On this past summer's
Open Gardens, an event of the
National Garden Festival, I spent a day visiting the gardens that were open for free touring on Thursdays and Fridays. It's a bit tough to give up a work day to go on a garden tour, but I needed to visit these gardens – some of which have been on the Open Gardens tour for years. Helping to organize the tour, mostly
by promoting it, I felt it was important to visit some of these Niagara County gardens.
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| The front garden. |
This
one, the garden of the Taylors is in Lockport, NY. You can see from just the front garden that it was going to be something special.
The
narrow side yard was very nice and led to "Taylor Falls" - a man-made
"hill" incorporating a stream and falls. It was very hard to photograph,
sorry about that. It was difficult to convey that it is very tall, sort
of wrapped around a tree, and had a walkway that led up towards the top
of it, offering many vantage points to see the stream. The stream
looked like a squirrel-sized flume ride.
The whole thing was quite the
engineering marvel. It took ten years to plan, three years to build and 22 tons of stones to complete.
The lush plantings throughout the
patio area where the falls stood was shady and quite pleasant on a hot
day. Just beyond that are was a filed with a spectacular long border of
flowers going off quite a ways into the distance.
And,
on the wish list of most gardeners, but a reality here, was a test
garden of plants that the Taylors pick up and plenty here for a season
or two to see if they take to the soil/sun combo of the property. If
they're there for a couple seasons and like it they get divided every
year and once worthy, get moved into the large border of plants
stretching along the property line. A test garden is a luxury we
small-space urban gardeners just do not have. I'm also too impatient for
that - I'd need some immediate gratification. And lots of it.
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| Leading to the back yard. |
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| Side yard. |
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| The Falls. Though admittedly, it was hard to show the scale of the man-made, stone structure. |
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| How would you like this view out your back door? |
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| The perennial border. |
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| The test garden, for experimenting. |
This is a testament not only to a beautiful garden but a fascinating insight into a way of thought I admire but couldn't achieve. I'm more of a take it home and plonk it in the ground sort of person - which is why the garden in your photos is lovely to look at and mine is not!
ReplyDeleteVery nice images of it, Jim. I too like this labor of love.
ReplyDelete