The Checkerboard Garden

Above is my checkerboard garden. It's under a "horsey" swing – part of the jungle gym/swingset my daughter has well outgrown. When I first put it in, it was done with too-thin slate tiles that broke apart after a few years. The square pavers you see here are concrete – and thick.

At its best it was very full -- in bright sun.

I had also originally spent LOTS of money on a line of plants called Stepables - I had different Stepables in each few squares - two thymes, silver kisses, baby tears, Irish moss and different sedums. For the full list with Latin names, see here. It took about three seasons for it to fill up.

But at the same time, the tree across from it and above it grew and put this area in deep shade. Then it was a race to see which Stepable would disappear first.

Before they were all gone, I planted them in other sunnier areas of the garden and are thriving fine. Most got planted into the hypertufa pots I made last year.

The area original was just grass under the "horsey" swing.
Full sun.

So now I was left with what to plant in deep shade that gets nice and thick - and doesn't cost much. I was told vinca, mondo grass and other suggestions - but I decided on plain old everyday grass.

Yes, I've planted grass in my yard (of which my end goal is to eliminate all grass). But grass is a reliable grower, consistent in texture and color. I think it'll look great here. Plus the fact that it's under a play area grass can take much abuse. More than all those fancy Stepables.

Year one. Not to impressive.

I'll have to mow it (probably just use a weed whacker) and still have to weed it. But I can weed it by hand as opposed to using chemical weed killers – it's not that large a space.

Actually, grass has its place in a few spots in my garden. I'd be lying if I said I had a completely  grassless yard.

At the top of this post, you can see the squares with the new grass just peeking through. It's a grass mix made for deep shade. I still have a few concrete blocks I need to cut in half. With my circular saw and a blade made for cutting concrete, I get one cut per blade (it's getting expensive again). The goal is to have it done before the National Garden Festival's Open Gardens start next Thursday. At least it'll look like a project in process, as opposed to a garden of bad decisions and bad luck.

Here's how it fits into the grand scheme of the garden.
It is between the raised bed potager garden and the jungle gym, beside the driveway.

Some of the Stepables, though pretty, were impractically-moundy.

A few freeze-thaw seasons had the slate tiles disintegrating.

The Stepables are living on in the hypertufa planters I made last year. Back in the sun, they're thriving.

Heuchera, hellstrip & Harry Potter

Harry Potter Garden has a few new additions this year.

This weekend was working on the Harry Potter Garden, the hellstrip and the heuchera (coral bell) bed. Also did plant shopping, planted up most of the baskets and boxes too.

The Harry Potter garden, where we find odd plants and give them the names of the plants found in the Harry Potter books, got cleaned up, mulched and a few house plants brought out to it (a pencil plant, ponytail palm, my birthday bromeliad (thanks Carol!)) and a few others. I've moved all my black mondo grass here from other parts of the garden and planted a few new additions. You'll have to stop by during a bus tour, bike tour, Open Gardens or Garden Walk Buffalo to see it.

The huechera bed had the copper fountain moved to the front and its old spot in the back of the bed now has a bloodgood Japanese maple tree. I used to have a royal purple smoke tree in this spot, but it died a couple years ago and I've missed having something tall, in a color, in this spot. Moving the fountain to the front of the bed will make it more prominent and noticeable. have to find a piece of tubing to get the pump hooked up to the fountain though. It seems to have gotten lost in the black hole that is my garage.

The Drunken Botanist is stumbling to Buffalo...

Amy Stewart, has regaled Buffalo audiences in recent years with tales of plants that kill and bugs that alter the course of history, is coming back courtesy of Talking Leaves Books, in collaboration with Buffalo Spree magazine, and Mike A’s at Hotel Lafayette, to discuss her brilliant tips for combining plants and mixology, as presented in her new book, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World’s Great Drinks (Algonquin Books).

Mike A's @ Hotel Lafayette

We’ll meet in the lounge of Mike A’s @Hotel Lafayette at 6 pm Monday, June 17, to witness her encyclopedic knowledge of both alcoholic beverages and plants, and the space where they meet. Special cocktails will be available for purchase, as will copies of all of Amy’s books. Anyone wishing to have books autographed is expected to purchase them from Talking Leaves, as an act of respect and support for the author and the bookstore who is hosting her visit.


In The Drunken Botanist Amy explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol over the centuries.

This concoction of biology, chemistry, history, etymology, and mixology—with more than fifty drink recipes and growing tips for gardeners—will make you the most popular guest at any cocktail party.

The longest press release in garden tourism history...

One of the gardens that is on both a weekend garden tour and Open Gardens on Thursdays and Fridays.

Just released by Visit Buffalo Niagara, our local visitor's bureau, on the events taking place this summer for the National Garden Festival:

NATIONAL GARDEN FESTIVAL RUNS JUNE 21 TO AUG. 4
Buffalo’s fourth annual festival features 15 garden walks (including America’s largest),
workshops, open gardens, a Buffalo-Style Garden Art Sale and more

BUFFALO, N.Y. – May 20, 2013 – The fourth annual National Garden Festival will take place from June 21 to Aug. 4 in Buffalo, N.Y. and it is, by far, the largest garden festival in America.

The six-week-long festival offers something for anyone with (or without) a green thumb:
15 garden walks and tours throughout the Buffalo Niagara region, totaling nearly 1,000 private gardens. The most popular of the tours is Garden Walk Buffalo – the largest free garden walk in the country, with more than 350 private gardens on view – on July 27 and 28.

Hellstrip progress

       

There is progress on the hellstrip! I dug up, added compost, planted divisions, and then added black mulch to a curvy shape within the hell strip. 

The eventual plan is to add some large pavers or bricks along the road side, for people to get in and out of their cars without having to step into the garden. I'd also like to add a "pad" of pavers to the area where I have to put my garbage cans for garbage day. I'd also like to add a row of lavender alongside the sidewalk to match the lavender on the other side that is there already. I planted many grasses of varying heights from divisions. I'd like to plant some other tall, "wispy" plants - salvias, Russian sage, and the like.

Garden tour by GObike Buffalo

Looking for a great way to see gardens? Sign up for the National Garden Festival's City Garden Tour by Bicycle! Coordinated by the people that know bike touring, GObike Buffalo, we'll start off in Delaware park and see many city gardens with a stop for lunch (box lunch included in tour cost) served in a community garden. It's only 3 hours and you'll also get a good view of what Buffalo is doing to make our streets more friendly to bicycles -- new bike paths, bike lanes, "sharrows" (street markings reminding card rivers that they're sharing the road), bike parking and more.

It's also going on at the same weekend the Ride for Roswell is happening. This should have all of Buffalo out riding bikes, with one of local bike enthusiasts' busiest weekends.

Sunday, June 23, 10am-1 pm, $30 includes lunch!

I don't know what gardens we'll be hitting up, but it should be fun. Find out more and register here.

Is it perverse to paint a plant?

 

Who sees a plant and says, "Oooh, I must paint that!"? While out scouring what's in store a the garden stores this early in the season, I came across these poor painted plants. I mean, if someone asked me if I wanted to paint plants, I'd break out some acrylics and stretch a canvas. Some person has the responsibility of hand painting or airbrushing paint onto these succulents. 

I cannot imagine a plant is at its best when it can't do its photosynthesis thing. Isn't this suffocating them?

Didn't nature make them perfectly beautiful and functional to begin with? Didn't it take tens of thousands of years of adapting to get to where they are today? If bright colors were good for them, wouldn't they have evolved that way?

I wanted to buy them all and take them home and give them a good scrubbing and then set them free.

But I held back. I didn't want anyone to see me buying painted plants. I do have a reputation to uphold.

Favorite garden channels

One garden feature I've added is a couple "channels" around a brick paver patio where I've removed a course of bricks and planted stuff in the channel it creates. Above I did last year. I took the bricks out and added a row of violets which were in another part of the garden and getting invasive. That's another benefit of planting in a small confined space like this -- no unmanageable spreading. The blue violets happen to go well with the blue-ish outdoor carpet. The flowers won't last long, but the bushty green leaves soften the patio edges quite nicely.

Another channel I've been watching is the one around my raised-bed vegetable potager. It is planted with strawberries. I think the variety of strawberries I have here are kinda' big for the space. They're sort of hard to see in this photo below, but they're more sparse, than bushy, like the violets and don't "mound" as nicely. They are directly beneath a knee-high dwarf apple tree espalier that I'm training to become a living "fence" around the potager garden - an idea I stole from Monet's garden in Giverny.

What a difference a week makes

The spring garden's been busy!

Buffalo's Japanese Garden cherry trees in bloom

Took a walk with my daughter over to the Delaware Park Japanese Garden here in Buffalo on Tuesday. Caught the evening light on the forest of cherry trees at the height of their bloom. It was stunning. The Japanese Garden sits on Mirror Lake in Delaware Park behind the Buffalo History Museum (the only building built permanent from the 1901 Pan American Exhibition where President McKinley was assassinated). Delaware Park itself was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in NYC, Boston's Emerald Necklace and Washington DC's U.S. Capitol Grounds, among others.

The Japanese Garden has cherry trees that come from the trees in Washington, DC, which were a gift in 1912 from the people of Japan. The Buffalo trees are still young --  the oldest tree is only about 10 years old. In 2012, 20 more were planted to match the 20 that were already there.

The Garden is a popular spot for wedding pictures. We had our wedding party pictures taken here. The Japanese Garden is also a stop on Garden Walk Buffalo -- complete with docents -- each year.

The Japanese garden itself was a gesture of friendship from Buffalo's sister city, Kanazawa Japan. The garden was modeled on Kenrokuen Garden in Kanazawa, one of the most famous gardens in Japan. The garden was conceived in 1970, construction started in 1971 and it was completed in 1974. the original design contained over 1,000 plantings, nearly 20 globe-type lights, three small islands connected to the mainland by bridges.

Six Buffalo gardens in national magazine (again)

The "Little Red House" on Bryant Street.

Six gardens from Garden Walk Buffalo are featured in the nationally-distributed, June 2013 issue of Backyard Solutions magazine, published byHarris Publications of New York City.

Editor Barbara Ballinger has been a great advocate for Garden Walk Buffalo after having attended the Walk in 2011. She has published dozens of Buffalo's in the magazine in the past. The gardens in this year's issue are:

• The Costa Schroeder garden at 322 Bryant Street
• The Jungels garden at 745 West Delavan Avenue
• 125 Windsor Street
• The Gamin James Garden at 42 Orton Place
• The Fink Garden at 24 Park Street
• The Halloran Garden at 279 Richmond

All the photos were graciously provided by Don Zinteck, of Photographics 2.
The magazine can be purchased wherever garden magazines can be found this time of year. I bought mine at Walgreens on Delaware Avenue. Generally they can be found in bookstores, Home Depot and Lowes.

Spring's a buddin'!

Spring's a buddin'! Finally. I did a walk about with the camera in hand yesterday throughout my entire spread (about 30x120 feet).

Garden Walk Buffalo in New York Times

The New York Times publishes a list of great home & garden tours that will take place over the summer each spring. Last year, as good as the list was -- they hadn't listed Garden Walk Buffalo.

That's not the end of the world, we still get 60,000+ visitors and get plenty of publicity. But I found it hard to believe that a garden writer would sit down to list garden tours throughout the country and miss the largest one in the U.S., covered in national gardening magazines -- and in their own state!

This year Garden Walk Buffalo is on the list - in the "North of New York City" portion of the list. We'll take what we can get.

You can visit the New York Times list here. It's a good list. Make sure you visit the slide show. The above Buffalo garden is on the list of great homes and gardens. Photo is by Don Zinteck, of Photographics 2. This is one of the more popular gardens on our tour. It's a tour de force!

Buffalo area garden in Garden Gate magazine

This great Buffalo area garden takes up a double page spread in this month's Garden Gate magazine. Of course, this is Garden Gate, so they don't identify where the house is, or who the gardeners are -- or even the zone the garden is in! Rest assured it's a beautiful garden. It is the Coyne DiNezza garden.

It has been featured in the pages of Garden Gate before, with comments from the garden owners -- and even made the cover! Here it is chosen to illustrate the article about choosing shrubs for front yard gardens. The symmetry of the garden above is amazing! It's a great home and I love the unique "rolled-edged" roof.

Huffington Post has a garden section

Has anyone seen this yet? It's pretty hidden within Huffington Post. you really have to go looking for it to find it. It seems as though Huffington post is in the process of merging their content with the content of AOL owned "magazine-style" websites.

If you go to Huffington Post's Home Page, click on "All Sections" in the menu bar, then click on "Home." Then, under the menu bar, there will be a list of feature sections - "Gardening" is about halfway down the list. Or, just visit here.

Grab a shovel and plant some shit

I'm not a big vegetable garden guy. I have one, but it's not designed for real production -- mostly to supply early-season lettuce end-of-season tomatoes for BLTs, but THIS guy, Ron Finley, speaks my language. Where he produces food, we in Buffalo produce tourists.

A garden, whether vegetable or flower, can transform a property through beautification and owner pride. It does the same to a street, block, a neighborhood, and a city. Ron just happens to be helping humanity as he does it. And he gets strawberries.

Grab a shovel and plant some shit.

The Dole Plantation, Wahiawa, Hawaii

On our recent trip to Hawaii, we took time out to visit the Dole Plantation. It's a Dole-centric manufactured tourist destination like you would expect -- shops, restaurants, gardens, a maze, and a small train ride (The Pineapple Express!) through the pineapple fields. The plantation is the actual site of Mr. Dole's first roadside fruit stand.

The gardens were nice - with areas featuring bromeliads, hibiscus, ti leaf plants, leis, natives and more. The gardens were not extensive, but a nice walk through. Took about a half hour. There are audio wands for those who want more in-depth on the history and traditions of the locals.

The miniature train ride was nice in that we actually got out into the fields (while being in the shade) and a prerecorded track explained the beginnings of Dole, a bit about the agriculture and history of the area and a fair amount about pineapples themselves. Did you know that pineapples are not native to Hawaii? The two-mile tour is slow paced and if you have young ones, they might enjoy it. I think they could use a Pineapple Express Rock n' Roll Roller Coaster/Splash Ride-- a little bit tour and a few upside down loop-di-loops for fun. But I assume they know their demographic better than I do.

The lush doorways of Sayulita Mexico

 

Spent last week in Sayulita, Mexico, about an hour north of Puerto Vallarta on Mexico's Pacific coast. This was our third trip there to visit friends that have built a home on the step hills just blocks from the town's center (last few photos).

Didn't get garden tours this year -- the start of the dry season. But what they think of as dry, we still think of as lush, being April in Buffalo where we're excited just to see a little green poking up from the ground.

The doorways of some of the homes are more lushly planted than some of our gardens. These show how welcoming Mexican homes can be.

The first award of the week

 

It's been so hectic the last few weeks I've had little time to reflect on an award I won last Friday night–the Ad Club of Buffalo's David I. Levy Award to recognize outstanding achievement and service in the communications industry. It goes to an individual that has amassed a distinguished record of achievement over an extended period of time, which includes contributions to his/her company, the industry and the community.

Back when I was president of this organization's previous incarnation, and helping to run the award show, I used to think this was the award for the establishment suits–the old folks that were influencers and stalwarts in the advertising and publishing industries -- ad agency founders, publishers, media executives. Either I've become one of those, or broke the mold, not sure which.

National Garden Festival wins International Garden Tourism Award

The National Garden Festival, an organization I helped to co-found, has won the International Garden Tourism Promotion of the Year at the Garden Tourism Conference, held in Toronto, Canada on March 19, 2013.

Sally Cunningham, director of the National Garden Festival (beautiful in blue); Ed Healy, VP of Marketing for Visit Buffalo Niagara (in the nice tie, above); and myself (with all the gray, above) accepted the award on behalf of the Festival's organizers and volunteers.

Cited as the reason the National Garden Festival was singled out for this award, Michel Gauthier, chair of the Garden Tourism Conference, declared, "The six-week long garden promotion is an outstanding demonstration of what can happen when you bring together all the garden energy of a community with the tourism energy of the same community. This unique promotion has put Buffalo on the map like no other promotion. The National Garden Festival intends to build upon the very real excitement, publicity, and visibility created by Garden Walk Buffalo, "America's best event of its kind." This multi week festival expands the opportunities for garden tourists to visit Buffalo beyond Garden Walk weekend and builds on America's growing obsession with all things green. Congratulations!"