Cult of the Cultivar: Hundreds Gather in Boonville to Learn Gardening Techniques

On Saturday, hundreds gathered at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds in Boonville — a small town in the Anderson Valley wine-growing region — to learn farming and gardening techniques from experts at the 36th Annual Winter Abundance Workshop.

The event, hosted by Mendocino Permaculture, offered free classes in tree and vine propagation and grafting, and a scion and seed exchange, where people could freely access and trade seeds and cuttings from all over the county.

A scion is a young shoot or twig of a plant that is pruned off of one tree to graft or root onto another.

“We definitely tend to have, I would say, a reverence for farming and an appreciation of backyard gardens and growing your own. I don’t know if that grow-your-own culture is as prominent in other places,” said Holly Madrigal, who held a bag of scions and seeds, including one labeled “Fort Bragg Jalapeño Plums.”

Madrigal is the publisher and managing editor of Word of Mouth magazine, which launched in 2016 to share the stories and products that make Mendocino County unique.

She said the Abundance Workshop has become renowned for the fabulous seeds and cuttings people bring to share with each other. There are whole tables dedicated to apple scions, and others with pomegranates, plums, pluots and grapes.

“This is a really generous event where people bring their seeds and share them. You know most of it’s free,” Madrigal said. “They’re learning from each other and sort of cross-pollinating basically across the county. I think we’re unique in that way.”

Many of the classes at the event discussed selecting plants for the unique bioregion. Mark Albert, who specializes in self-sufficient food production and has researched the best fruit and vegetable cultivars for the local climate, taught a course on scionology: the art of grafting scions onto root stalks to grow diverse varieties of plants.

Albert has developed a concept he likes to call the “cult of the cultivar.” He said that cultivars — or the individual plants that completely adapt to a region — become the foundation for a culture to survive there. Plants, more than anything else, were the reason humans were able to settle down, he added.

“People have been traveling and moving plants around forever. I mean from day one,” Albert said. “That’s what the pack animals were for. What was in them saddlebags? You know, it wasn’t Guns, Germs and Steel. No, it was sticks and seeds. And moving sticks and seeds from one area to another and trying them out. And then, they would adapt to that new place.”

Albert said the cultivar is essential to human survival. Therefore, the skills people learn at the yearly Abundance Workshop are vital.