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The Sacramento Bee, Calif., Dan Vierria Column: Calling Your Buff: Naked Gardening Day Takes Root

Posted on: Saturday, 11 March 2006, 15:00 CST

By Dan Vierria, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Mar. 11--Prepare to drop trousers: There's another World Naked Gardening Day ahead. Gardening's a la buff day will be Sept. 9, according to Mark Storey.

"You can't have a World Naked Swimming Day because not everyone has water," he says. "So it dawned on us that naked gardening would be perfect because more people garden. Almost everybody can get out in the backyard."

Storey, chairman of the philosophy department at Washington's Bellevue Community College, and buddy Daniel Johnson co-founded WNGD last year. The day will always fall on the second Saturday of September. Their intention, according to Storey, is light-hearted fun.

"We encourage people to take it any direction they want, but keep it friendly," he says. "Find out what it's like to garden naked. Tell friends, introduce people to naked gardening."

Not that there's anything wrong with naked gardening, but there will be none of that in my garden on Sept. 9 - or any other day of the year. Thorns, spines, sunburn, sharp-bladed tools and stinging insects are best faced fully clothed, in my humble opinion.

Nevertheless, naked gardening has received more exposure, if you will, of late. WNGD's launch attracted media attention and prompted others to admit online to gardening naked.

Organic gardener Jay North's recent self-published book, "The Windowsill Organic Gardener" has an entire chapter on going naked without going to jail.

"Gardening naked and organic gardening goes hand-in-hand with some of us," says North, from his organic farm in Ojai in Southern California. "There's a handful of us who like to be in the garden in the buff. All of the people I know who do it are organic gardeners."

North reports that he once Googled "nude gardening" and got 378,000 results. I Googled the same two words last week and found 879,000 results. Not sure what that says, but all this may make you wonder if the neighbors are stark naked when planting their petunias.

Storey, a proponent of family-friendly nude beaches, skinny dipping and other naked activities, has performed a variety of gardening chores sans clothing - turning compost, mowing lawn, transplanting trees, weeding and much more.

"I've done just about the gamut in my yard, even yanked out blackberries," he says. "Wear shoes or gloves if you like. Whatever people feel comfortable with. It's amazing how resilient the body is to the natural world. The body is pretty darn tough."

He says his wife Kathleen has been stung a few times by bees, but in places she would have been stung fully clothed.

Last year during World Naked Gardening Day, Storey, his wife and friends performed community gardening service in the nude. They did a quick, cleanup in a public park after first making sure nobody else was around.

Storey's wife, Kathleen Blanchard, is the real gardener in the family. She's head gardener for the Japanese Garden at the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle.

"All our neighbors are aware of our naked gardening," says Storey. "We make it a point to get to know the neighbors. What they really want is gardening advice from my wife."

The Storeys confine naked gardening to the backyard and have asked all the neighbors whether they are offended by the nakedness.

"We ask them: 'We like to garden naked. Does that bother you?'" says Storey. "They react with amusement. We get some chuckles and they like joking with us about it. If I'm going to offend any of the neighbors, I'll do naked indoor gardening."

Interest in dianthus, the genus of plants with common names that include pinks, carnations and sweet Williams, is on the rise. Breeders are coming out with more dianthus choices and growers haven't been reluctant to make them available to home gardeners.

Dianthus gratianopolitanus "Feuerhexe" is the Perennial Plant Association's 2006 Perennial Plant of the Year. It's commonly called cheddar pink firewitch. Grow it in full sun and well-drained soil and deadhead old blooms regularly for best flowering results.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

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Source: The Sacramento Bee

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