Do you ever visit other gardeners' gardens? I don't mean just the gardens of friends. I'm talking about the amazing horticultural displays privately owned but open to the public through the Garden Conservancy, an organization dedicated to restoring and preserving private and public gardens.
Each year the Garden Conservancy publishes a trade paperback listing the private gardens that can be visited during "Open Days". The book is organized by both dates and locations, and has grown from merely New England gardens to cover almost the entire country, including Hawaii. It gives a brief description of each garden and clear directions as to how to find it.
I've visited various gardens on the Conservancy list over the past five years. It's a wonderful way to see unfamiliar plants in bloom and get great ideas for your own garden. The biggest drawback - well, no, not a drawback really, just a frustration - is that almost all the gardens are maintained by well paid full-time gardeners, so a great many of the landscaping ideas are far beyond the reach of folks with a modest income.
The flower bed in the photo above is over ten feet wide! Isn't it gorgeous? This past month I visited four different private gardens. I drooled over the vast stretches of velvet, weed-free lawns, the immaculate perennial beds with their soaker hoses well hidden by a thick layer of mulch, the 100-year-old specimen trees, a wisteria vine dangling its lavender blooms from a second story porch, and of course the vista views of distant hills, grazing horses or winding rivers that enhanced the landscape.
Unpaid, do-it-yourself gardeners may not be able to duplicate such magnificent gardens, but it's still fun to visit them. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and saw many plants "in the flesh" that I'd previously only seen in catalogs and garden books.
Nothing beats a stone wall as a background for a perennial border, and the first property I went to see had a wall to die for. Don't you agree? Such enormous stones, it hardly mattered what flowers were placed in front of them, so long as they didn't detract from the wall itself. The owner had planted a tasteful collection of perennials that included foxgloves and peonies, daisies and day lilies, phlox and hollyhocks, artemisia and asters.
This hillside property overlooked a large meadow and was terraced to accommodate other flower beds. And since a picture's worth a thousand words, here are two more photos - a view of the gardens beside the house and one of the small stream that trickled down to a pool.
My memory is not what it used to be and my note-taking a little scatter-brained, but I remember well the next property I visited. It was where I saw a most unusual display of clematis vines. These were not just the standard varieties. Along with the large-flowered species such as the white Henri and the purple Jackmanii, there were several bell-shaped varieties, children of the Integrifolia species. I couldn't find any of them in my garden catalogs, and finally looked up the Clematis Society on the Internet and got a good picture of one of them, C.roogushi.
According to what I read, these beautiful bells have been around for years, but do not climb well. Although they're not as big and showy as the large-flowered types, they provide a lovely contrast. One that is particularly beautiful is C. alionushka which has soft pink bells. You can find nurseries on the Internet that carry these varieties.
Beyond the display of clematis vines were
flower beds and vast stretches of lawn scattered
with tall, shapely trees - birches, beeches, old
apple trees. I was stunned to suddenly catch
sight of a tree near the house that displayed a
huge red and yellow flower, only to discover it
was the owner's pet Mccaw, strutting up and
down on a branch.
Remember the days when every pool was aqua blue? Thank heavens folks woke up to the fact that here in New England pools should be dark blue or even black. All but one property I visited had a pool, cool and deep blue, none sporting that artificial looking Caribbean color. My friend Angie and I had our picnic lunch in the shade beside just such a pool at the second property we visited, fanned by a constant breeze.
There are many more "Open Days" this summer - gardens you can visit all over New England. If you'd like to order the directory ($15.95), write to the Garden Conservancy, Box 219, Cold Spring, NY 10516.
