Happy October, dear readers! I am in deep disbelief that we’re somehow nearing the end of 2025, but orb-weaver spiders — those great harbingers of fall — are already out in force in my Ventura yard, stringing “Gotcha!” webs across my porch and all my walkways. So I guess it must be so.

I have so many activities to share with you in the plants calendar below — note especially that October is the opening gate for many of SoCal’s native plant nurseries. But first, I want to talk about Las Pilitas Nursery , one of California’s oldest and most respected native plant nurseries with a huge SoCal clientele athough it’s based in a very rural part of the Central Coast.

In 1974, about four years before Mike Evans and Jeff Bohn set out to start the Tree of Life native plant nursery outside San J

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