe, there's all sorts of low water gardens. Beth Chado created the Gravel Garden in England.

The Huntington, there's parts of the Huntington that are low water. Even parts of Lotusland, although that also is a pleasure garden. This is a really unique garden, I think because of both the scale, it's actually I mean, it's two and a half acres, the garden itself. It's, but it's quite small. And then also the kind of location of this garden, right?

It's, it's in the middle of these sprawling suburbs, right? And it's this. jewel of low water gardening. So, yes, there's, there's kind of low water, right? Desert Botanic Garden is a low water garden. But this sort of smaller scale pleasure, low water pleasure garden is fairly unusual in the United States.

Pauline Bartolone: What would you say is the most important skill, uh, that people need or a thing that they need to learn in order to have a successful drought tolerant garden?

Cricket Riley: I think you need to take care of your soil. People don't think about the soil and that is you're asking me like what it is that that I'm Continually surprised by is your soil So if you think about it the soil is what the plants grow out of it's what they get their nutrition out of it's What it's their food, right?

And if we aren't eating a healthy, good food that's nutritionally dense. We don't feel very good and we don't grow very well. And it's the same for your plants and soil is living. Right? Soil has all sorts of living, like, microbial activity in it. And that activity, those, all that feeds the plants. So really taking care of your soil.

And soil that appears to be dead can totally be brought back to life. And it can be brought back to life organically. So, making sure first, you know, making sure there's not debris in your soil. Digging deep, digging in some volcanic material, either pumice or volcanic rock, to get that drainage if you're using these low water plants.

But if you're, wherever you are in the country, just, if other places, if it needs to be more loam or whatever it is that you need in your soil to kind of create a good balance for those plants. And then making sure that you mulch with good wood mulch. Have that soil protected. Soil shouldn't be exposed to the sun.

It dries out. The microbial life dies. You want to encourage that. You want to encourage worms. Put coffee grounds in your soil. Just really, it doesn't have to be a lot, but if you care for your soil, your plants are going to be so much happier. The whole process is going to be so much easier. If you have healthy soil, why do you think it's important that people develop dry gardens climate resilient gardens?

Is it for the planet for themselves individually? Oh my gosh. It's it's all of those things, right? So first of all, I think that a lot of people what they have right now are lawns And if you haven't thought about it or done any research, I suggest you kind of look into a little bit about lawns and how bad lawns are for the environment, um, the pesticides and the water and all of the energy that it takes, so just removing your lawn is going to improve the environment, right?

You're not going to be mowing it, you're not going to be expending that labor or those fertilizers. Also, having something that's low water uses fewer resources, right? The conservation of resources, it doesn't matter what you're Sort of political stripe is we don't want to be wasteful just to spell this out I mean, is there a way that a low water garden is?

Reducing a carbon footprint a low water garden is going to use less water Right, there's also so like we have these terms like low water, but also climate resilient, right? So or climate appropriate so if you're planting things that are appropriate for your climate It's going to reduce the carbon footprint in a number of ways, right?

The plants will be more successful, so you'll be buying fewer plants that will need to be trucked across, that will need to be grown with chemical fertilizers in plastic pots that are going to go into landfill, right? There's all of those factors. There's also the care. The plant's going to be happier, it's going to need less care.

For us here in coastal California, a low water garden oftentimes needs less tending. Right? So you can have somebody come, if you don't want to do the gardening, quarterly to carefully take care of your plants, then come weekly to blow leaves around and hack things back, right? It actually requires less input once established and that input takes carbon, right?

That input creates It's all sorts of off gassing and use of petroleum products, et cetera.

Pauline Bartolone: Thank you so much Cricket Riley for talking with us. Of course, my pleasure. I love talking about this place. Cricket Riley is Design Services Director at Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, California. And that's it for this edition of the Secrets of Mastery. Music in this series is by Blue Dot Sessions. See you next time. For more Secrets of Mastery episodes, or more stories about craft, check out craftsmanship. net. That's craftsmanship. net. You can find us on Substack, too. Thanks for listening.