Many of the menus at Barona Resort & Casino start from the ground up —- literally. The resort, located in the East San Diego County city of Lakeside, relies on its on-site Chef’s Garden to supply produce to several of its restaurants. The garden also serves as the hub of Chef de Cuisine Duncan Firth’s environmentally layered approach to managing his kitchens. Firth says his entire staff takes pride in using what they grow on Barona’s menus, translating seasonality directly to the customers’ plates each day.

Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia is nothing short of dazzling. It’s the product of one wealthy woman's early 1900’s dream of turning her husband’s defunct cement pit into a floral glory.

Each year more than 1,000,000 bedding plants in some 700 varieties are used throughout the Gardens to ensure uninterrupted blooms from March through October. To see what’s ending or blooming before you go, be sure to check Butchart’s Weekly Flower Report.

During our late May visit, rare yellow wisteria, brought here from China, dripped over rows of arbors by the entrance. Magenta peonies were just blooming, and the first blue delphiniums had started their spires. We found azaleas and rhododendrons of every imaginable color, even bright orange.

Some of their begonias are as big as a human hand. Himalayan poppies glow light blue and lavender in the light. And you shouldn’t miss the Japanese garden; it’s a triumph of composition.

Called the "eco-oracle" by Wine Spectator magazine, "Amigo Bob" Cantisano is a legend in the organic gardening field. I had the opportunity to learn a ton from him during a recent workshop on the Heart of Organic Gardening up at Esalen.

Amigo Bob started with a factoid: There are 70,000 different species of insects in the world and less than 100 are pests in the garden. The rest are our allies. That's pretty cool, huh? We have 69,900 allies! Yea!

So the question becomes: how do we get these allies into our gardens? The answer is through diversity. The greater the diversity, the more stability a garden has. So if you're growing mostly vegetables, you will want to add flowers and herbs and allium (onions, garlic, etc.) as they attract the beneficial insects (those allies we talked about) like ladybugs, which are predators and eat the pests, and wasps, which are parasites and love to lay their eggs within the little buggers.