These tours are over, but even these brief garden descriptions may be useful to others. When I visited Mary Manilla’s garden in Hawley this week it was a ribbon of green along the stream that borders the garden. By the time the Hawley Garden and Artisans Tour takes place on Saturday, July 11, there will be a river of color along the stream as the hundreds and hundreds of daylilies in every hue come into bloom. It…
The roses were just beginning to bloom on June's Bloom Day, mostly the rugosas, but this Fairy, one of two, had not yet begun. Unlike most of the roses in my garden The Fairy will bloom into the fall. I fully expected the roses which had barely begun to bloom on June 15, to be done by today, but they are have a most floriferous and long season. The Queen of Denmark is still petite, but blooming as…
The Western New England Iris Society is having its annual Iris show at the Community House in Shelburne on Sunday, July 5 from 1-4 pm. This is an opportunity to see a variety of beautiful Japanese irises and learn about their needs and culture. Japanese irises have a flatter more horizontal flower and bloom slightly later than Siberian and bearded irises. I always thought they required a wet site to thrive, but Kathy Puckett told me this…
Kathy Puckett is a collector. She has hundreds of orchids and hundreds of daylilies. She has lilies and roses and peonies. But right now she is celebrating her Siberian irises. Blue, purple, yellow and white. Great clumps of healthy gorgeous plants. When I asked if she had a favorite flower family (it was obvious she could never choose a favorite individual flower) she hesitated. “I love them all for different reasons. Sometimes I love the flower, or…
Pam Oakes assures me that neither her house, nor the lush surrounding gardens existed in 1976. When she and her husband Gordon first walked this piece of land by a pond once used for harvesting ice, they could not even imagine where to place a house until a friend bulldozed a stand of sumac and said “Build here!” They did and she said it is a perfect site. The gardens grew and continue to grow. Oakes said…
I walked through the garden with my Sunday morning coffee amazed and delighted to see that the fat pink buds of my Guan Yin Mian tree peony had opened. Guan Yin is the name of the Bodhisattva (or goddess) of Compassion. The term bodhisattva is not much used in the west. It means those who have chosen to remain in the world even though they have enough merit to reach nirvana. Guan Yin is almost…
Things are blooming here at End of the Road Farm. The Sargent crab in the Sunken Garden is magnificent. So are the dandelions. It is so wet we haven't been able to mow here yet. The lilacs are also in full fragrant bloom. On Saturday I worked at the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club plant sale, which includes many many divisions from our famous Bridge of Flowers. Now it is time to plants my new beds. I also got…
Lilian Jackman, owner, grower and general factotum of Wilder Hill Gardens, invited me over to see the late summer garden. I found her at her shady potting bench, situated so that she could keep working in the heat of the day. I admired the thought that went into the design and siting of the potting bench, but did not feel up to the concept of working all morning, having a little lunch and digesting time and then setting…
My Friend Elsa Though I haven’t read Dear Friend and Gardener I have my own great garden friend. When I moved to my Massachusetts hilltop, I found that one of our area’s most famous perennial gardeners, Elsa Bakalar, lived on a neighboring hilltop. She was a generation older, British, much more knowledgeable about flower gardens, and way more opinionated than I was about anything but happy to befriend a novice. She is a born teacher, and even now…