Beautiful Buffalo

If you read virtually any gardening blogs at all, you probably already know that this past weekend some 70 of us were in Buffalo having the time of our lives. Given the already wall-to-wall coverage, I'll just add a few of my favorite photos, a HUGE thank you to our incredible hosts and organizers Jim and Elizabeth for putting together a practically perfect few days.

Working together

The beds infront of my house are in their second year, and things are starting to come together. I'm particularly fond of this section at the moment:

Here we have my beloved cardoons, fronted with the stunning Allium christophii mixed with bronze fennel. (It suddenly strikes me that this is edible landscaping... not that I could bear to cut and eat any of it, but still. All three are vegetables.)
Believe it or not, when I started planting here last spring, I was planning all hot colors -- red, oranges and yellows accented with purple foliage and a bit of blue. But somehow I started planting silver foliage (because I can't resist cardoons), and I don't like yellow tones with silver, so all the orange and yellows got ripped out. Then I started planting purples and blues, and... I'm liking it. A lot. It will be interesting to see the look evolve as the summer goes on and my Salvia 'Black and Blue' (from tubers I saved from last year) and Crocosmia 'Lucifer' come into flower.

Brunnera beauty

Just because it is spring, and I love brunnera.

Yum...

Lawn alternative of the day

I love this hell-strip planting on street with otherwise completely uninteresting front lawns. It is simply masses of violets (why do some people call them weeds?) and a small creeping sedum (of unknown identity -- anyone care to take a stab at IDing it?).

Here is a close up:

I love it -- simple, zero maintenance, and looks terrific.

Living room Garden

My friend Virginia sent me photos the other day of a planting we did two years ago at the Ohio State Learning Gardens. When we were both students, we worked in the gardens together, and started a tradition of whimsical, furniture-based plantings.

This is what we did for 2008:

Coleus on the couch watching TV next to the Canna Grandfather clock

Begonia end table and more of the couch

Virginia herself, relaxing on the sedum-ajuga rug next to the thyme chair.

Last year we were both too busy to do a planting, but we're getting ready to do one for this year come May!

Photos of ideas 2: Rainlilies

This is a picture of yard of a house I walked past in Shikoku, Japan while visiting my friend Reiko's family:

Like so many Japanese gardens, this one is full of graceful, understated beauty. The rain lilies (Zephyranthes) dotted randomly in the grass, the simple stepping stones... I love it. This photo inspires me to rethink my "lawn" areas. I've never been a big lawn person, but this is the sort of lawn I do like -- simple green background to randomly dot flowers in. But how do you do that practically? What about mowing? I'm not sure how they manage it in this yard, but I'm trying to make a space for this sort of look by replacing part of my grass with moss. I'm also considering replacing my grass in sunnier areas with a dwarf blue grass, or maybe short "no mow" fine fescue both from High Country Gardens. Without the need for mowing, I could mix all sorts of bulbs and small perennials into my lawn...

Photos of ideas

A lot of the pictures I take are of ideas: Bits of design, combinations of plants -- cool stuff I want to remember to play with in my own garden. And half the time I never go back to those pictures and actually DO anything with them. Blogging projects are always a good way to make me actually do something I've long been thinking about, so I'm going to do a series of posts with photos that represent some cool gardening idea to me.

 To start off: This image I took in the summer of 2005 when I was working as an intern at a nursery in Saitama, Japan.

 (Do click on the image to view it full size -- it is better that way)
This garden is in front of a small, neighborhood shrine, and perfectly creates the quiet, restful, sacred atmosphere appropriate for this space. If I was gardening this space, I think I would be tempted to throw in variegated foliage, or a few slashes or flowers -- but the restrained colors really work, and play up the gorgeous contrasts in texture. And the stone trough it just about perfect -- again, simple, but not boring. Just enough decoration, the color nicely matching the stones set around it. As you can only sort of see in this picture, it is filled with still water, which I love. No trickling waterfall or fountain -- just placid water.

Best of all, like so many Japanese gardens, this one is tiny, and so could easily translate to the smallest yard. I want to create a small, peaceful, sacred nook like this in my garden. I just need to figure out where.

Rice art and cultivar lust.

Have you see these amazing images created in Inakadate, Japan, by planting different colored leaf rice varieties in exacting patterns?

Photo from Pink tentacle (Do go check out the rest of the set. Really cool.)

But what gets me is the varieties they use to create the images, especially this almost white leaved rice:

Photo from this site (in Japanese)

How stunning is that? I want some! I've seen purple leaved rice for sale before, but never the white. Does anyone know of a source? I've been asking my Japanese friends, our friendly neighborhood rice researcher, browsing rice mutant databases... no luck yet. If anyone knows anything about it, PLEASE let me know! I NEED it. Desperately.

Therapy for winter: Meijer Gardens

So this weekend I went to Meijer Gardens -- a huge public greenhouse about an hours drive away in Grand Rapids. They were having their annual orchid show this weekend, which was additional reason to go.

They had LOTS of orchids. And lots of people selling orchids. My new Indoor Gardening resolution was burning in my mind, tempting me to buy, buy, buy... But I restrained myself. I simply looked, noticed what I liked, and asked the one orchid freak (and when I say orchid freak, I mean freak I asked him about slipper orchids and he launched into an explanation of how they're not REALLY orchids because their fertile anthers are derived from the wrong whirl. Right. Though I could, if prompted, launch into rant about how rosemary is actually a salvia due to THEIR anthers, so I guess I can't make fun of him) of my aquaintance what he would recommend for my house, which I keep very very cool.

Luckily, the first genus he mentioned is ALSO the genus I had been admiring most in the show: Masdevallia.

(Sorry about the bad photos -- it was dim, and the crowds made it hard to get good pictures -- check out google images for a better idea of how cool these orchids are)

But there weren't many for sale -- because, I guess, most people don't keep their house in the 50s and 60s all winter. So I'm going to read more, and then maybe order some from somewhere.

After the orchid show, we enjoyed the consevatories, as you can see in these photos. Starting with a shot of the arid room for the sake of Germi who is suffering from too much rain.

Warning: Slightly inapproriate behavior with an amorphophallus ahead:

A tillandsia of some sort:

Drooling over conifers

Today's post in a nutshell:
Going to Hidden Lake Gardens

 Has left me saying:
Oh my god CONIFERS!

Inspired by this post by Bert Craig on The Garden Professors blog, I decided to take a trip down to Hidden Lake Gardens -- it is in Tipton Michigan (aka The Middle of Nowhere) which turns out to be about an hour and a half south of here.

And it is spectacular. High on my list of all-time great public gardens I have visited. The lanscape is lovely rolling hills complete with lakes and gorgeous views, there is a marvelous conservatory with tropical, temperate, and arid rooms, but the really highlight is the conifer collection. Absolutely amazing. I came away with a whole list of names scribbled on a scrap of paper.. Lovely rare dwarf conifers I'm sure I'll never be able to afford on what we get paid in grad school, but a man can dream.

Anyway, enough words. On to some pictures:

Just a few of the wonderful colors, textures, and forms in the collection:

A view of the lake

 The cool conservatory that looks like an observatory:

Inside the conservatory:

If you are anywhere near southern Michigan, I highly recommend making a trip. I know I'll be back soon. Maybe this time with my bicycle so I can enjoy the lovely trails through the wooded hills around the lake.