One beautiful container

HGTV host promises smiles grow in gardens

Sunday, April 14, 2013

All it takes to start a garden is a “beautiful container” and “a good local garden center,” Erica Glasener said.

She should know. She’s been talking to - and listening to - gardeners around the country for most of her life.

The longtime host of HGTV’s “A Gardener’s Diary” will speak to the Flower, Garden and Nature Society of Northwest Arkansas and guests Saturday. Her topics will be “The Joy of Gardening” at 10 a.m. and “Designing a Garden for Year Around Pleasure” at 2 p.m.

She knows that some of her listeners - and some of her most devoted fans - might never put spade to dirt. They simply enjoy the idea of gardening. But she wants to encourage those fantasy gardeners to reconsider.

“I think if they have any small success, it’s so different than (all the time spent on) computers,” she said. “It’s so tangible. You can smell it and feel it and touch it and taste it, and it’s immediate in a lotof ways - but you get the long-term gratification, too.

That’s why you always hear gardeners say, ‘Oh, but wait ’til next spring.”

For those who say they don’t have time, Glasener said gardening is therapy worth the investment.

“It’s relaxing, and the plants don’t talk back to you.”

And for those looking for a creative outlet, gardening is perfect.

“You hear it referred to as ‘the art and science of gardening,’” she said, “and there is science to it, but it is an art. What appeals to me most about a garden is when it has the personality of the owner.

That’s the heart and soul of gardening and why people liked our show. We were trying to tell the story of why people do it.”

Glasener gardens because she grew up loving the outdoors in south Florida - where “we really did have banana trees in the back yard,” she said - because she got a job at a garden center in high school and because she needed a direction in college.

“I started out studying just liberal arts - English, music, dance, history, pottery- and I thought, ‘What am I going to major in?’ I thought about horticulture, and it just sort of took off from there.”

After college, however, came “the school of hard knocks,” she admitted. She and a friend from the University of Maryland started a landscaping business and “worked ourselves to death. I realized that probably wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

An internship at Brookside Gardens in Montgomery County, Md., ended up deciding her future for her.

Glasener convinced her employers to let her teach a workshop on preparing a garden for winter, “so when I went to apply for the education coordinatorjob at the arboretum on the Swarthmore College campus, I was able to say I had taught workshops!

“I was lucky to land there,” she said. “The Delaware Valley is a wonderful place, rich in horticulture history.”

It wasn’t until 10 years later than Glasener moved to Atlanta and stumbled into the opportunity to host “A Gardener’s Diary.”

“Our show was as much about people and their stories as it was about gardening,” she said. “I love the stories, and people are endlessly fascinating. It was a good fit, and we had a great time doing it. I wish we still were.”

So do her fans.

“To let you know how popular her show was, we have had calls from Oklahoma, Missouri and as far south as Magnolia in Arkansas to get details on attending her program,” said Gail Pianalto, co-chairman for programs for the Flower, Garden and Nature Society.

When HGTV canceled the show, Glasener had to create a new career for herself. She parents an 11-yearold daughter, writes for Fiskars Tool Co., lectures, leads garden tours and is now blogging for Gibbs Gardens, a brand-new public garden an hour north of Atlanta. She loves having her fingers in another public garden, shesaid, filled with daffodils and water gardens, a native fern garden, a Japanese garden and more.

“And I try to keep up with my ornamental garden” in an in-town neighborhood of Atlanta, she added.

“We live on a corner lot on a dead-end street,” she said, chosen for the quality of the schools and the mature trees.

“I have a sunny front yard, a shady side yard, and a back yard that doesn’t get gardened too much,” she admitted. Half is planted to vegetables - which Glasener finds difficult to grow - “and the black lab gets the other half.”

Yes, she said, her daughter does garden, and she highly recommends it for children, “even if you just grow green beans or basil in a pot so you can make pesto. It’s what you expose people to that matters.”

That container garden, one beautiful pot outside the front door, “will put a smile on your face,” she promised.

“Some of the best gardens I’ve seen are small.”

But if her talk inspires a complete landscape redesign, Glasener said hire a professional.

“You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache and money if you start out with a plan as a guide. Then, as you learn more, you can make the gardens yours.”GO & DO Erica Glasener Flower, Garden and Nature Society When: “The Joy of Gardening” at 10 a.m. and “Designing a Garden for Year Around Pleasure” at 2 p.m. Saturday Where: Northwest Technical Institute Student Center, 709 Old Missouri Road in Springdale Cost: Free to members; nonmembers $15 for one presentation or $20 for both Information: Joyce Mendenhall at (479) 466-7265 or Gail Pianalto at (479) 361-2198

Northwest Profile, Pages 44 on 04/14/2013