Garden Club meeting features Boddaert talk

FALLBROOK – The first Fallbrook Garden Club meeting of the year was held Sept. 25 at the Fallbrook Community Center and members gathered to hear its program, "Reverence for Nature." The center-stage tables were festooned with flowers and plants from all over the world.

The "Tree Man of Fallbrook and Maker of Gardens," Roger Boddaert, began by holding up a globe of the earth and saying, "This is where we live. This is where we shall pass, but in the interim, let's take better care of Mother Earth and be respectful of all that lives here."

Boddaert recounted the long history of his gardening past, which began as a young 7-year-old boy cutting lawns for 50 cents in the 1940s and progressed to working on grand old estates like Lotusland in Montecito, Hope Ranch in Santa Barbara, plus many gardens in Pasadena, the Warner Bros. estate in Beverly Hills and gardens throughout the Los Angeles area.

He shared his summer travels to northern Sweden where, as a teenager he worked on his grandpa's farm and out in the pine and birch forest woodlands hauling cut timbers down to the river to flow to the sawmills out toward the Baltic Sea. These many experiences galvanized his plant passion and love for nature that he has taken him through life with respect and a complete reverence for nature, he said.

While going to horticultural school in the mornings, he worked the graveyard shift in the Hollywood movie industry building movie sets for "Hello Dolly," "The Music Man," "My Fair Lady" and "P.T. Boat 109" as a movie set carpenter. This work gave him varied construction skills and artistic exposure from the film industry that he carried through life when designing creative landscapes throughout California.

The meeting's center stage display was decorated with flowers and potted plants consisting of celosia, gaillardia, bromeliads, native redbud, crossandra, protea, haemanthus, pomegranate, variegated clivia, acacia, a flowering orange and yellow spathodea trees from South Africa and the towering white sea squill flowers which bloom this time of year in Fallbrook.

Colorful landscape renderings were also displayed, along with antique garden books and a little wooden bird box that his granddaughter built as a child.

The Fallbrook "Necklace of Leaves" story was told about the creation of the Treescape program in Fallbrook which has been given awards from the Arbor Day Foundation, International Society of Arboriculture to the California Governor's Environmental award.

Boddaert talked about the first large Fallbrook tree planting event at the Los Jilgueros Preserve and explained how in the early 1990s, 750 volunteer tree planters showed up from all over Southern California and planted 435 trees on a cold winter's morning in five hours. He said that this large tree planting was attended by many garden club members giving their support to this major community tree planting event.

The Treescape Action Kit was developed by Fallbrook volunteers to start a community forestry program which has been distributed to small towns, hamlets and villages across the United States through a California Department of Forestry granting program. An informative and descriptive educational video is also part of the action kit. So, Fallbrook's branches have reached across this country somewhat and perhaps helped and inspired the planting of many more trees in America.

In closing, Boddaert said that the Fallbrook Community Gardens needs help with volunteers to revitalize the gardening venue which he helped start over 15 years ago. He asked if there are any volunteers interested in working with Mission Resource Conservation Service.