Garden Tour 2012

The Garden Tour yesterday was a great success. The weather was beautiful and I was told it was the biggest turnout yet the town has had for a garden tour.  People were so nice and appreciative--I guess I had not thought about how the people doing a garden tour are mostly gardeners themselves, or flower lovers, so everyone was so interested in every little detail, and many had cameras and notebooks out, taking down names of plants and asking questions about sun and shade, plant divisions, hardiness, etc. I even had two English women who oohed and aahed and told me I had a true English garden. Now that's a real compliment!

On Saturday, all the people participating in the tour met and went around to see all the other gardens, which was really interesting and fun.  Here are a few pictures of the other gardens on the tour this year. The garden below was really nice--the gardeners are both landscape architects, so they had a lot of help with the hardscape. The front yard had a beautiful front porch of bluestone, with different little creeping plants planted between the pavers. And I loooved the stacked stone walls that surrounded the property--they were my favorite part of the whole garden. The backyard had several garden features, including an amazing outdoor kitchen and bar, patio, waterfall, seating area with firepit, all mixed in with beds of hydrangeas, roses, heuchera, and other shady plants. Most of the beds were bordered with Korean boxwood, something I liked a lot. Only a landscape architect could get that many boxwood plants...

The garden below is one I drive by several times a day, so it was fun to get up close and see all the plants I have been admiring from the road. Mostly a shady garden, there are lots of hydrangeas, azaleas, hostas, ferns,  foxgloves, and even a little waterfall garden.

The next garden was very eclectic, with something interesting to look at everywhere you turned. The centerpiece of the garden was a huge 22- foot wide pond in the backyard, filled with water lilies, lotus, and other water plants, as well as several varieties of koi. Around the yard were garden beds planted with native plants and exotic perennials, including banana trees and palms.  They also have a beautiful solarium on the back of the house (oh man what I wouldn't give for a solarium), filled with more exotic plants.

And I liked this little succulent garden they had in their front yard.

The final garden belongs to a guy who used to work as a landscaper and owned a nursery. He kept saying he was not a gardener, just a landscaper. In fact he was very knowledgeable. He had an amazing collection of shrubs and trees and I liked how he had layered so many different varieties of holles, spruces, cypresses, and other trees and plants all around his garden. He also had the largest hosta I have ever seen! By the end of the tour, everyone was hot and tired, and he very graciously invited us all into his cool house for cold beers and some snacks. It was fun to talk to everyone and hear how busy everyone has been getting their gardens ready for the tour.

The best part of being on the garden tour was getting to meet other gardeners, and make some new friends. When it was all over on Sunday afternoon, we were all invited to the home of one of the tour's organizers (who also has a beautiful garden, of course) for a picnic. It is a great group and I am sure we will be seeing these people again.