While walking around in my garden (a highly recommended shelter-at-home activity), I was pleased to see one of the earliest Irises to come into bloom. (Local gardeners in slightly warmer locations already enjoy several Irises.) This specimen is Iris pallida ‘Variegata’, which is appreciated primarily for its green and yellow or green and white foliage.

We continue our exploration of three categories of gardening activities that are suitable under social distance constraints and rewarding to the gardener.

1. Care for Your Garden

Engaging school-age children  in gardening is a way for parents to and grandparents  to help children to learn and be productive while sheltering at home. A fine source of gardening activities is the non-profit Kids Gardening organization (kidsgardening.org).

Short-term gardening activities can be enjoyable for adults and children to work together, but as we deal with extended stays at home, consider more programmatic approaches.

Borrowing concepts from formal schooling, adults should adopt a gardening curriculum for young learners. Basically, a curriculum involves learning objectives within a defined scope and following a logical sequence. Gardening naturally involves periods of a given plant’s development with beginning, middle, and end (germination, growth, ripening), so it lends itself to clear lesson plans.

Browse to kidsgardening.org and explore the menu, “Educator Resources” for a wealth of ideas for gardening with kids at home. The website offers many options, so interested adults will need to commit time to select lessons that are suitable for their site, workable with available tools and other resources, and interesting for both adults and children.

Pruning Salvias

Salvias should be pruned heavily every year to remove spent branches and promote fresh new growth. Some gardeners accomplish this pruning in the late winter, just as the spring shoots begin to appear at the base of the plants. That approach works fine, but this year the opportunity came and went, leaving the apparent option to skip pruning until next year.

Then, I learned of a more complex situation. Salvia specialist Kermit Carter, of Flowers by the Sea advised different strategies for each of four kinds of Salvias:

• Rosette-growing, herbaceous perennials, e.g. Hummingbirds Sage (Salvia spathacea). Deadhead spent flowers; cut to the ground when growth stops (prune winter bloomers in summer, summer bloomers in autumn).
• Deciduous or semi-evergreen types with soft stems, e.g. Mexican Bush Sage (S. leucantha). During the season, cut spent stems; at first frost, cut all to the ground.
• Deciduous, woody-stem varieties, e.g. Autumn Sages (S. greggii species). During the season, cut spent stems; at first frost, cut all to the ground (same as above).
• Evergreen, woody species, e.g. Karwinski’s Sage (S. karwinskii). Remove old wood at any time to encourage fresh growth.

Now, the task is to identify each type of Salvia in my garden and prune accordingly.

2. Advance Your Gardening Knowledge

This lesson on Salvia pruning illustrates the importance of knowing the plants in your garden, as the foundation for their cultivation. For any given plant, the gardener can gain important information by searching the Internet for the plant’s botanical name. In many cases, a search by common name will lead to the botanical name, and useful knowledge.

For many popular garden genera, specialized web sites provide good basic facts of value in caring for plants. In the above example, Flowers by the Sea has an extensive database of Salvia species and cultivars.

For the large category of bulbous plants, a fine resource is the Pacific Bulb Society, which maintains a wiki with images and growing advice for a great range of bulbous plants. The Society’s name relates to its geographic origins; the wiki includes plants from everywhere. By the way, “wiki” comes from a Hawaiian word for “quick,” and it refers to “a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users.”

3. Enrich Your Gardening Days

Opportunities abound for virtual tours of public gardens. In previous columns, we have recommended public gardens in California and in England and France. Here, we feature some of the now-closed great public gardens in the United States, outside of California.

• Chanticleer, A Pleasure Garden. This is a relatively small public garden (35 acres) that had been a private garden before 1990. Today, Chanticleer has been called “the most romantic, imaginative, and exciting public garden in America.”
• New York Botanical Garden. 250 well-tended acres of plants. Use the Garden Navigator to explore the current and historic living collections, see photos, get plant information and see when they have bloomed at the garden.
• United States National Arboretum. This amazing place, established by Congress in 1927, has 446 acres of plants. Try the Arboretum Botanical Explorer, a unique learning tool available on the website.

Enjoy your gardens and gardening and stay healthy.

The spring season continues to unfold. The plant pictured is the Chinese Ground Orchid (Bletilla striata), believed to be the easiest orchids to grow.

In today’s column we again explore the three priorities suggested for gardening while maintaining social distance (everyone’s first priority).

1 Care for Your Garden

If you have school-age children whose schools have been closed for the present, and who need your attention and guidance, they could enjoy gardening with you. Developing and maintaining a home garden involves scientific, aesthetic and physical concepts that we have described before. In the present context, gardening with kids also could emphasize these aspects in a thoughtful manner.

There are several garden-related short-term activities and long-term programs that parents could organize for their child’s education and enjoyment. For ideas, check out the Kids Gardening website for a wealth of ideas for indoor and outdoor gardening. They invite opportunities in which children benefit most when parents and children work and play together.

During the early spring, weeding remains a necessary task. Some gardeners find weed removal sessions to be meditative and satisfying. It is certainly a safe and welcome distraction from our threatening surroundings, so align your thoughts to emphasize this work as a contributor to the health of your plants and garden.

Now is still a good time for installing new plants in the garden. Some local garden centers have continued business hours with various strategies for enabling customers and staff to maintain social distance. In some cases, for example, gardeners can order plants in advance by phone or email for curbside pick-up at the harden center.

Mail-order opportunities also continue to offer a great range of choices, and to evolve into a convenient approach to plant buying.

2 Advance Your Gardening Knowledge

If you are not already a well-equipped and capable computer-user, consider using this shelter-at-home period to update your devices and skills. Our society and the world have entered well into the digital age, and gardeners now have access to excellent online information on plants, landscaping, and related topics. While we still learn gardening from friends and relatives, an Internet search will provide basic concepts and answers to questions quickly and in abundance. If you should come across shaky ideas, comparing it with other sources will lead to reliable information.

Tutorial help (free or fee-based) might help to build your computing skills, but a good strategy is practice, practice, practice. And don’t hesitate to try different ways to pursue specific objectives: keyboard actions won’t hurt the computer.

Mail-order shopping for plants requires source information: plant catalogs and websites. A valuable resource for locating plant nurseries that will ship plants to your home is //gardensavvy.com which lists sources for several kinds of plants as well as a range of other garden-related information.

Here are websites to draw upon to advance your knowledge of some popular garden plants.

• ROSES >> The American Rose Society
• IRISES >> The American Iris Society
• NATIVE PLANTS >> The California Native Plant Society

The American Horticultural Society also lists many garden societies that specialize in particular garden plant genera. To advance your knowledge of almost any plant genus, visit the AHS website and look under Resources/Societies, Clubs and Organizations.

3 Enrich Your Gardening Days

• On Gardening. My Facebook page offers daily “garden notes,” brief current reports from my garden, as “what’s in bloom now” articles updates focusing on Mediterranean climate gardens. .
• ReScape California. Tools and resources to help you to plan, design and create beautiful sustainable landscapes and gardens.
• Gardening Discussion Forums. The National Gardening Associations community forums on a range of gardening topics.

These websites only suggest the online resources for enriching your gardening experiences.

Enjoy your gardens and gardening and stay healthy.