Inside George’s Garden Tour

September 11th, 2012

   You know, I’ve been to a lot of garden tours and have seen a lot of other people’s gardens, but until this past weekend, I’ve never been on the receiving end of a tour.

George yakking with tour-goers.

   My yard was one of eight stops on Saturday’s Penn-Cumberland Garden Club “September Song” tour. Despite the atrocious weather forecast, well over 100 people stopped by to ogle the yard.

   It was fun.

   It was nice spending a day yakking with so many other passionate plant people.

   But the whole thing also was pretty exhausting.

   I usually keep my yard in decent shape just because I like the whole process of snipping, staking, weeding, planting, transplanting and transplanting some more. To me, that’s play, not work. Plus I can use the exercise.

   But when you know a whole lot of people are coming to not just see your gardens but to examine them, there’s some extra pressure there. In my case, I figured people would be expecting something nice since I supposedly know what I’m doing.

   So for a couple of weeks in advance, I did some finagling I normally wouldn’t do.

   I dead-headed the roses and flowers to encourage a new round of bloom that hopefully would coincide with tour day.

   I fertilized the pots, baskets and veggies to give them a bit of second-wind energy in case they were thinking of an early fall snooze.

   And I went out and bought some things I normally don’t buy this time of year to fill in “blanks,” such as mums in bloom, mature ornamental hot peppers and a few 6-inch annuals the garden centers were still trying to get rid of.

   Actually, my wife, Sue, worked harder than I did. She was out there sweating buckets (literally) for days, cleaning up the floppy stuff, dead-heading, primping and putting down a fresh coat of mulch.

   She especially focused on “her” bed. This is a garden near the back of the yard that I generously let her have to plant as she pleases.

   Over the years, it’s become a little of this and a little of that. She was determined to not only have it looking good, but to have it looking best so I wouldn’t dare say, “Guess which garden is the only one I didn’t do?”

   I knew she was up to something when one visitor made it a point to tell me that particular garden was his favorite. (He admitted that Sue put him up to it.)

Sue's coleus horns.

   Sue also was hard at work adding all kinds of little accessories and surprises, such as a planter box of succulents hung by the front door, a wine-bottle and candle contraption hung from a dogwood and several brass horns that she scavenged at an antique shop and planted with coleus.

   You could tell whose work people were looking at by what they said as they went around.

   If they said, “Oh, isn’t that cute!” you knew they had just seen something Sue did.

   If they said, “What plant is that?” you knew I was behind it.

   I do plants. Sue does cute.

   We weren’t too sure what to expect when we said OK to Penn-Cumberland’s tour-stop request. I had read articles about how people on tours often swipe seeds, cuttings and even whole plants and sometimes decide to take their own self-guided inside-the-house tours.

   We didn’t run into any of that (that we know of). Our visitors were all very polite and appreciative. We ended up giving many of them seeds (especially from the 2-foot-long Chinese noodle bean plants) and cuttings (mainly from coleus, Persian shield and our Rex begonia vine).

   About the worst thing that happened was that my grass got smashed down in a lot of places. That’s pretty normal and happened mainly after we got a rain shower in early afternoon.

   The fact that we only got a bit of rain surprised me more than anything. If you know anything about my weather record when attempting to plan significant things outdoors, you know rain is a sure bet even when the forecast says no chance.

   In this case, the weather people were calling for a near 100-percent chance of rain for most of the day. I was about to tell the Penn-Cumberland ladies that they needed to change the name of the tour to “September Sog” instead of “September Song” and to ask them if the September song they had in mind was “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.”

   Somehow, even a little sun poked through, and the day didn’t turn out to be a washout after all.

   As for reactions, one thing I heard a lot was that people were surprised how many things could be in bloom at this time of year. My “trick” is to plant so many varieties of stuff that you can’t help but having something flowering just about any time of the season.

   Our metallic purple Persian shield plants caught a lot of eyes, and so did the size of my ‘Incrediball’ hydrangea blooms (basketball size) and the dark, lacy foliage of my two ‘Black Lace’ elderberry shrubs.

Curly ivy... what's the big deal?

   The surprise people’s pick, though, was curly ivy. We’ve got a patch of this shade groundcover with the unusual leaves that curl up around the edges. The new growth also is a light green.

   I really don’t like it because A.) I’m not an ivy fan to start with, and B.) curly-edged leaves, to me, mean that a plant might be coming down with a virus.

   Sue, on the other hand, likes curly ivy a lot. She thinks it’s “cute.”

   I think her favorite part of the whole day was having so many people ask about that really interesting ivy – as if it vindicated her taste and proved mine obviously way off base.

   Fine by me. You all can have cute. Just stay out of my way if a new super-dwarf, variegated, reblooming, grape-purple crape myrtle hits the market…