For some, spring means home-tour season

<p>Robin Parer makes her living selling unusual geraniums.</p><p>But the Kentfield plant lover isn’t content with what she grows in her own nursery. Four times a year she pulls together a group of like-minded souls humorously dubbed The Hortisexuals, and they hit the road.</p><p>They go in search of otherwise inaccessible caches of botanical bling, mind-blowing private gardens concealed behind fences, gates and hedges, some seen only in the pages of design magazines.</p><p>It happens every spring. Just as budbreak marks the beginning of the wine tasting season, luring limo-loads of oenophiles to Wine Country’s backroads, the season also shakes out another class of taster who loves to sample the architecture, design and gardens of Luther Burbank’s “Chosen Spot.”</p><p>“It’s like going to look at a work of art,” said Parer, explaining the allure of piling into a car with friends and following a secret treasure map available only with the price of admission.</p><p>The season kicks off April 25 with Kitchens in the Vineyards, a look at multimillion dollar estates in Napa Valley. Not only do tour-goers get to ogle everything from a hilltop aerie to a Provencal retreat, but a noted chef is waiting with something good to taste in each to-die-for kitchen. The season winds down on June 13 with the Mendocino Coast Garden Tour featuring gardens and studios of area artists.</p><p>The tour circuit collectively draws thousands of gawkers who get to indulge their urge to peek without fear of punishment.</p><p>“I walk by these houses and I think, I would love to look inside and see what those people have done or how they remodeled it, or did not remodel it,” said Gail Wright, a spokeswoman for the American Association of University Women’s Historic Healdsburg Homes Tour, slated for May 3. “We’re all curious about how people live.”</p><h3>People are nosy</h3> <p><MC>Stretching from Napa to Forestville, all the tours raise thousands of dollars a year for community causes.</p><p>“The Anderson Valley is not a particularly likely place for gardens although it certainly is for wine. But I think people are nosy,” says Ginger Valen, explaining why some 250 people, most from out of the area, would make the winding trek to Boonville to poke around someone’s back yard.</p><p>She organized the first Anderson Valley Garden Tour five years ago as a way of connecting with other green thumbs after she and her husband, Walt, the longtime director of what is now the San Francisco Botanical Garden, moved north from Marin. Their mailing list has now swelled to 450 people from as far away as Carmel. The couple’s own garden will, for the first time, be on this year’s tour May 9.</p><p>Some tours primarily feature homes, like The Architectural Tour and Wine Tasting in Sea Ranch, also on May 9. Others, like the Napa Master Gardeners’ Down the Garden Path tour on May 3, teach as well as entertain.</p><p>“It’s a great way to be with your friends and have lunch and have something fun to talk about beyond your new shoes,” says Betsy Flack. She makes the circuit as a garden lover and also has helped pull together private gardens to feature in the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days, which take place throughout the season all over the country, including May 17 in Marin County.</p><p>Procuring properties demands networking, a good eye for aesthetics and the power of persuasion.</p><p>“We have to tell people you’re going to get hundreds of people through your garden over two days. We ask people to carpool but it’s hard to find areas where you actually have parking for a hundred cars in front of a house. It’s a lot more complicated than you can even imagine logistically,” said Cathy Kaufman, head of the Sonoma County Medical Association Alliance and Foundation, which will showcase six gardens in the Sonoma Valley May 15 and 16. Last year it sold 1,400 tickets, raising a record $90,000 for community health programs.</p><h3>Fear for security</h3> <p><MC>Parking isn’t the only deal-breaker when it comes to recruiting homeowners to open doors to gawking strangers. Some fear for their security, although sponsors report no theft or vandalism. Homeowners are told to tuck away small valuables and docents are assigned to be watchdogs.</p><p>Jack Monroe, whose 1891 farmhouse, glamorized by Healdsburg designer Myra Hoefer, is a star attraction in Healdsburg this year, says he’s happy for the chance to promote historic preservation while helping education programs.</p><p>“I don’t have possessions I’m so concerned about that I need to stay home that day and watch over them,” said Monroe, whose home recently got a spread in House Beautiful magazine. “I’m not guarding anything.”</p><p>Suzi LeBaron of Food for Thought, the Forestville AIDS/HIV food bank, said the imposition and effort homeowners go through to get ready for her agency’s tour May 17 is enormous and appreciated.</p><p>Steve Whiteman, who, with his partner Bob Truax, will open their country home and woodland gardens for Food for Thought, said they got cracking a month ago.</p><p>“Of course I was horrified when I started looking around at first,” he confessed. “We’ve just been pruning and weeding and doing stuff on a daily basis getting it ready.”</p><p>LeBaron also snagged Jacques Saint Dizier, whose 1912 country Craftsman house in Forestville was just featured in Architectural Digest. The designer, whose clients include celebrities and CEOs, recruited friends to help pull things together before 500 strangers descend. That includes thinking about safety, from fixing rickety boards to ridding pathways of lichen.</p><p>“I’m one of those people who puts things off until the last minute” he said, admitting that unlike the studied perfection he brings to each client’s project, his own home is more “design by default.”</p><p>“People say it’s really gorgeous. I look around and just see this house that needs so much work,” he said with a modest laugh. “I guess everybody sees their house that way. But I’m happy to help in any way I can. It’s a good excuse to get stuff done.”</p><p>-- Meg McConahey, a staff writer, can be reached at 521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@ pressdemocrat.com.</p>