Gay dads are dishing dirt at this year's San Francisco Flower and Garden Show, the world's sixth largest, and the nursery and landscape industry's most cutting-edge. The show runs through Sunday, March 19 at the Cow Palace."We're encouraged to do stuff outside the box," said garden designer and co-parent Daniel Owens, who created one of the 27 juried display gardens. "San Francisco's diversity of plants encourages that."
Owens, whose partner died in 1994, became a co-parent after "dating" his kids' Oakland moms, even sending flowers. "A regular courtship," Owens called it. He now spends Thursdays and some weekend time with his son, 8, and daughter, 5, at his Richmond city home he shares with his current partner of four years. The kids play in a backyard playhouse from his garden show display of three years ago.
"I don't do nightclubs," said Owens, 49, a former 15-year Castro resident. "I'm not an A-list gay. Today my life is so suburban."
Owens's brief childhood years in Chicago's Oak Park suburb – with Frank Lloyd Wright's numerous organic-style homes – influenced his career choice, he said.
"I'm very methodical about designing," said Owens, whose EnviroMagic business creates 35-40 gardens per year.
This year, his garden show display, "Sea Shells, Sea Swells," is a boardwalk dune with beach cabana surrounded by willows, alders, succulents, grasses, and wetland riparian, inspired by his Provincetown vacations.
"I wanted to create the kind of garden where time and space falls away," said Owens. "Not a care in the world, that's what I would like the feeling to evoke."
Participating in the shows generates exposure, name recognition, networking – what Owens called "branding."
"I'm one of the most recognized designers because of the show," said Owens, who has appeared on 14 episodes of HGTV's Curb Appeal show doing front yard makeovers.
Another gay dad at the garden show is Robin White, 48, owner of The Living Land design company. He also co-parents and has children Rafael, 8 and Simon, 6, over to his San Francisco home one weekday per week, after school.
"I've become more involved, certainly, than they thought I would be," said White. "It's completely transformed my life. I have a whole set of responsibilities now that didn't exist before. Before it was just me. I have to take a whole family into account."
In White's simple, walled, "Garden of Rocky Disengagement," display, a large granite and quartz table sits within a perfect circle of Salmon Bay gravel surrounded by an array of 30 varieties of foliage, such as the cone-like flowered South African Proteaflora, and rare, tall grass-like plants from Guerrero Street Gardens, watched over by a mirrored figurative sculpture based on Prince Charles and Princess Diana by Santa Cruz artists Phoebe Fisher and Wayne Bassano.
"I'm taking the centuries-old theme of the garden as a retreat a step further," said White.
Sean Stout and James Pettigrew, both 38, met 10 years ago, fell in love, and "jumped in with both feet," creating their company, Organic Mechanics, first toting their pruning shears in backpacks on public transit before eventually acquiring a landscape contractor's license and two trucks.
Stout and Pettigrew's current "Garden Puzzle" patio is composed of Connecticut Bluestone surrounded by rounded beds of purple and black fleshy-leaved succulents, native lilacs, daisies, Australian Leptospermum, and carnivorous Sebastopol-grown Sundew and Venus Fly Traps.
The garden show includes seminars and lectures for adults. A special "Sproutopia" area for kids includes demonstrations and art projects with a bugmobile, caterpillars, root viewing, and seed planting.
from Bay Area Reporter
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