Even though it’s tempting to cocoon inside, winter is the time for Sacramento gardeners to pick up our tools and go outdoors. The work that we do in the next few months lays the foundation for the rest of the year. Winter is pruning season for roses, grapes and most deciduous fruit trees. Pruning encourages the growth of fruiting or flowering branches and controls a plant’s shape and size. Pruning can also improve a plant’s health by removing dead, diseased and damaged growth.
Built in 1931 in one of Sacramento’s most celebrated neighborhoods, the brick Tudor exhibited a footprint typical of that bygone era.
The kitchen was small. The rooms were segregated. Storage space was scarce. But homeowner Katherine Bardis, who saw past the bright blue fuzzy carpet from a long-ago update, knew she could turn the two-story structure into a show-stopping place to call home. “The craftwork in the home was phenomenal,” Bardis says. “You could tell the bones had a lot of room for greatness. The house gave us a really good foundation to be creative.”She knows what she’s talking about. As co-founder of Bardis Homes, a company launched in 2012, Bardis is experienced in home construction, land development and interior design. She was born to the business. Her father Chris Bardis built thousands of homes in Sacramento and around the West.
“High and low” is how interior designer Elizabeth Lake describes her style for remodeling her two-bedroom, one-bath home in East Sacramento. For example, she replaced the cabinets on one side of the kitchen with inexpensive open shelving from IKEA. But in the dining room, she went big with a modern, statement-making crystal chandelier by Baccarat.
“Buy quality when necessary, but be smart about it,” says Lake. “There are places you don’t need the best of the best and places you probably do.”
For much of the world, fall is the time to harvest and put the garden to bed. Gardeners in Sacramento are harvesting, too, but we have to multitask. Autumn is our “second spring,” according to Angela Pratt, owner of The Plant Foundry in Oak Park. Now is the time to plant spring-blooming seeds and cool-season flowering plants, and then enjoy their flowers in the coming months.
Gerald Walburg is a gentle, unassuming man with an extremely large perspective on life. His multiple homes, backyard art studios and sophisticated gardens are proof. But nothing conveys this man’s vast talent for great endeavors more than his art—his really big art. Examples include the 40-foot-tall corten steel “Indo Arch,” installed in 1980 outside of Macy’s on the K Street Mall, and a striking bronze sculpture at the entrance of the Crocker Art Museum. While art lovers can access Walburg’s public creations at any time, the community now has the opportunity to view his private collection during this year’s Urban Renaissance Home Tour on Sunday, Sept. 23.
It was our first visit to our son’s new townhouse. Kurt and his girlfriend Shelly had purchased a strawberry pot, filled its little openings with blue lobelia, scarlet salvia and white alyssum, and put it on the front stoop. The plants were drooping woefully in the blazing sunlight. As soon as Kurt and Shelly opened the door, I blurted, “These plants need water now!” I tried, more diplomatically, to explain that their roots needed more soil and space to grow, and it would be very hard to keep them moist enough to survive in that pot. In my heart, I was lamenting that they were making the same mistakes I made when I began gardening. Why didn’t they consult me, the Master Gardener in the family? Does each generation need to repeat the last’s gardening goofs?
