Pat Welsh is a television performer, columnist, garden editor, public speaker, and author of "Pat Welsh's Southern California Organic Gardening, Month by Month" and other books. As the host of a television segment on the evening newscast of San Diego's NBC affiliate, Welsh pioneered the subject of gardening on the 6:00 p.m. newscast, the first show of its kind nationwide.
During her long career as a magazine editor, columnist, TV performer, and public speaker Welsh vigorously opposed the once-popular concept that gardening information and books for California must be written and published in England or New York. Instead, Welsh championed regional books and Mediterranean garden styles. She urged gardeners to turn away from English and east coast styles and thirsty lawns and instead to grow drought-resistant plants and use techniques and timing of garden tasks appropriate to the Mediterranean climate of Southern California, which is characterized by plentiful sunshine, mild temperatures, and dry summers with most rainfall occurring in fall, winter, and spring. Her approach combines the artistic elements of gardening, such as design and color, with practical skills for dealing with climate zones, soil types, plant materials, irrigation methods, and environmentally responsible methods of disease and pest control. An early emphasis on IPM (Integrated Pest Management) was later replaced by a firm conviction that chemical pest controls have no place in the home garden. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Welsh has urged today's gardeners to rely solely on poison-free organic methods and to feed plants with natural, organic fertilizers in place of synthetic ones.
Maps, Directions, and Place Reviews
Early years: 1929-1935
Patricia Ruth Fisher-Smith was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, England, in 1929, the year of the financial crash to a wealthy and influential family of mill owners and garden enthusiasts, thus she naturally fell into an early interest in gardens. The families of both her parents had risen in prominence during the Industrial Revolution and were now rapidly in decline. Her father, Emerson Lyman Fisher-Smith and mother, Ruth Beatrice Ambler, were socialites who lost their money and residence in the financial crash. They were forced to return home and live in the large estates of their parents; they went first to the Gleddings and then to Hoyle Court, each with extensive gardens. Emerson borrowed money from his mother, Lady Hattie Fisher-Smith, founder of many charities in Yorkshire and the American wife of Sir George Henry Fisher-Smith, to buy part ownership of the Gainsborough Studios a film company outside London. Emerson worked as Art Director on Men of Steel (1932), in which his wife, Ruth, had a small role. Tiger Bay with Ana May Wong in the starring role, did well at the box office, but minor comedies starring his wife Ruth Fisher-Smith, who was beautiful but could not act, opposite Reginald Gardener were not a success. These fiascos capped by the over-budget production of Chu Chin Chow (1934), a musical and somewhat racy retelling of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, also starring Ana May Wong, led to Emerson's financial ruin. As a result, Ruth and Emerson divorced and Emerson emigrated from England to America, where he joined the Hollywood crowd, played major roles at the Pasadena Playhouse, and small roles in several movies including Mrs. Miniver. Emerson later married Margot Gould, an American from Connecticut who was twenty-five years his junior, and lived comfortably to the age of ninety on the proceeds of the Fisher-Smith estate in a house he and Margot built overlooking the Mediterranean Sea on the island of Malta. Throughout his life, he was a talented painter in both oils and watercolor and a world traveler.
Pest Control Bucks County Pa Video
Coming to America: 1936-1960
After the divorce, Ruth married fashion photographer, Geoffrey Morris. The couple emigrated to America in 1936, launching a fashion-photography business in New York, and leaving their three children, John Fisher-Smith (10), Pat (7) and a half-brother William Morris (1), in boarding schools, and under the watchful care of grandparents and a nurse. In 1938, after the Munich Crisis, Lady Hattie died. Emerson Fisher-Smith sailed back to England First Class on the Queen Mary to bury his mother, settle his affairs, and get three children re-listed on the quota for English immigrants entering the United States. Pat and John Fisher-Smith, and Bill Morris and Bill's nurse, Norah Widdop, sailed to America in Tourist Class, accompanied by Emerson Fisher-Smith sailing in First Class (where his two children joined him daily), on the Cunard White Star Line ship, the SS Franconia. The family disembarked in New York City, New Years Day 1939, to be met by Ruth and Geoffrey Morris.
The Morris family and Fisher-Smith children spent the war years on a Bucks County, Pennsylvania farm where Pat learned sculpture, watercolor painting, and numerous outdoor skills. She was inspired to become a writer by family friendships and frequent contacts with local Bucks County writers and artists, including James Michener, Pearl Buck, William L. White, Oscar Hammerstein, and others. In 1944, the family sold the farm and moved to Hollywood where Geoffrey worked as a publicity photographer in the film industry and Ruth owned an antique store called "Morris of London" on the Sunset Strip. Welsh graduated from Hollywood High School, received a B.A. from Scripps College in Claremont, California and was married on the afternoon of her commencement day, June 8, 1951 to a Los Angeles trial lawyer for the Santa Fe Railroad, Louis Maximilian Welsh, later a prominent Superior Court Judge in San Diego and founder of the San Diego Inn of Court.
Del Mar: 1956
In 1956 the couple built a home in Del Mar California, designed by Louis Welsh's stepfather, John Lloyd Wright, second son of Frank Lloyd Wright and inventor of Lincoln Logs. The Welsh home is next door to the house in which John Lloyd Wright and his wife Frances, lived until each succumbed to cancer during the 1970s. The Welsh's had two children Francesca Filanc, widow of Peter Filanc, and Wendy Woolf, married to Lawrence D. Woolf, PhD.
Author, editor, and resident gardener: 1961-1979
During the 1960s Welsh wrote travel and self-help articles published under the names Patricia Fisher and Patricia Welsh in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. In 1975 she began lecturing on gardening at the UCSD Extension. In 1979 she became the first Garden Editor of San Diego Home/Garden Magazine. In 1981 she was hired as the host of an evening news segment called "Newscenter 39's Resident Gardener" on the NBC station in San Diego. This was the first regularly scheduled garden news segment aired on the evening news by a network station. Now working under the name Pat Welsh, through the years she planned, wrote, and performed over 500 practical gardening segments plus one grand promo weekly and two teases. Each segment was accompanied by written material, so that viewers could mail in a stamped self-addressed envelope to obtain exact detailed information and techniques covered in the TV demonstration. This system of mailing developed a large number of loyal viewers and helped spread practical and environmentally responsible information. This show which lasted five years during the 1980s, an era of prosperity for network television, helped raise public awareness of the environment and was instrumental in moving gardening into the mainstream of media attention in the U.S. a position it's always enjoyed in England.
San Diego Emmy Award and national TV: 1980s
The 1980s marked a high point financially for newsrooms in network stations nationwide. After riding that wave to its conclusion, and winning the San Diego Emmy Award for News Performer, Pat continued for several years in local and nationwide television as a freelance writer and performer.
Southern California Gardening: A Month-by-Month Gardening Guide: 1990-present
In the late 1990s Welsh made two instructive videos for the Meredith Corporation and Better Homes and Gardens Magazine. "Foolproof Flowerbeds", written and performed by Welsh and filmed in Descanso Gardens, won the Garden Writers' of America Quill and Trowel Award for Best Video of 1990. The success of this video led to another called "Landscape Problems Solved" which was followed by various infomercials, national TV programs, and eight shows on the Home/Garden network filmed in Nashville Tennessee in 1996.
In 1988 Welsh returned as a columnist to San Diego Home/Garden Magazine, and in 1991 Chronicle Books published "Pat Welsh's Southern California Gardening: A Month-by-Month Gardening Guide", the first major gardening book of encyclopedic scope written exclusively for the unique climate and conditions of Southern California. This book stayed in print for twenty years selling close to one hundred thousand copies and proving that practical regional books to help gardeners with local problems were preferable to books written for the broader market and containing information not applicable to many areas. This book, now out of print, was supplanted in January 2010 by the new all-organic edition entitled "Pat Welsh's Southern California Organic Gardening, Month by Month", published by Chronicle Books.
Welsh is also a sculptor and lifelong painter in watercolor and oils. Her professional art projects include the design and building of a 92-foot-long, multi-media mural completed in 2002 in collaboration with graphic artist Betsy Schulz and 80 volunteers. This mural is four feet tall and includes over thirty pieces of original terra cotta sculpture plus brick, Mexican river rock, and local memorabilia. It is located at 13th Street and Camino Del Mar (Old 101) in Del Mar California in front of the Del Mar Public Library.
Awards
- The San Diego Area Emmy Award for Performance, News
- The San Diego Press Club Award
- The National Quill and Trowel Award
- The Lifetime Achievement Award from Quail Botanical Gardens, Cuyamaca College Horticulturist of the Year
- San Diego Horticultural Society's Horticulturist of the Year.
- Honorary Master Gardener of San Diego
Books by Pat Welsh
- Pat Welsh's Southern California Gardening: A Month-by-Month Guide: Chronicle Books, 1991.
- Pat Welsh's Southern California Gardening: A Month-by-Month Guide, Completely Revised and Updated: * Chronicle Books, 2000.
- All My Edens: A Gardener's Memoir: Chronicle Books, 1996.
- The American Horticultural Society Southwest Smart Garden Regional Guide: D.K. Publishing, 2004.
- The Magic Mural and How it Got Built: A Fable for Children of All Ages: The Friends of the Del Mar Library, 2005.
- Pat Welsh's Southern California Organic Gardening, Month by Month: Chronicle Books, 1991.
Videos
- "Foolproof Flowerbeds": Better Homes and Gardens and The Meredith Company, Inc.
- "Landscape Problems Solved": Better Homes and Gardens and The Meredith Company, Inc.
- "It Takes a Village...To Raise a Wall": Holliday, Phillips: Del Mar TV Foundation.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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