Have you ever considered adding a special theme garden to your landscape but didn’t know where to begin? Try a visit to the Oregon State University Research and Extension Center on Hanley Road for a tour of their beautiful display gardens. Just a few of the 16 theme gardens to help you with ideas for your own landscape include a kitchen garden, a shade garden, a lavender garden and a rock garden.

The OSU Extension Center’s gardens were developed and maintained by members of the Jackson County Master Gardeners Association who are all volunteers. The Center moved to its present site about 10 years ago.

“It was a brand new building on nothing,” said Cora Lee, a Master Gardener from the Master Gardener’s class in 1994. Lee is one of several Master Gardeners who helped design the theme gardens and give their time to maintain them. Her husband, Haydn, is an ex-engineer who now handles the irrigation at the center. Ellen Scannell and her husband Jim also put in many hours of work at the center.

Most recently, Ellen and Cora designed the newest of the themed gardens, a lavender display garden, now in its second summer. In what was once a gourd garden, paths meander among 70 different types of lavender.

Most of the plants in this garden were donated by Goodwin Creek Gardens in Williams and the Scannells and Lees also donated decorative items like arbors and benches to make this a truly beautiful space. Old roses now climb on the arbors and the garden is flanked by grapes on one side and hops on the other.

There are only five lavender collection gardens associated with the Herb Society of America and the Center has the only one in the West, said Lee.

To look at the Center today, one can only imagine the many years of work it took to bring it to the lush, colorful landscape it is now. Through the years, the gardens haven’t been immune to the common problems which beset other Rogue Valley gardeners either.

For instance, a freeze in 1996 carried off many of the roses in the Wanda Hauser Rose and Herb garden, said Lee. In 1997, Jackson and Perkins donated most of the replacements now seen in the garden.

As the trees grew too, the original rose garden got too shady for roses. “Everything that was not an herb was moved to the perennial garden,” Lee said, and the rose garden was also relocated to a sunnier spot.

Lee, a one-time interior designer, helped map out the gardens with proper labels so visitors can write down the name of a particular plant they like. Some, like the herbs, also list purpose and uses and whether or not the plant is medicinal.

People tend to say that herbs are safe because they aren’t chemicals, Lee said, but they are still medicinal and people can be allergic to them.

Besides the regular maintenance that must be done in every garden, all the deadheading, pruning and clipping, the Master Gardeners also keep records of such things when plants come into bloom and growing patterns for research purposes.

One hint which Lee was glad to pass on is to buy plants locally. “We have a different kind of soil and dryness in the Rogue Valley,” she said. Many of the lavenders originally purchased from outside the area didn’t survive the extended dry periods here.

One purpose of the display gardens is so Rogue Valley gardeners can see what grows well in Southern Oregon and in what combinations.

A map of the grounds is available in the office at the Extension Center so visitors can take a self-guided tour and a member of the Master Gardeners is on duty in the plant clinic for questions, Monday through Friday, from 10 am to 2 pm.

Right in front of the Center, visitors find a rock garden and a landscape garden. One of the Master Gardeners was especially interested in rock gardens and so started this classic collection of plants used the rock gardens in the Rogue Valley, said Lee. The Landscape Garden highlights the many perennial landscape plants that have stood the test of time and pests in the local area.

Many of the plants in the rock garden were donated by the Siskiyou Rare Plant Nursery here in Southern Oregon.

The themes of the gardens mostly depend on the interest of the members, Lee said. If someone has a passion for a certain thing, like dahlias or day lilies, a garden can be designed and maintained by that person.

On the left corner of the Center building is the culinary herb garden, devoted to the many culinary herbs available to the modern gardener. These are harvested as needed and used by the Master Food Preservers in their classes.

Other great gardens to give visitors plenty of ideas for their own gardening situations are the Shade Garden which has many of the standard varieties of woody perennials that grow well in dense shade, and the Water-wise Garden to help demonstrate how to develop a pleasing and water-wise garden through water conservation and a selection of drought-tolerant plants.

In the Kitchen Garden, visitors see examples of seed growing and transplant techniques, raised bed and intensive gardening methods, soil enrichment techniques such as cover crops and composting, cold frame propagation and handicapped accessibility in the garden.

Here is a complete list of the display gardens at the Research Center:

* Celebrate the Harvest Garden
* Class Garden
* Children’s Garden
* Culinary Herb Garden
* Kitchen Garden
* Gramma & Grampa’s Garden
* Grass Garden & Dahlia Garden
* Greenhouse Garden
* Landscape Garden
* Lavender Garden
* Perennial Garden
* Rock Garden
* Rose Garden
* Shade Garden
* Water-wise Garden
* Wanda Hauser Rose & Herb Garden

Besides these areas, the Research and Extension Center includes experimental orchards and apple, apricot and almond orchards, berries, hops and grapes.

The Hanley Arboretum is also on the property and available for picnics seven days a week. This shady spot, planted in the 1960’s by the Hanley sisters, is now a Jackson County park and includes many varieties native to the Rogue Valley, as well as some unique flowering trees.

One primary goal of the Center and OSU is education, Lee said. In fact, the children’s garden is planted and cared for by youngsters who come to the center to learn about gardening and garden crafts.

In past years, the children grew a “pizza garden,” Lee said, and at harvest time, they got to use the herbs and produce to make pizza.

High on the list of education projects is the Master Gardener program, the annual class instruction which begins in January each year. Classes are available for a nominal fee in both Jackson and Josephine Counties. Graduates give back 60 hours of volunteer service on the Extension grounds, in plant clinics or other community projects.

The Master Gardeners also sponsor a day-long seminar at Southern Oregon University every February, which averages 400 attendees. The annual spring fair in April drew over 9,000 last year, Lee said.

Fall brings harvest time and the Extension Center has an open house planned for September 18. Again education is one of the benefits, but celebration and sharing are the theme of the day, said Lee. There will be demonstrations and hay rides for visitors.

The Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center is open Monday through Friday and is located at 569 Hanley Road in Central Point. A map is available on their website at http://extension.oregonstate.edu/sorec/. More information on the Master Gardeners Program can also be found there or call 541-776-7371.

For information on Josephine County’s Master Gardener’s Program, visit their website at http://josephinemastergardeners.homestead.com/mainpage.html

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