English Love of Gardening Spurs OCC Horticulturist

The arrival of spring stirs the passions of John Lenanton, who for 26 years has guided the horticulture program at Orange Coast College. But with spring come mixed emotions for the British-born plant expert, who believes the English reverence for things that grow has been hard to instill in the “mow, blow and go” culture of Orange County.

“In both countries there are people who are very passionate about gardening, but the percentage of people in England far exceeds the percentage here in Southern California, or in Orange County,” Lenanton said. “For most people here, it’s a necessary evil to have a frontyard and a backyard. And they want to have nothing to do with it, because they much prefer to do all the other things that are available. It’s as if everybody’s on vacation most of the time, isn’t it?”

Even the word “yard” reflects a kind of horticultural ambivalence, according to the 60-year-old Costa Mesa resident.

“A yard in England is somewhere that you store the trash cans; it’s the area that you don’t want anybody to see, usually at the side of your house. What you have in the front of your house and the back of your house is a garden.”

While Lenanton was growing up in the rural English countryside, his parents were devoted home gardeners who also grew much of their own food. He worked in a nursery during his teens and taught high school horticulture after graduation from the University of Oxford.

Gardening in England is still very much a family endeavor, he said.

“The whole family goes to the nursery to buy plants for the weekend,” he said. “Mom, Dad and the children. In some of the nicer nurseries there’s a restaurant and a play area for the children. But you often see the children going ‘round with the parents to pick out the plants.”

Lenanton came to the United States in 1968 to earn a master’s degree in horticulture at UC Davis and decided to stay on after graduation. His first teaching assignment was in the horticulture department he now heads at Orange Coast College.

*

In a stroll through one of the college’s seven custom-built greenhouses, Lenanton takes a homeowner’s pride in pointing out the translucent polycarbonate roofing material that he used to replace the greenhouse glass. He demonstrates the misting system, connected to a central computer that calculates sunlight, time of year and other variables. Soil moisture is monitored by a computer-linked sensor buried in each plant container. It is a high-tech system Lenanton says few professional nurseries have.

“We may be the only community college in the nation with computerized greenhouses,” he said, bathed in the fragrant, moist air that surrounds the thousands of unusual plants his students are growing for April’s spring plant sale.

The annual plant sale is growing in popularity at a time when gardeners are finding a limited variety of plants at large home-and-garden stores.

“The small retail nursery is disappearing, and it’s the Home Depots that are taking over,” Lenanton said. “It was in those little nurseries that you could find these unusual plants, because until they become popular, you just don’t sell that many.

“I’ve picked up some of our most unusual plants at small nurseries,” Lenanton said, pointing to a red passion-flower vine that blankets a chain-link fence outside one of the college greenhouses.

“This is not a common vine; it’s an incredible vine,” he said, snapping off a fire-engine-red bloom and cradling it in his hand. Lenanton has allowed commercial growers to take cuttings of the vine, which blooms year-round, to help make it more available to the public. “It’s getting into the trade right now,” he said.

Lenanton and the students are also growing a new kind of hybrid from Denmark called the cape daisy, along with other hard-to-find plants such as the tapien verbena, New Guinea hybrid impatiens, orange clock vine and a trailing, perennial petunia called surfinia, which has been available in the United States only four years. About 7,000 individual plants are under Lenanton’s care for the spring plant sale.

Lenanton, who was host of the 1976 public television show “The Home Gardener,” advises the spring-inspired novice to take a trip around the neighborhood before heading to the nursery.

After more than a quarter-century of living in the relatively temperate zone that is Orange County, Lenanton says he understands why the coming of spring attracts such sparse attention.

“Back in England, to compensate for all those dreary, wet, cold months, spring comes and everybody has spring fever, and they go at their gardening hammer and tongs for months, until they can’t do it anymore,” Lenanton said. “The same thing occurs back East. Wherever there is a more rigorous climate, at the times of year when it’s possible to garden, everybody wants to garden. It’s something a lot of people don’t even think about here.

“We do sometimes lose sight of spring,” he said. “But spring has come . . . and things have changed. I have the feeling that the rains of winter have finished. There really is something in the old expression of taking time to stop and smell the flowers. After working in that office building all day, if you can go home to a pleasant space in your garden, it really is delightful.”