Dave Egbert’s syndicated television show, “The Coastal Gardener,” started with a focus on the West Coast, emanating mainly from his Big Sur home. But the show has blossomed in the three years since it debuted. It now airs on more than 200 stations, from Florida to Hawaii, and the content has gone equally continental.

“We just decided instead of changing the name,” Egbert said, “we would just say we’re from coast to coast — we’re all over the place.”

The show is all over the place, one week visiting a conifer nursery in Oregon, the next touring rooftop gardens in Manhattan. But in the end it always comes home to Egbert’s slice of paradise on a hilltop above Pfeiffer Beach, with a quarter-acre garden that’s become a laboratory and learning center for the program. Viewers get tours of beautiful gardens and growing grounds across the country, introductions to new and different plants, tips on everything from planting to pruning, and occasional visits with celebrities.

The half-hour show is a colorful, wide-ranging garden tour led by Egbert, an exuberant host who doesn’t take himself too seriously, but is a serious student of his stuff.

Egbert didn’t get extensive formal training in gardening — no college degree in ornamental horticulture or botany. He simply dug in, eventually becoming a certified nurseryman. He grew up in the Toro Park area of Salinas and at 14 went to work at nearby Bokay Nursery.

After three years, he moved across Highway 68 to Graeber Gardens. It was on-the-job training, learning from the experienced people at both places, becoming a student of the plants that came and went, absorbing the fine points of garden design. The Central Coast, he found, was a haven for talented, devoted gardeners, making it fertile training ground.

Egbert moved briefly to Fresno then back to the coast, this time in Grover Beach near San Luis Obispo, where he found his next mentors at Ron’s Nursery. He said he learned how to make gardening spaces even richer, “designing with everything — hardscape, pots, colors.”

About a decade ago he returned to Monterey County, moving to the Big Sur hilltop and working as a gardening consultant and writing for various publications. He also crossed paths with Mark Morro, a producer and director who pitched the idea of a television show. They made a pilot and then nothing. For two years. Then one day Morro called: We’ve got to make 13 more episodes and we’ve got a month to do it. So they did, and it hit the airwaves, and the number of television stations picking it up has been growing.

Egbert’s reach recently grew in the print arena, too, with his contributions to a new book from Sunset Books: “Big Ideas for Small Gardens.” The photo-filled book is an inspiration for people who don’t have a lot of space for gardening and want to make the most of it.

“By concentrating on the quality rather than the quantity of your space, you can turn the tiniest garden into an oasis,” it says. “The trick is customizing your ideas to fit.”

The primary author is Emily Young, who writes about landscape design and architecture for Garden Design, the Los Angeles Times and other publications. Interspersed throughout are “garden notebook” pages by Egbert, dissecting photos of gardens and telling what makes them work.

Ben Marks, a senior editor at Sunset Books, invited Egbert to do the commentaries after meeting him at the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show, looking at “The Coastal Gardener” Web site and reading some of his work.

Marks liked Egbert’s plain-spoken style, “almost like you’re talking to your neighbor over the fence and they give you ideas about something. I sort of felt that kind of conversational tone was really what we wanted when we did this.”

Egbert takes that conversational style and an almost childlike curiosity onto his show. Wearing khaki shorts, a denim shirt and a hat that leans toward Indiana Jones, he explores gardens and garden-related places around the country. He’s taken viewers to spots such as the insect zoo at the San Francisco Zoo, the gardens at San Quentin Prison, the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., the Morton Arboretum in Illinois, and Copia, the American Center for Food, Wine and the Arts, in Napa, and to gardens and nurseries that specialize in everything from mums to salvias to dwarf conifers. He talks to the experts at each of his stops, in that conversational style described by Marks.

Sometimes there are visits to celebrity guests and their gardens, including Clint Eastwood, Mickey Rooney and Al Jardine of the Beach Boys.

Much of each episode is taped back at Egbert’s home, with his ever-changing garden the subject and the backdrop. When he bought the place, there were no gardens, just an awesome ocean view and a challenging landscape of scrub brush and unwieldy grasses. He began carving out pieces for his gardens, often finding unpleasant surprises: construction scraps hidden in the grasses, poor or shallow soil, and weather conditions that ranged widely across the lot, from harsh winds to dry heat to cold ocean breezes.

For visitors today, there are no traces of that history. It’s a showplace, a mixture of color and texture and type and size, the result of building up the soil, mapping out beds, constantly trying new plants.

Egbert loves trying new plants and introducing them to other gardeners. A mainstay of his show is a segment called “Dave’s Faves,” where he talks about his favorite finds. He also looks for things that aren’t fussy.

Given the show’s geographic coverage area, Egbert said he tries to have something for everybody, whether they live on a foggy bay or an arid area — or aren’t even gardeners.

“Even if you’re not that interested in gardening, we try to have a visual presence, make an extra effort to make sure everything looks as beautiful as it can. It’s eye candy.”

The show’s Web site also has recaps of what was covered in each episode and links for more information.

“The main purpose is to inspire people, to show that gardening doesn’t have to all be work,” he said. “Go out and enjoy your yard, whether it’s a balcony or a window box or a big yard. If you use plants effectively you could make gardening a lot easier.”

source : www.montereyherald.com