Nurseryman to Talk about Ornamental Trees Monday

Steve Brigham, owner of Buena Creek Gardens, a retail plant nursery and display garden in Vista, will speak to the Palisades Garden Club members and guests on Monday, February 7, 7:30 p.m. at the Woman’s Club, 901 Haverford. He will talk about his book ‘The Trees of San Diego and of Other Mediterranean Climates,’ (San Diego Horticulture Society), which includes 240 trees, accompanied by color photographs by Don Walker. Buena Creek is a four-acre garden and nursery that grows Southern California’s largest selection of new and uncommon flowering perennials, shrubs, daylilies and vines. Its collection of over 5,000 outstanding varieties of flowering plants attract visitors from all over the world. Brigham, a horticulturalist and nurseryman who has lived in North San Diego County since 1980, developed his interest in gardens in his childhood vegetable garden. His interest expanded to landscape gardening as a young adult, when he discovered the Sunset Western Garden Book. In college at UC Santa Cruz, he worked as a gardener, and ‘that’s when things began to change,’ he writes in ‘Birth of a Plantsman.’ ‘Tending a large collection of proteas there made me realize that there was more to the world of plants then what was commonly available in nurseries. My professor, the great naturalist and horticulturalist Dr. Ray Collett, had by then already established an enormous collection of many kinds of unusual flowering plants at the arboretum, and I was just getting to know them. ‘One day I went into one of the greenhouses to do some weeding, and I could not believe what I saw. An exotic and spectacular bright yellow flower had just been produced by a small subtropical tree that I had never paid much attention to. The next day, there were more flowers, and more after that. What I was seeing was Tabebuia chrysotricha, the Golden Trumpet Tree’a Brazilian plant that would change my life. I discovered that although this tree could grow and bloom outdoors in Central California, it was practically nonexistent in the local nursery trade.’ Brigham’s search lead him to the classic book, now out of print, ‘Color for the Landscape,’ edited by the late Dr. Mildred Mathias of UCLA, which featured pages of color photos of the best subtropical flowering trees, shrubs, vines, perennials and natives for California gardens. He determined that he would search for each plant in the book, take cuttings and seeds which would become the nucleus of his first nursery in Santa Cruz. ‘One yellow flower, then one book, and suddenly a career was born,’ Brigham writes. In the course of his 30-year career, Brigham has worked both as an employee and a volunteer for several botanical gardens and nurseries, and has introduced many flowering plants into the nursery trade. He and his wife Donna have owned Buena Creek since 1996. He says that the mission of Buena Creek is to ‘collect, grow, display, promote and distribute new and uncommon varieties of ornamental plants for Southern California gardens.’