Gathering friends in your garden for a casual midday meal is the ultimate pleasure on a lazy summer day―especially in the cooling shade of an arbor. At the Apple Farm (707/895-2461), a working farm, inn, and cooking school in Philo, California, owners Sally and Don Schmitt and Karen and Tim Bates have been hosting garden-fresh meals beneath a living arbor of 12 mulberry trees for more than a decade. There, around a concrete table with a tree-stump base, friends and guests get together to dine and chat. » see room