touring summer gardens

I linger quite a bit on this image from the Rhododendron Species Botanical Garden (RSBG). Silver, gold, rust tones on the foreground rock outcropping, lacy ferns gently breaking the horizontal, backed by that incredible mounding conifer. Casuarina glauca might work for the mounding whipcord effect in warmer zones.

Lately I’ve been dipping more and more frequently into photos taken while garden touring last summer with the Garden Fling, a highly recommended garden tour group. Compared to what’s being reported in this crazy news cycle, making and caring for a garden is the epitome of a fact-based, thoughtful, creative endeavor, considering multiple inputs and striving for a result that, hopefully, nourishes the maker intellectually, sensually, even potentially nutritionally, along with friends and resident wildlife. All the gardens toured last summer accomplished many of these goals, leaving those who visited with some breathtaking memories.

hardy schefflera/heptapleurum anchors a mixed planting at Heronswood also including hardy geraniums, sedum, phlomis, Lonicera nitida

The Puget Sound Garden Fling visited gardens made in the context of a region rich with garden societies and specialty nurseries, annual rainfall 40 inches and up, USDA zone 8-9ish. The best garden tours will showcase gardens reveling in their unique climate, with owners deeply knowledgeable of the vagaries of their seasons as well as how to care for experiments with marginally hardy plants.

in the Gray Garden, visions of Little Edie of Gray Gardens bustling around serving “pate” (cat food) on trays had to be banished to absorb this elegant garden whose only similarity to Little Edie’s garden was the name

In the Puget Sound area, the tour saw plantings, for example, starting with a base of lichens, mosses, sedums and sempervivum clinging to rocks, past a detailed understory of shrubs, bulbs, and perennials, tracing upward to the 30-40 foot tree canopy of fir, cedar and hemlock. Very well-clothed gardens! Every possibility for plant life of some kind to thrive was thoroughly exploited to spectacular effect.

at Heronswood soft drapery for the pergola, a weeping conifer, maybe the Kashmir Cypress?

you never see agaves treated as stars in a pot of summer bedding in zone 10, especially A. americana which quickly grows large and unruly. Seen at Heronswood with banana and what looks like cercis and lots of other stuff, the agave becomes a coveted component of a fleeting summer scene.

using salvage metal for a hanging container at the RSBG

the stylish replacement for a garage door reflects this tableaux’s many admirers at the Heckler garden

the metal fishing float was a standout among the many glass floats — beautiful in their own right as well as placing the garden in a maritime region

touring gardens, for example, can reveal a like-minded affinity many share for sewer grates (Heckler garden). Gardens can absorb interests in shapes, textures and materials that would be unsuitable indoors.

beautiful specimen of Acanthus sennii — I’d only seen straggly versions before

the mesmerizing rhythmic patterns of Impatiens omeiana enmasse with synleisis

My garden touring budget this summer has been busted by another ACL surgery for Billie, a full TPLO this time — hopefully the last! But I hope you get out to see some gardens this coming season. Just as in hearing music live, nothing comes close to visiting gardens in person. And at a minimum, you’ll take away photos as powerful talismans nearly capable of teleportation.

touring summer gardens

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