NORTH COAST GARDENING: A musical interlude at the garden ...

Get thee to the garden on Sundays -- the Humboldt Botanical Garden, that is. Beginning this Sunday, the Humboldt Botanical Garden will celebrate summer by presenting the first musical offering in its summer series of music called ?First Sundays at the Garden.? While the garden will be open every Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. this summer, it will also offer live music the first Sunday of each month.

Performing this Sunday will be Reflection, a vocal trio with acoustic guitar performing folk tunes and standards. Also on the program is Humboldt Light Opera Company's women's ensemble ?The Babes.? This is a wonderful family event where you can pack up a picnic lunch, spread out a blanket on the soft green grass and listen to quality local music in a beautiful public garden.

And while you are at the Humboldt Botanical Garden, check out all the beautiful core gardens. The Dedekam Ornamental Terrace Garden is a rainbow of colors planted in bands of red, orange, yellow and blue. Plants were selected for their foliage, flower color and hardiness. A striking feature of this garden is the pair of formal storm water runnels that flow from the top of the garden into the Lost Coast Brewery Native Plant Garden water feature below.

Central to the Humboldt Botanical Garden is the Lost Coast Brewery Native Plant Garden. Covering more than an acre, this garden is the largest native plant garden in Northern California, offering habitat to weasels,

rabbits, foxes, hawks, bobcats and a variety of songbirds and butterflies. This garden provides visitors with striking examples of how native plants can be aesthetically integrated into home landscapes.

Cross over a rustic foot bridge and discover the wild things in Wildberries Natural Riparian Area. Central to this garden is Fault Creek, a year-round, free-flowing spring that bisects a rich community of native willows, berries, flowering currant, red alders and other natives. The wild berries of this riparian garden include California blackberry plants, thimbleberry, salmonberry and evergreen huckleberry and wild currant. Migratory songbirds such as Wilson's warbler, Swainson's thrush and black-headed grosbeak make this garden their home.

The Moss Family Temperate Woodland Garden is located slightly inland and up in elevation from the lower gardens. Because this garden is tucked within a bowl surrounded by steep grassy hills and tall Sitka spruce forest, it is protected from stiff coastal winds. Often the temperature can be as much as 10 degrees warmer.

The Moss Family garden offers an extensive rhododendron collection, a bed of the enchanting true blue Himalayan poppy, the Raul Ruiz Iris Douglasiana Reserve and the rare Wollemia pine. This tree, once thought to be extinct, was known only from fossils dating from 120 million years ago. A group of 30 or so were discovered in 1994 at the bottom of a canyon in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia.

Peter Santino's All Happy Now Earth Sculpture, located at the uppermost reaches of the garden, is the only one of its kind in North America. It is a merger of two ancient landscape architectural features, the ziggurat and the labyrinth. Based on a mathematical equation named Fermat's Spiral, the 100-foot diameter earth mound is covered with grass and features two non-intersecting quarter-mile pathways which take the walker to the center and back down out the opposite side. It is intended to be walked in the manner of the meditation labyrinths found in churches and cathedrals.

The Humboldt Botanical Garden is located at the north end of the College of the Redwoods campus, on Tompkins Hill Road. Summer hours starting next Wednesday (June 6) are Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Admission is free for garden members, $5 for non-members and free for children under 12.

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Terry Kramer is a trained horticulturist and journalist. She has been writing a garden column for the Times-Standard since 1982. To get in touch with Terry, send an e-mail to style@times-standard.com and put ?For Terry Kramer? in the subject line, or write to Terry Kramer, c/o Times-Standard, P.O. Box 3580, Eureka, CA, 95502.

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