not really all that very secret gardens

Fields of November
Today Lake Forest Park Commons hosted its annual Garden Fair, and what with me, liking plants and stuff, that's just solarbird-bait.

The fair wasn't bad. Not the largest thing in the world, of course, but it filled the lower floor of the shops pretty well, and listening to Ciscoe Morris do his radio show live revealed something kind of neat: when he's talking to somebody coming up and asking a question on the air, he's talking to them, not to the audience in lieu of them. His voice gets louder, but he's not doing the radio host staging thing. It's pretty much the same as when he's talking to people off the air, which is not all that typical in radio. He does get louder, though, projecting more for the microphone.

Oh, and firni: Furney's Nursery. Muah!

Someone - a local realtor, I think - also gave me some free seeds that, according to the package, should have been planted already this spring. Since they're for an ornamental, I'll keep them for next year and try again. I can't completely blame them, since it has a "sell by" date of August 2006, but the instructions note required planting indoors, eight weeks (!) before first frost.

Regardless, I didn't buy anything, partly because I wasn't seeing a lot of shade plants I wanted, but partly because I decided to go on the garden tour, which had an admissions fee. (The proceeds go to charity of some sort, but it was cheap enough that I didn't care.) I wasn't sure at first about whether I'd go, because it isn't particularly set up as a walking tour; they try to "group" it so car-loving suburbianites will drive to clusters of gardens. This year, there were three "clusters," one of a single garden, one of two, and one of cluster of three, which wasn't really that much of a cluster, but whatever. But I looked at it and poked around at the map, guessing at the milage, and decided I'd do it anyway.

The funny thing is that despite being, as far as I can tell, the only person doing this as a walking tour, I kept meeting up with the same people at the same gardens in the same order. And that's funny.

Today's miles: 5.8 (all walking; 1.2 to the shops, 4.1 on the tour; .5 in Woodinville)
Miles out of Hobbiton: 902.8
Miles out of Rivendell: 443
Miles to Lothlórien: 23.4

One of the gardens was a separate two-mile-total hike out of the way, down Ballinger Way, so I didn't even try to get to that one. I also made a little side detour to a landscaper's house which was near one of the official tour stops; they were also having an open house/garden tour, taking advantage of the stop a couple of blocks away, and were selling plants and garden art ornaments they make and/or sell, I'm not sure which. They had a nice gate marker made of cast glass and iron with a three-blossom design that they inexplicably call a "garden stake." I'd rather like one, it was pretty. I refer to this as "Garden nr. 0," and visited before any of the listed below; the only note I took from it was the stake, and that it's there. Apparently their plant prices are low.

Here are my notes for the official stops on the tour:

Garden nr. 6 (first visited): Julia Phelps Ceanothus is an interesting shrub - the one I saw was about 6' tall - which has leaves that look like they've been photographed and run through Photoshop's "unsharp mask" filter too many times. This is a strange effect. The same garden used tube lights to mark the edges of paths at the tops of retaining walls at night, which I thought showed a bit of cleverness, and had something called Sea Holly, which I thought was pretty and spiky and may plant at some point.

Garden nr. 4 (second visited): Old fireplace irons, slightly buried, used at plant framers to good effect. Ornamental clovers are wonderful, I must remember to use them. Pairs of salvaged window sashes hinged at the top (and capped with metal across the hinge, to delay rain damage) make useful small shelters, and adding large-gap wire mesh turns it into a climbing frame. Owner painted a non-movable cement post in the ground BRIGHT YELLOW and turned it into a colour accent.

Garden nr. 5 (third visited): Best architecturally of the entire series; terrific use of (relatively) limited space through scaling and attention to detail. Artist gardener/homeowner used bright/swirly bowling balls as garden globe ornaments, amusing and effective. A tiny storage shed was turned into a mini tearoom house; features: dutch door, three salvage window sashes, four candle lanterns hanging from ceiling - would that be enough to keep it warm in the spring and fall? A candle puts out more heat than you might think and if the room is tiny enough (as this one was, at maybe 6' by maybe 4') it might do. Inside, a small table and pair of chairs. Vinyl wallpaper on the inner walls between the 2x4 posts, applied directly to the sheathing. She'd added a bunch of windowsill shelves and other small places to put knickknacks all over the place. Also used to store a bike. Mosaicwork can be good, as demonstrated by her birdbaths. Allium Schubertii (an ornamental onion) looks like a dandelion in puffball stage, only instead of an inch in diametre, it's more like 10" or so, and instead of white, it's purple. Dead rhodies, trimmed back to core branches, make good features and frames for new climbers which can repopulate the bones.

Garden nr. 2 (fourth visited): Original 1920 house and 2.3 acre estate garden, some roses appear to my eye to be as old as the house - the current owners don't know, the rose garden was there when they moved in. Blueberries and raspberries make a fun compact orchard. They also had apples and pears. Koi selection very good in their rather lavish water feature. Good use of secluded "rooms" formed simply via overhanging-foliage trees and bamboo. Rose garden varied and attractive; a lot of red wine-scented roses, I think there's a whole family of wine roses? I'm not sure, but more than one of these smelled like a sweet red wine. Owner had never noticed but concurred; it's strange to me that so many people who have roses don't care about their scents. One of the roses was the same variety as one of the older Murkworks South roses, which made me smile. It also had a burl of remarkable size; it's been there a while. Good use of delphinium in the borders.

Garden nr. 3 (fifth and final visited): I'd walked by this house before, and noticed the newest part of their garden, which is an attempt to do an overtly Japanese garden; some of it was hit and some of it was miss, but a section with a dry stream bed made from blue rock winding down a small hill section and going to a crack in an old cement wall to the neighbour's yard (so it appeared to be going through the crack) beyond with was the neighbour's old water feature, still in place - genius. Clever use of a screens, and an adorable panda sculpture. In another part of the yard, an awfully nicely scented rose - I smelled it from halfway across the yard - but they didn't know what kind it was either.

And that's it for my notes. I enjoyed it the tour; I'd recommend it next year if you like gardening - the gardens change every year, but I've got no reason to think this year was atypically good. I also recommend walking it instead of hopping around in cars, if the chosen houses are even semi-clustered again; I'm not even sure the cars save you all that much time, given that I was seeing a lot of the same people multiple stops in a row. But I imagine if I'd been going back to the shops after, or picking up plants, I'd have liked to have had it.