Summer 2008 was indeed the year of glory for our garden. August 12th saw the Vancouver garden club on tour; every year, one of their members goes on the Peninsula garden tour and chooses a few favourites, then requests a tour for her group a month later. It did inspire me to keep the garden in peak form.
As I always like to do on tour days, I set out some of my favourite gardening books. (I’d been pleased to see someone at the official Peninsula tour quite absorbed in Shocking Beauty by Thomas Hobbs.)
Usually I advised touring our garden from the lower to the upper level but this time we’ll go the opposite direction. The steps down to the pond level, thoroughly weeded by Allan before the big June tour, still looked perfect with just a little touch up. The gardening ladies loved the assorted plant tables in the garden like this round table sedum display halfway down that showed off the collection I’d gotten from my friend Mike of Mu.
We had all the water features burbling away: a bamboo trough waterfall outside our front door, the bamboo trough cascade behind the pond (below) and the flower pot water wheel. The best water feature of all in this garden was always the cool-smelling, peaceful spring fed natural pond.
Just a dribble of water emerging mysteriously from the native ferns drew attention to the difficult-to-weed backside of the pond that looked better than it ever had before.
For the earlier tour I’d finally achieved a completed look to the difficult area under the big spruce tree.
Through the narrow walkway on the north side of the Spruce tree among the tree-like peeling trunks of big Fuchsia magellanica, the quotation walk had survived a month of little rain and I took great satisfaction in watching the garden club ladies read every notecard.
A friend of mine christened this “the fairy path”. Perhaps I don’t want my clients to think too hard about the sentiment at right. Oh well, I can always make a living just weeding!
Always, always float some flowers in every bird bath on garden tour day.
And never pass up a partly rotten old pedestal which could be put to temporary use in the garden.
Coming out from the shade of the Spruce tree and Fuchsia walk to the sunny lower garden….This Hebe, which I’d had for years, always kept the perfect shape.
The lower sunny borders had finally come into their own in 2008 having been fluffed, raised up, and filled with lush plantings.
The path which we had widened just before the middle tour looked so inviting that the gardening ladies walked up it, back through the fuchsia/quotation walk into which it led, around the Spruce tree and down again into the lower garden. My favourite gardens always have me going around twice so this was particularly gratifying.
One tourist who stayed away this time was my neighbourhood deer. During the official tour day I had found her in the lower garden eating from my one of my favourite rose bushes (Radway Sunrise) while assorted tour goers were at the other end admiring Allan’s garden! For the smaller tour I was able to shut the lower gate because I knew the voracious deer would be lurking and waiting for any opportunity.
Looking back on summer 2008 from a new garden four years later makes me miss my pond and the satisfying feeling of an established garden. Yet one reason we moved in 2010 was that we had achieved perfection in every corner of our garden and needed something new. These photos make me realize how far my new garden is from being as tour-worthy as our old one, although if it were to be on the 2012 tour it might be of interest to see how much can be accomplished in a year and a half.
[…] July 8th, the Vancouver (Washington) garden club returned in the morning to tour mom’s garden. Early rain had us worried but had almost […]
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[…] tour day to see her favourite gardens of the year’s selection, so she had been twice to both my old garden and my mother’s […]
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[…] were her favourites on the year’s tour. This club had, in the past, been welcome guests at my old garden and my mother’s […]
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