Ex-’Garden Show’ Host Finds Her Roots in Print : Vocations: Horticulturist and writer Lili Singer combined her favorite interests to create a flourishing newsletter.

Not so long ago, Lili Singer was living a comfortable life doing work she loved. She was the host of “The Garden Show” on radio station KCRW-FM, writing a gardening column for a design magazine, teaching gardening and horticulture through UCLA Extension and consulting on homeowners’ gardens throughout Los Angeles.

Then a friend came to her with an idea. Why not start a gardening newsletter full of information geared to the climate and growing conditions of Southern California?

Singer, who lives in Van Nuys, was intrigued. “There was nothing else like it,” she recalls. “There was a definite need. And it brought together my two big interests--gardens and writing.”

What she didn’t bank on was how the project would change her life. “I thought it would be a little four-page thing I could do in my spare time!”

Now in its fifth year, the 24-page Southern California Gardener, published six times a year, is more than a full-time job for Singer, who is co-editor and publisher with her partner, Phyllis Benenson.

Moving season by season through the year, the beautifully illustrated newsletter is chock-full of advice for local green thumbs. Its regular features include a month-by-month guide on what to plant--and what not to plant--in home gardens, as well as where, when and how to get things in the ground. Other columns deal with irrigation (“About 90% of garden problems relate to water,” Singer says), native plants and pest control.

So effective has its coverage been that the Southern California Gardener recently received the 1995 Quill and Trowel Award from the Garden Writers Assn. of America, which deemed it the country’s best gardening newsletter. This honor comes on the heels of two previous Quill and Trowel Awards, one for the publication’s regular “Pest Profile” department and one for a cover story on bamboo.

The Gardener’s circulation is up, too, from 1,000 subscribers in 1991 to 5,000 now, and ads are selling briskly, Singer says.

“It’s gratifying to be acknowledged by your peers,” says Singer, who plans each issue months ahead, writes many of the articles and works with artists on pen-and-ink drawings. “I love to see people use the newsletter, learn from it and save it.”

One person who saves it religiously is Pasadena landscape architect Shirley Kerins, curator of the herb garden at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. “Many of us have come from the East Coast,” she explains, “and when we start to garden here, we find that doing what we’ve always done doesn’t work. The Southern California Gardener teaches us what we need to know about local soils, insects and appropriate plants.”

Singer learned gardening from her grandfather, a passionate amateur plantsman, and later from her parents, who became interested in exotic plants and opened a nursery in Northridge during the 1960s. For 25 years, Singers’ Growing Things was a Valley fixture until her parents sold it in 1992; Lili first worked there part-time while she taught nursery school in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

After a while, she recalls, “I realized I loved the physical work, being in the greenhouse--the smells, the colors, the bugs.”

She later managed other nurseries, went into horticultural teaching and consulting and became an L.A. garden-world personality during her 12-year stint on “The Garden Show,” which ended last year.

Today, her pared-down schedule includes some consulting, a weekly KCRW (89.9 FM) garden commentary--and the newsletter.

“I love it so much,” she says, describing plans to get the Gardener on newsstands, to increase its circulation and perhaps eventually to enlarge it a bit and add color photos. “We won’t get slick, though,” she promises. “We’ll just cover more subjects. Like plants, they’re never-ending. You can’t possibly get to them all.”