Glorious Gardens Tour

A good garden tour stirs up a lot of feelings: admiration, wonder, joy. But envy, discontent with my own garden? I admit, a little, but I like to put it within the context of being inspired to make it better. The Glorious Gardens Tour sponsored by the Birmingham Botanical Gardens this year was everything the name implied. The weather was perfect, not too hot, and the tour offered something for gardeners of all tastes. 

The garden tour left me with three main impressions:

1. Stone walls. I want some stone walls! Enclosure creates intimate spaces that make a garden feel comfortable. A large property like mine needs enclosure to prevent the garden from having a feeling of endless sprawl. Yes, I know greenery can be used also, but I love the strength and low maintenance of stone walls.

2. Mushrooms. Cement or cast stone ones. Giant fungi tucked among flowers and woodland plants. 

3. Chickens! All of a sudden I am seeing chickens everywhere. Not long ago a friend suggested I raise chickens. I thought it was a joke and relayed the funny idea to my husband, who, unknown to me, has fond memories from childhood of relatives who raised chickens. Never underestimate the power of fond childhood memories. Are there chickens in my future? I'm not sure yet, but there were chickens at one of the tour gardens.

So those are my inspirations that came out of this year's tour, and here are some photos of these glorious gardens. I hope you enjoy them!

The Mark and Caroline Clark Garden:

The Ernest and Vivian Cory Garden:

The Jane R. and Neil Ross Garden:

The Barbara Saurer and Brad White Garden:

The Ginger and Charles Clark Garden:

Thanks for visiting my blog and taking the tour with me!

A Tour of the May Garden

June begins in a couple of hours. It will be the beginning of hurricane season and the start of summer. (I know summer doesn't officially arrive for twenty more days, but by then we will be hunkering inside our air conditioned spaces and dreaming of fall.) Today I watched the gnats swirl above the front lawn, flying up and down and around in circles. One can barely see them, but there's thousands of them and it's easy to inadvertently walk through the middle of their dance. It's not too bad unless they fly into facial orifices, and that is annoying.

Here is a quick tour of the May garden, beginning in front of the house, where Japanese maples are featured:

Hydrangeas are blooming along the hydrangea walk:

The common daylily grows in abundance near the patio. These enduring flowers are sometimes called ditch lilies. They have been growing on our property for over half a century.

The garden is permeated with the fragrance of gardenias. I have two large shrubs on opposite sides of the property, one in the woodland garden and one down from the patio. It seems that wherever I am, I can get a whiff of them.

Zantedeshia is blooming in the sunnier part of the woodland garden. I did not think it was hardy in my area, but it keeps returning, larger and with more blooms each year:

Here are more assorted May flowers:

I am still in love with my red banana plant, featured in my last post. Here is another look at its outstanding foliage:

Other plants with tropical foliage:Top: Caladium. The insect is a lightning bug. Clockwise from middle left: Stromanthe tricolor; Canna 'Tropicana'; Dracaena Massangeana, also called Corn plant; Coleus.

Dogwood  'Cherokee Sunset' and hostas 'Wedgwood Blue' and 'Sum and Substance' are also great foliage plants:

Finally, a tour of my gardens is not complete without a peek into the woodlands. The large vine is a wild muscadine:

I hope you have enjoyed the tour. Happy gardening!