Garden Visits

In my part of the world, July and early August are prime time for visiting gardens. In the past three weeks, I have experienced three garden visits.

The first came in the third week of July when my garden club visited a garden by a lake in rural Maine, a garden known for its collection of daylilies, one of my favorite flowers. It was a rainy late afternoon, which made photographing the garden more challenging, but I thoroughly enjoyed seeing some daylily varieties I grow in a different setting and being introduced to some new varieties. And the garden was also full of non-daylily beauties. I particularly liked this combination of black-eyed susans, beebalm and phlox growing on a sunny corner (left) and the tranquility of this shady glen (right).

My second garden visit came at the end of July when I was visiting my brother and sister-in-law in Rhode Island, and my sister-in-law and I took an outing to the Roger Williams Park Botanical Center in Providence. The combination of glass conservatories and outdoor “Seasonal Gardens” gave us a chance to learn about tropical plants we could never grow (e.g., seeing for the first time what dates look like when they are still on the date palm!) and also consider new plants for our own gardens. We were both smitten by a Chinese pine tree with beautiful exfoliating bark in the winter garden, and my sister-in-law left the summer garden thinking about where she could add Joe Pye Weed and ‘Lavender Mist’ tall meadow rue to her garden.

My third garden visit happened at the end of the first week in August, this time in the form of people visiting my garden. The visitors were three women from another part of Maine, about an hour away from my home. After a series of e-mail communications and phone calls with one of them about the possibility of my speaking to her garden club, she asked whether she and some friends could come to visit my garden.

Although I enjoy sharing my garden with others, formal garden visits, especially by strangers, generate a certain level of anxiety. Suppose they are disappointed? Mine is not a manicured garden by any means; will they go away feeling as though I should have made more of an effort to weed and neaten things up before the visit? How much should I warn them ahead of time that this year’s resident woodchuck has been devouring many of the flowers that would normally be in bloom right about now (e.g., phlox, purple coneflower, liatris)? Suppose I get up on the morning of the planned visit to find that the woodchuck or deer have eaten much of what was left? On the day before the planned visit, when one of my late-blooming daylilies, Hemerocallis ‘Autumn Minaret,’ opened fourteen flowers on one day, I added a new worry – that few of the remaining daylily buds would open on the appointed day.

In the end, my worrying was pointless and unnecessary. About thirty different varieties of daylilies had flowers open on the day of the visit, and there were also plenty of other blooms to accompany them. If my visitors were disappointed, they did not show it. They were appreciative of the garden and the work that has gone into it; they encountered some plants that they weren’t familiar with (e.g., spotted beebalm, Monarda punctata); and they noted the number and variety of pollinators busy at work. They were, in fact, the best kind of garden visitors – committed gardeners themselves and generous in understanding a garden as a complex community of plants interacting with one another and with the environment.