Sonoma County gardeners retreat to their greenhouses in winter

The greenhouse is the winter refuge for gardeners, the place where the spring season starts from seed, where experiments take place and tender and tropical plants are babied.

And yet no two are alike. They reflect the passions, tastes and obsessions of the people who tend them. They are more than utilitarian places to protect their plants. The greenhouse is a cold-weather workshop that enables a gardener to stay connected to cultivation when most everything outside is dormant.

As a Master Gardener, Sara Malone is serious about horticulture. But the Petaluma woman also loves the aesthetics of her high-end Hartley greenhouse, an aluminum and glass beauty that is a generous 27-by-11 feet, big enough for a multitude of tasks and experiments and equipped with a mini-fridge for storing seeds.

“The reason for having a greenhouse for me is not so much that it needs to be warm as I need it to be controlled,” she said. “Especially it it’s nasty outside, it’s a whole lot nicer for me to be in the greenhouse rather than outside working. It’s not insulated. If I heated it, it would cost a fortune. But every now and then I take a space heater in there.”

Have you ever driven by a greenhouse and wondered what horticultural mysteries were growing inside? The contents of a greenhouse can be both utilitarian and very personal - and reflect the owner’s particular passions.

Rare conifer

A self-described “conifer freak and foliage farmer,” Malone right now is babying a Pinus Ponderosa as it establishes from a cutting she received from a friend who has an arboretum outside Atlanta. She also is caring for cuttings of Torreya, a rare conifer in the same family as yew. Hers is native to South Korea.

Malone also relishes a challenge. While the vast majority of gardeners buy their roses as rootstock, Malone is attempting in her greenhouse to cultivate from seed a chestnut rose, Rosa Rox Burghiki. It’s a temperate Asian rose she gathered from seed at Quarryhill Botanical Garden in Glen Ellen.

“I’ve never grown a rose from seed. A lot of it is I don’t know any better,” she said with a laugh, admitting she’s also trying to grow strawberry plants from microscopic seed someone brought back to her from France. One acquaintance declared, “You are out of your mind.”

Malone’s reply? “I’m playing around and having some fun. This is my laboratory. This is my playground.”

Stranger still are the contents of Phil Pieri’s 16-by-52-foot greenhouse between Petaluma and Sebastopol, which keeps expanding in 12-foot sections to accommodate his strange acquisitions.

A member of the local Rare Fruit Growers of California, Pieri’s feelers are always out for exotic edibles, some of which push the climate envelope. He’s working on his second banana plant, which has another year to go before it will produce fruit. Doubters tell him you can’t grow bananas in Petaluma but he is on the quest for a variety that will.

“I don’t have that bragging right yet, but I’m working on it,” Pieri said.

Electrical colors

His greenhouse also holds 12 varieties of dragon fruit, similar to cactus, that develops a fruit that inside is filled with electrical colors.

“It doesn’t have a lot of flavor and it’s flavor I go crazy for,” he said. “But it’s kind of interesting.”

Other denizens of Pieri’s greenhouse include charamoya, a round, pear-like fruit with skin like an alligator common in Mexico, and black sopote, which turns black when ripe and is used in flavoring ice cream and drinks.

“I’m always running across something I can’t live without,” confessed the hobbyist, who also has cardamom, capers, pineapple plants and tamarillo, a South American plant that produces fruit in bunches the size of a tennis ball.

Deborah Walton of Petaluma’s Canvas Ranch says her hoophouse is a veritable salad bar of lettuce, kale, chard, arugula, baby carrots, tatsoi, an Asian brassica, mustard greens and sorrel, a French herb with a bright, lemony flavor that she says is one of her favorites.

Helen Ogill, a retired insurance claims adjuster, collects orchids in her small 9-by-12-foot greenhouse on her 1/3-acre lot in the E section of Rohnert Park.

“It’s just the smallest you should get if you’re going to have a greenhouse,” said Ogill, who bought hers as a kit and hired a handyman to assemble it.

Inside she has a little $20 heater to keep a warm environment for her collection of 175 orchids. But she also finds room for a few tilliandsias, Christmas cacti, bromeliads, begonias and Spanish moss.

Joe Michalek has a similar little greenhouse on his property off Santa Rosa’s Brush Creek Road.

He has had it for 40 years; it’s his station for propagating plants for Master Gardener plant sales, for starting veggies from seed and for winter care of more tender beauties like bougainvilleas and fuchsias.

“It’s electrified,” he said of his outdoor retreat. “I’ve got a little radio out there and I just sit out there and relax. The nicest thing is you go out there and you just smell all the moist soil.

“It’s a wonderful feeling to go out there and have some fun and just be away from the outside world.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204.