Mid April - Fullerton Observer

MID APRIL 2013
LOCAL NEWS
2013 Garden Tour Not to Be Missed
by Nancy Spencer
Come join us in cerebrating the beginning
of Spring with a stroll through lovely
and inspiring gardens. This year
Fullerton Beautiful presents its annual
garden tour on Sunday, April 28 from
11AM to 4PM.
The tour will begin at Fullerton College
Horticulture Department on Berkeley
Avenue, east of Lemon Street. Visitors
may purchase maps for the self-guided
tour for $10 while shopping for plants at
the Horticulture Department before
departing on the Tour. Flower purchases
may be left at the Dept. and picked up
after touring the gardens.
There are eight beautiful gardens on the
tour with many clever ideas. One homeowner
turned a swimming pool into a koi
pond, some entertainment areas incorporate
planting of flower gardens within
hardscape, slope plantings, grottoes, different
types of vegetable gardens, recycling
of water and, of course, lovely rose, perennial
and drought tolerant flower gardens.
Features at last
year’s Garden
Tour included
hanging gardens,
a tree-well patio,
a tiered fountain
garden, and the
lovely sun-dappled
garden
chair pictured
here - as well as
drought tolerant
and other types
of gardens.
PHOTOS
BY ERIK VOSS
Local Author Peggy Hesketh will present
her latest novel “Telling the Bees” at a
reading and book signing on Saturday,
April 20 at 2pm at the Fullerton Barnes &
Noble Book Store, 1923 W. Malvern, in
the Amerige Heights shopping center.
“I grew up a few miles away (down
Dale Avenue to a little Cinderella housing
tract off Orange Avenue) in West
Anaheim,” says Hesketh. “My oldest
friend lives just off Malvern in the old Los
Coyotes neighborhood. We used to play
softball up the hill near Gilbert and
Rosecrans on the other side of Ralph B.
Clark park.”
Her latest book “Telling the Bees,” is set
just down the road in old Anaheim. “If
you have lived in this neck of the woods,
as I have since childhood, you may
remember the scent of orange blossoms,
jasmine and eucalyptus that used to infuse
the nights with such possibilities.”
“I grew up watching Johnny Carson. I
remember thinking: I must have interesting
jobs so that when I sit on the couch
next to Johnny and he asks me what I did
before I became an author I would have
glorious stories to tell.
So my first job straight out of high
school was an incense stick dipper, my
second a waitress in a coffee shop that
shared a bathroom with a whorehouse
upstairs, my third a window blind repair
person, my fourth a typesetter, my fifth a
freelance ad copywriter, my sixth a computer
graphics artist, and so it went.
And meanwhile, I dropped out of several
colleges, got married on a volcano in
Guatemala in a Mayan ceremony presided
over by a Catholic priest who was murdered
five years later by a right-wing death
squad, had two glorious children, nursed
both my parents through fatal cancers,
earned a BA in journalism, spent a dozen
years as a reporter and editor, traveled
around the world, broke several major
bones playing softball, went back to
school, earned an MA and MFA, started
writing fiction and teaching full time at
the University of California, Irvine,
(which by the way, was one of the colleges
FULLERTON OBSERVER Page 7
Author Peggy Hesketh
PHOTO BY CHRIS GRIFFITHS
www.peggyhesketh.com
Local Author Peggy Hesketh
I dropped out of as an undergrad), spent
the last year undergoing treatment for
breast cancer, and ultimately celebrating
this crazy life. Oh, and I'm back playing
softball twice a week.”
ABOUT THE BOOK
Albert Honig's most constant companions
have always been his bees. A nevermarried
octogenarian, still residing in the
house in which he was born, Albert makes
a modest living as a beekeeper, just as his
father and his father's father had done
before him. Deeply acquainted with the
ways and workings of the hives, he knows
that bees dislike wool clothing and foul
language; that the sweetest honey is made
from the blooms of eucalyptus; and that
bees are at their gentlest in a swarm. But
Albert is less versed in the ways of people,
especially his beautiful, courageous, and
secretive friend Claire.
A friend and neighbor since childhood,
Claire was a hovering presence—and then
a glaring absence—in Albert's life, a
change that has never been reconciled.
When she is murdered in a seemingly
senseless accident during a burglary gone
wrong, Albert is haunted by the loss. In
the aftermath of this tragedy, he is left to
piece together the events of their lives, to
attempt to make sense of their shared past
and the silence that persisted between
them for a decade before her death. What
Albert comes to learn is that Claire's
secrets were far darker than anything he
could have imagined . . . and the mystery
behind her murder lay not so much in
who did it, but why.
Spanning the arc of the twentieth century,
set in the transforming landscape of
Southern California, Telling the Bees is a
beautifully imagined novel about the farreaching
consequences of words left
unspoken, the persistence of regret, and
the power of truth both to wound and to
heal.
The book is available at Barnes &
Noble, Amazon.com, and IndieBound.
For more information go to
www.peggyhesketh.com