Search This Blog

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Stonecrop - An Overview

This past Tuesday I went on a trip with my garden club to Stonecrop gardens in Cold Spring, New York. My friend Kim and I have been waiting for this trip for years now so we were really excited to finally be on our way.

Today I just have time to share some landscape shots and give a quick overview.

My favorite part of the garden was the flower and vegetable garden area and this opening photo is my new screen saver on my computer.

Dahlia's were used in many places to accent the various color schemes. They weren't planted in groups, instead they used individual cultivars as focal points and they were stunning.

Grasses and Boltonia swayed with the most gentle breeze. What a delightful spot to stand and listen to our charming tour guide Michael.

I didn't get a chance to look up the name of the purple flower here. We were given highly detailed maps and plant lists but I tucked them in my backpack right away so I'd be free to shoot photos.

How's this for a glorious early fall grouping?

Interspersed through out the perennials were a wealth of tender plants too. Look in the top left corner and you'll see the leaves of a Banana peaking out. One plant I noticed quite a bit and have put on my wish list is Angelica. I've grown Angelica before in my herb bed but here it was a wonderful accent in the flower gardens.

Another thing I noticed quickly was that the purple perilla was allowed to naturalize in many locations where its dark foliage was just what was needed.

A photographer who likes to take landscape shots would have a field day at this lovely garden. Every time you turned around there was a spectacular view just begging to be photographed.

This bridge was aptly named the Flintstone bridge. I was disappointed that our group wasn't led across it.

A final shot from the inside of the Wisteria Pavilion.

As soon as I have the time I'll be posting about the most well known feature of Stonecrop, the trough and stone gardens that were just amazing.

Monday, September 15, 2008

No time for gardening :-(


Just a quick update here. No time for gardening during the past week or this coming week either. It's marching band season and around here that means that just about every other project comes to a full halt.

My oldest daughter went through marching band for four years and now my younger one (Emily) is in her second year of the color guard. In order to save our school district $$$ we make our own flags. Purchased flags run $29.95 to $40 per piece, home sewn flags cost about $5 per piece. A mid sized marching band (we have 87 students) needs 80 - 100 flags.

This photo shows some of the flags I made last year, in total I sewed over 50 flags on my dining room table. So far this season we've finished 30 flags, with 45 to go. We're going the team route with me teaching lots of other mom's how to make flags. So you can see why there's no gardening around here right now!

Tomorrow I'm taking a day off to visit Stonecrop, a botanical garden known for it's Sedum collection so I'm sure I"ll have lots of photos to share when we are all stuck inside this winter.

Be back soon,

Melanie