Garden savers

<p>Antonia Adezio's bicoastal job takes her to some of the best gardens in the country and has her rubbing elbows with America's horticultural elite.</p><p>As the founding executive director and current president of The Garden Conservancy, a national organization dedicated to preserving and restoring gardens, she has helped ensure the support and preservation of over 90 significant gardens all over the United States, including the gardens created by determined inmates and warden families on Alcatraz.</p><p>But on a late summer day in Sonoma Valley, Adezio is looking at her own little rocky patch with all its potential and wondering where to start. The topography and climate is far different from her native East Coast.</p><p>“I have everything to learn about gardening in this climate,” she says softly, recounting how two years ago, when she first moved to Sonoma, she enthusiastically planted a “New York Mediterranean” border of plants she knew from home, things like salvias and the groundcover Helichrysum petiolare “Limelight.”</p><p>“They were the correct choice. But I had like three times as many plants as I needed,” she says with a laugh. “Here in one winter I had to pull out half of it and it's still really overgrown.”</p><p>But she and partner Rick Goodsell, a retired San Francisco firefighter, didn't pick this hillside home for the ready landscape. They were drawn to the sunny, south-facing views and the enchanting oak and madrone forest, filled with wildlife.</p><p>As the head of the Conservancy, which treats gardens as historic and cultural treasures as well as works of art, Adezio appreciates the vast diversity of American landscapes.</p><p>“The whole activity of gardening speaks to a very important human need to connect with the earth, and being creative with plants is a piece of that — the way people have taken their own vision and put it into a garden,” said Adezio, 55, who grew up in New Jersey and is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and the Juilliard School in New York.</p><p>After working as a pianist in New York, she decided to give up performing and devote herself to “saving the world in some way” through nonprofit work. She found she liked the challenge of bringing people together, of collaborating and planning and “brokering arrangements” among people for a common goal.</p><p>The conservancy's first rescue was The Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek. Now a centenarian, Bancroft was in her 60s when she cultivated four acres of giant cactuses, succulents and native species out of the last undeveloped chunk of a 400-acre fruit farm established by her husband Phillip's grandfather, esteemed historian Hubert Howe Bancroft.</p><p>The garden was designed by the late Lester Hawkins, whose legendary Western Hills Rare Plant Nursery in Occidental has itself become a focus of the conservancy's attention. Distinguished horticulturist Frank Cabot heard about Bancroft's garden and during a 1988 visit he became convinced it must be saved after Bancroft lamented that her heirs had no interest in preserving it after she died.</p><p>Cabot conceived of an organization like The Nature Conservancy, structured to help private individuals and communities preserve important works of horticultural significance. He recruited Adezio, who had impressed him with her work as a development officer for Wave Hill, the public garden and cultural center established to preserve his wife's family estate in the Bronx.</p><p>“She moved into the back of my messy little office in Cold Spring, N.Y., and within six months she had her own building, her own staff and the thing up and running,” said Cabot by phone from Quebec, where he lives part-time.</p><p>As Adezio remembers it, “Frank told me he had enough money to pay me for 30 days. But I felt if Frank believed in it, it could be very exciting and successful. I was willing to take that risk and see what happened.”</p><p>They used their contacts and their wits to marshal support from horticultural leaders and create a community-based organization. Bancroft gave the fledgling conservancy a conservation easement and helped set up a non-profit entity to oversee the garden, which became a model for future preservation efforts.</p><p>Over the past 20 years the conservancy has taken a major role in preserving 14 public gardens and assisted with and advised on many others. Some are private, like the fabled Green Gables in Woodside, where the conservancy assumed a deed restriction from the Fleischaker family to monitor and enforce perservation.</p><p>In 2003 the conservancy opened a West Coast office at the Presidio in San Francisco to help further its efforts to be truly national. Adezio took an apartment in San Franciso before moving up Sonoma. She threw herself into creating a partnership with the National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy to rehabilitate the forgotten gardens on Alcatraz, a project powered by volunteers which has been selected for a Preservation Design Award by the California Preservation Foundaton.</p><p>The Garden Conservancy also sponsors nationwide Open Garden Days and has an extensive educational program of seminars, many held at Cornerstone Gardens in Sonoma. On Sept. 17 to 20, the conservancy will co-host The Late Show Gardens, a fall garden festival at Cornerstone focused on sustainable gardening and drawing luminaries of landscape design and horticulture.</p><p>Bill Noble, the conservancy's director of preservation, said the $3 million annual non-profit has been successful — it has a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator for fiscal management — in part because of Adezio's “vision and level-headedness.”</p><p>“Her skill is being able to explain why something is important and to then galvanize people's hopes and mobilize their energy to work together in a collegial way toward very special concrete goals.”</p><p>Close to home, Adezio said the conservancy is helping Robert Stansel and Joseph Gatta, who two years ago bought Western Hills Nursery in Occidental. The late Marshall Olbrich and Lester Hawkins assembled a remarkable collection of rare plants that was a mecca for plant lovers and collectors that proved a monumental task to upkeep.</p><p>A small group of volunteers is helping, including Betsy Flack from the conservancy's San Francisco office. The conservancy hopes to raise funds to inventory the plants and create a published history of the garden as well as lay the groundwork for a non-profit organization to sustain it.</p><p>“It was a nursery that represented the pinnacle of innovation at the time Lester and Marshall were doing their work,” says Adezio. “They were bringing in plants that just were not available to gardeners at the time and ranging the world to find them. The garden was a beacon and their work included countless gardeners all over the U.S. People made pilgrimmages to Western Hills just to see what they were planting.”</p><p><em>You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.</em></p>