Other Gardens

April 12th, 2011

   If I had enough money and liked New Jersey, I know where I’d be retiring.

The water garden off the main lobby at Medford Leas.

   Medford Leas.

   I just got back from doing a couple of gardening talks there through Elderhostel’s Road Scholar program, and despite the rain (surprise, surprise), the landscaping was magnificent.

   Medford Leas is a huge, upscale retirement village in Burlington County, N.J. One of the “fringe benefits” is living within the Lewis Barton Arboretum, which includes specimen trees, wooded walking trails, cutting-edge shrubs, vegetable plots and a water garden off the main lobby.

   What’s most amazing is that the resident buildings are arranged in ovals with courtyard gardens in the middle of every cluster. That’s 37 gardens, and they’re all different and all filled with interesting plant choices – not your basic yews, azaleas and forsythia.

   Thanks to covered walkways and roof overhangs, you can walk through this whole network of gardens without getting rained on. That’s a big plus to me since I have a knack for getting rained on every time I try to visit a garden.

   The gardens and the whole arboretum are open to the public. Here’s a link to it if you want to see more: www.medfordleas.org/arboretum.htm.

   Visiting public gardens is a great way to learn plants and get ideas for your own gardens.

   This Saturday is the first outdoor trip my wife, Sue, and I are leading this year through the annual series we do with Lowee’s Group Tours. We’re heading to Winchester, Va., to see that city’s garden tour, which is part of Virginia Garden Week (http://www.vagardenweek.org/). We’re also stopping by the State Arboretum of Virginia (great boxwood collection) and the Colonial gardens at Historic Long Branch.

   On May 27, we’re heading to Richmond, Va., to see one of my top-10 favorite public gardens of all time: Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. I love the conservatory, the rose garden, the kiddie gardening village and the Japanese garden. We’ll see the city’s nicely landscaped Maymont Park that morning.

   If you’re after ideas, you really need to get to Buffalo for this year’s Garden Walk Buffalo – the nation’s biggest walking garden tour in which 350+ homeowners open their gardens for all to see. It’s a two-day affair, and we’re taking a busload up July 30-31 and also cramming in visits to the annual flower trials at the Erie Basin Marina, the Buffalo Rose Garden and Buffalo’s Japanese Garden.

   I also just posted about 30 pictures Sue and I took at last summer’s Garden Walk Buffalo to give you a feel. Click here to see them.

   We’ll also be going behind the scenes at Longwood Gardens on Aug. 12; visiting three public gardens in New Jersey on Sept. 16 (New Jersey Botanical Garden, Frelinghuysen Arboretum and the trial gardens at Rutgers University); seeing the superb Philly-area Meadowbrook and Chanticleer gardens in their fall glory on Oct. 21, and then doing a “Conservatories for Christmas” tour on Dec. 9 of the U.S. Botanic Garden, Brookside Gardens and Baltimore’s Rawlings Conservatory.

   More details and prices are on my Talks and Trips page.

   Extra bonus this year: We’re giving away five $25 gift cards to Stauffer’s of Kissel Hill (http://www.skh.com/) on every trip.

   To sign up for the trips, call Lowee’s at 717-657-9658 or toll-free 1-888-345-6933 or email CKelly@Lowees.com.

   Sue and I are heading back to Ireland in June to lead another tour group through Harrigan Holidays, but registration is closed on that one. Sorry. We’re thinking about doing a Scotland garden trip so stay tuned for that.

Words spelled out in bulbs at the 2002 Floriade.

   The biggie for next year is a trip to the Netherlands to see the Floriade, a huge flower show held only once every 10 years. Besides the Dutch planting bulbs like there’s no tomorrow, a couple of dozen countries build exhibits to make it a kind of Olympics of gardening.

   Lowee’s just started accepting registrations for that trip. It’s to go April 18-29, 2012, and also will include visits to the Keukenhof gardens, a real working bulb farm, the gargantuan Aalsmeer Flower Market, botanic gardens in Amsterdam and Leiden, a tour of Amsterdam canal-house gardens, the Versailles-like formal gardens at Paleis Het Loo and non-gardening cool stuff like the Zaanse Schans living-history village, the Madurodam Netherlands-in-miniature village, the Rijksmuseum with its priceless Dutch Masters paintings, the Anne Frank House, an Amsterdam canal cruise, the Kroller-Muller Museum, a stop at the Delft Pottery Factory and plenty more.

   I saw the last Floriade in 2002 and couldn’t believe what can be done with bulbs if you plant a gazillion of them. I can’t wait to see what’s in store this time around.

   Lowee’s has all the details at 717-657-9658 or 1-888-345-6933.