Flowering tradition attracting thousands

Alicia Robinson

Need a weather vane? Looking for advice on your bonsai tree? Want to

handle your plants with kid gloves?

This weekend, all those needs can be met at the annual Southern

California Spring Garden Show at South Coast Plaza.

The garden show opened Thursday, attracting shoppers like bees to

the bright blooming plants and shiny garden gadgets. About 80 vendors

of garden products are fanned out from a central display with a

marketplace theme, life-sized sculptures of burros bearing saddlebags

overflowing with orange orchids and other flowers and a cart piled

with fruits and vegetables.

This is the 15th year for the garden show, and about 100,000

visitors are expected to browse products such as knee pads and

kidskin gardening gloves, buy plants and seeds and attend seminars

held by garden experts.

“People in Southern California love gardening,” South Coast Plaza

marketing director Debra Gunn Downing said. “They love outdoor

spaces, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve continued this for so

many years.”

Show organizers look for different products and vendors, and

they’ve found a few this year.

Probably the only vendor that harks back to the Victorian era is

West Coast Weather Vanes, a Santa Cruz company owned by LizAnne

Jensen and her husband, Ken.

The couple designs and makes copper and brass weather vanes shaped

like cats, dogs, farm animals and more fanciful creatures such as

fairies and gargoyles. They also do custom designs requested by

customers and once spent several months making a scaled-down model of

a locomotive engine on a small track.

“If you like folk art, weather vanes are sort of the epitome of

American folk art,” LizAnne Jensen said.

“They have a lot of history, a lot of tradition to them.”

She said the Jensens’ weather vanes are made largely the same way

they would have been constructed by the ancient Greeks, who are shown

in historical references using weather vanes.

Most popular during the Victorian era, weather vanes had a

resurgence in popularity in the 1970s and have remained a collector’s

item, Jensen said.

Also at the garden show were members of the Orange Empire Bonsai

Society, who were displaying some of their little creations.

Society President David Nadzam said not everyone understands the

ancient Asian art centered on tiny trees.

“As long as it’s a woody-type tree or plant, it can be bonsai-ed,”

he said. “Bonsai is what you do to it.”

Creating a bonsai tree isn’t hard, it just takes a long time,

Nadzam said. It involves consistently trimming the tree’s leaves and

roots, which must be kept in proportion. Sometimes the whole tree

must be stripped bare until trained only to make smaller leaves.

Nadzam caught his bonsai enthusiasm from a friend.

“It’s almost like meditation,” he said. “You sit there with your

tree and you care for it. It’s the challenge, the art form.”

In spite of myriad products and displays, it was the wide variety

of plants at the garden show that drew Josie Carlevato, an avid

gardener from Chino Hills, to South Coast Plaza in Thursday.

Carlevato fed her gardening habit with a fairy for the garden, a

begonia and a plant she didn’t know the name of.

“It just struck me as unusual, so I bought it,” she said.

Not everything that brings people to the garden show is for sale,

though.

“I come for ideas,” said Bonnie Aborne, who appropriately lives in

Garden Grove. “I come to get projects for my husband to build.”

Right now she’s into fairy gardens, which she was examining

Thursday. One example, displayed in a small tin washtub, consisted of

several patches of tiny flowers and a fairy statue about 4 inches

high. Aborne called it “the mature adult woman’s dollhouse.”

She also was admiring some crates made from wooden slats being

shown as plant holders.

“My husband doesn’t know it, but he’s going to build me some of

these crates,” she said.

The spring garden show runs through Sunday in the Crate & Barrel

wing of South Coast Plaza, 3333 Bristol St. in Costa Mesa.

* ALICIA ROBINSON covers business, politics and the environment.

She may be reached at (949) 764-4330 or by e-mail at

alicia.robinson@latimes.com.