Planting Every Last Inch

August 2nd, 2016

They dig up their entire front lawns, and turn them into perennial gardens.

Here’s the gorgeous outdoor living room built by Joe Hopkins and Scott Dunlop in Buffalo.

They fill their postage-stamp back yards with vine-covered arbors, espaliered trees and pots full of annuals and tropicals.

And when every last inch of ground space is gone, they hang flower baskets from their fences, mount wooden boxes full of basil on their kitchen walls, and even plant whole vegetable gardens on their garage roofs.

This is the city of gardening-gone-mad called Buffalo, N.Y. Nowhere else have I seen so many rabid gardeners make better use of space than there, specifically in the six neighborhoods of the city that put on the annual Garden Walk Buffalo.

Garden Walk Buffalo has grown to become America’s biggest garden tour since it began 22 years ago. This year’s Walk just happened over the weekend. If you want to see some of the gardens, I just posted a Photo Gallery from the bus trip I led there.

More than 400 gardeners (yes, 400+!!!) open their gardens for the world to see the last weekend of every July.

There’s no charge either. You just show up and start looking at gardens for six hours during each of two days.

Since there is no judging and no guidelines that gardeners have to meet to be on the tour (other than they can’t sell anything), you’ll see some fairly ordinary places. But you’ll also see plenty of no-lawn places that are packed with wall-to-wall living color – head to toe.

Most of the homes are on small city lots, some with back yards no bigger than a typical kitchen.

This forces the residents to be very resourceful in how they use their precious little outdoor living space.

And that they are, coming up with their own style that’s a blend of creativity, thrift and quirkiness that I haven’t seen anywhere else.

It’s the best place to get ideas for your own yard – even if you have space to burn.

Check out the bright begonias and artwork that dress up this stockade fence in Carol Siracuse and Tom Palamuso’s back yard.

Buffalonians’ top specialty is how to turn fencing (the quickest way to get privacy without giving up much space) into a work of art.

Lots of gardeners have mounted small pots, flat-backed baskets and window boxes on their fences and planted them with bright flowers – especially begonias and coleus.

One couple mounted a bed frame that doubles as a vine support.

Others mount plaques or “found objects” or antiques as fence decoration – very much like how we decorate inside walls with pictures.

And a few gardeners use the trick of mounting mirrors on fences to give the illusion from the flowery reflection that the yard is bigger than it really is.

But Buffalonians carry the artsy tendency over into the yard as a whole.

My favorite place is how Joe Hopkins and Scott Dunlap turned their asphalt side and back yard on Sixteenth Street into a scene of garden center meets living room. The place bubbles with the color of 150 flower pots, blooming perennials and a Better-Homes-and-Garden sitting area – all in the space about the size of a volleyball court.

Elsewhere, you’ll see dead trees carved into elaborate sculptures, mechanical statute men made out of engine gears, and Tidy Cat kitty litter buckets that have been turned into a garden of self-watering containers.

One of Buffalo’s best-known garden focal points — the bowling-ball totem pole.

Probably the best known example of Buffalo garden art is the bowling ball totem pole that Mitch Flynn and Ellen Goldstein built as a focal point for their Highland Avenue back yard. They mounted a 10-foot pole, stacked real bowling balls up it by drilling holes through each, then topped the whole thing with a fan of bowling pins. It sounds crazy, but it actually looks right at home in the back corner of this flower-filled yard.

Features like that make gardening fun and also make great fun for visiting gardeners, who get to see what fellow gardeners are up to (and maybe also validate their own crazy experiments).

The bus load I took to see this past weekend’s Walk certainly enjoyed themselves and came away with lots of ideas, not to mention a few threats to “bulldoze my yard and start over again.”

Two of our ladies even got free bowling balls after talking to a gardener who had scavenged them on trash day. They’re going to end up as accents in a children’s garden.

Come to think of it, I’ll bet trash day in Buffalo isn’t just the time to get rid of stuff. For some, it’s probably component-hunting time for next year’s garden art.

If you’ve never seen Garden Walk Buffalo, Lowee’s Group Tours and I probably will do another 3-day bus trip in 2018. But if you want to go next summer, the dates are July 29-30, 2017.