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.
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 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.
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.
This post is a great promotion for garden tours, Denise! I appreciated your focus on the little ideas and combinations that so often stick in our memories to later encourage innovations to embellish our own gardens. I’m sorry to hear that Billie’s lined up for another surgery and hope she (and you) sail through the experience with aplomb.
Good memories! Thanks for the reminder.
Excellent thoughts, great shots. The poisonous hate infection in our country is somewhat counterbalanced by the beauty, serenity to be found in gardens. Those eternal truths, not a day-to-day invented unnatural chaos of narcissism.
Must disrespectfully disagree a bit on Agaves–in my eyes they do not reach their full glorious potential in the PNW. Stark, solitary and enduring ferocious heat they are at their most proud and defiant. “I endure!” they announce, to those whose hearing is attuned to their song.
@Kris, Billie is a week out from surgery, walking on all fours, and tolerating the “cone” reasonably well. The first surgery was a different technique designed more for smaller dogs. As we all know, corgis are big dogs in a small dog’s body!
@Hoov, I didn’t mean to say agaves grow better up north, heavens no! Only that they get the star treatment as opposed to the landscaping the overgrown parkway treatment I see locally!
I hope Billie continues to thrive post surgery, and there will always be HPSO Open Gardens for you to visit on a reduced budget (as long as you’re returning to Oregon)!
As for the “fleeting summer scene” with the agave at Heronswood. It’s not completely fleeting as a similar planting was there when I visited in 2021 (in this post, http://www.thedangergarden.com/2021/11/heronswood-parking-lot-rock-garden-and.html). I am so glad you joined up with the Fling fun last summer!
Lovely overview Denise ! Sorry to hear more surgery for Billie. My garden tour/travel budget has tanked for this year too thanks to the need for a new roof and rapidly deteriorating circa 1983 HVAC system. At least my spring trip to the Central Coast remains intact.
I’m hoping Billie sails through the healing process! I didn’t know you had a Corgi :).
I love *well clothed garden with the photo of the weeping conifer. Perfection. Your photos are soothing, a great mix of hard & soft.
Denise, I enjoyed revisiting the Fling gardens with you in your evocative post. You eloquently sum up, for me, the joy of blogging about a garden visit: “you’ll take away photos as powerful talismans nearly capable of teleportation.” So true!