Tags: 2014, Garden Ornaments, Meeting, Season 2014-2015, Yvonne Darlene Savio

For our December event, master gardener Yvonne Darlene Savio presented Garden Ornaments – Holiday Creations and Just Fun Stuff.

Gardeners are infinitely creative in using their gardens as source material for holiday decorations, and in decorating their gardens with just fun stuff. Yvonne shared many ideas found across the US, England, and Europe.

Ms. Savio grew up on a 3/4-acre hillside lot in Pasadena in Southern California, with year-round fruits and vegetables and flowers homegrown with lots of manure and compost and “making do” before it was called recycling or repurposing. She knows what “harvested at the perfect moment of ripeness” means and enjoys enabling others to enjoy the benefits of “growing your own.”

Ms. Savio has degrees in journalism, English literature, art and photography from California State University at Los Angeles and Sacramento; her horticulture degree is from American River College, Sacramento.

For 15 years, she worked in the Botany and Vegetable Crops Cooperative Extension Departments at the University of California, Davis. Since 1984, Ms. Savio has contributed weekly gardening columns, features, and photographs to California and national newspapers, magazines, journals, and newsletters. In 1994, Ms. Savio moved “back home” to Pasadena to revitalize the Master Gardener Volunteer Training Program for the University of California Cooperative Extension office in Los Angeles County. Master Gardener volunteers assist community and school gardens, senior gardens, and homeless and battered women’s shelters. Our Grow LA Victory Garden Initiative offers basic garden instruction to the general public at some 25 locations throughout Los Angeles County in both Spring and Fall.

Ms. Savio maintains demonstration and trial gardens in Northern and Southern California, specializing in drought-tolerant and recycling techniques for growing vegetables, fruits, perennials, roses, and succulents. She documents the creative fun stuff of repurposed tools and garden art.