Garden Tour in Philadelphia, Part I: A Few Pictures from the Always Inspiring Chanticleer in Wayne, Pennsylvania
Category: Botanical Gardens
Buy Divisions from one of Piet Oudolf’s Gardens in New York City on Thursday, May 7th
From The New York Times: “More than 100 different kinds of perennials and grasses from the Battery gardens in Lower Manhattan designed by Piet Oudolf, the Dutch landscape designer, will be available for $10 each at the Battery Conservancy plant sale on May 7, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m…’We have over 3,000 divisions to sell, all from the incredibly strong plants in our gardens,’ said Warrie Price, right, the founder and president of the Battery Conservancy, created in 1994.”
You can see some of these plants in my pictures from Battery gardens here.
Pictures from the Reeves-Reed Arboretum Daffodil Day in Summit, New Jersey
If you didn’t make it to Daffodil Day at the Reeves-Reed Arboretum in Summit, New Jersey today, here are a few of my pictures.
A view of the Daffodil Bowl as you approach from behind the great Sugar Maple with the Reeves-Reed home in the background.
A close-up of the Daffodil Bowl.
A different view of the Daffodil Bowl.
Another view of the daffodil bowl from the Reeves-Reed house.
A plaque reminding us: “In the weeks following September 11, 2001, we came together to plant daffodils on this site as a symbol of courage and hope for all.” For those of you who are not from around here, we are a commuter town to New York City and we all lost relatives, friends and neighbors in the attacks.
A beautiful saucer magnolia overlooking the daffodil bowl.
A close-up of a daffodil combination that I quite liked.
A view from the parking lot. I love the way botanical gardens plant everywhere, particularly in the places that others accept as being unsightly..
Do you want to see 45,000 daffodils in bloom?
Reeves-Reed Arboretum in Summit, New Jersey
Daffodil Day on Sunday, April 19th, 2009
Plant sale, family scavenger hunt, woodland tours, games, arts and crafts, face painting, mini-lectures, refreshments, free tree seedlings.
For more information, click here.
Courtnay Daniels’s 15 acres of gardens in Virginia
Sara Lin, in today’s Wall Street Journal, writes: “Courtnay Daniels’s backyard is testament to what a very avid gardener with considerable resources can create…In this bucolic area 20 miles west of Jefferson’s Monticello, Ms. Daniels has devoted much of the last decade to 15 acres of gardens filled with rare and unusual trees, flowers, grasses and shrubs. There’s a rose garden, a vegetable garden, a blue garden and an apricot garden. The orange garden is adjacent to the grass garden, and the yellow garden leads to the canal garden with its two reflecting pools. A five-acre arboretum boasts vast views of the surrounding hills.” For the full article that also includes a slideshow, click here. The end of the slideshow includes a note that Ms. Daniels “gives tours of the gardens to about six groups a year.”
How to See Beautiful Private Gardens: The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days
As a follow-up to my prior post about the Garden Conservancy, I was excited to read about their upcoming Open Days. Valerie Sudol of the Star-Ledger writes:
“The Open Days program kicks off on May 31 in New Jersey, when a garden in Somerset County and another in Hunterdon County throw open the gates to visitors.
River Run Farm in Bedminster is a horse farm estate dating to the 1920s, with formal gardens designed in 1980 by John Smith. These include a walled pool garden, a wisteria-draped gazebo, woodland and courtyard gardens, and a vast collection of shade-loving plants.
Woodlove, a garden in Glen Gardner, was created over a 30-year period and includes perennial gardens, collections of fern and hosta species, and a stream terminating in a frog pond. The six-acre property has been divided into “garden rooms,” each with its own character.
The Open Days program continues through Sept. 6, with visits scheduled to gardens in Essex, Bergen and Union counties.”
Hopefully, when we’re not going to ballet or baseball, we can make some of the ones in New Jersey. They are also taking place in California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. For the complete schedule, check out the Garden Conservancy’s website.
Pictures from my Mothers’ Day Visit to Reeves-Reed Arboretum in Summit, New Jersey
Reeves-Reed Arboretum is one of my favorite botanical gardens (click on any images for the full picture).
While Chanticleer and Wave Hill are ever-inspiring, Reeves-Reed and Willowwood Arboretum have the benefit of being local.
Being only ten minutes away from Chatham in Summit, New Jersey, I get to visit Reeves-Reed frequently to see what’s new.
Further, being in my identical gardening zone (6b), I know it will work in my garden if it works at Reeves-Reed.
Also, being of a more modest scale, they have a lot that is applicable to the home gardener.
From the website:
“The Reeves-Reed Arboretum is a suburban conservancy dedicated to environmental and horticultural education for children and adults…
and to the enjoyment of nature through the professional care and preservation of a historic country estate. Reeves-Reed Arboretum has 5-1/2 acres of formal gardens.
The gardens represent design trends of the early 20th century.
A map of the Arboretum grounds and description of the grounds are available.
Also we have a wildflower guide depicting some of the many flowers that can be found at Reeves-Reed Arboretum.”
Related posts: Living and Gardening Around Chatham, New Jersey, A Visit to Chanticleer in Wayne, Pennsylvania
A Visit to Chanticleer in Wayne, Pennsylvania: Spring Bulbs, Flowering Trees, and Inspiring Containers
I have never been to Chanticleer in the spring. Usually, things are too busy here with spring sports and gardening to go for the day; but with a clear schedule, we went. It was wonderful.
The most inspiring part of the visit was seeing all the containers. I often find spring pots hard to put together, but with a combination of colored branches from dogwoods and willows, climbing vines, leafy vegetables, and some flowering plants, each pot conveyed the fun and excitement of spring.
It was also good to see which annuals be set out early. Usually, I plant bulbs for most of my spring color in my beds, but I was inspired by Chanticleer to use some annuals such as the African daisy (Osteospermum) which can tolerate cool weather too.
Chanticleer’s large drifts of bulbs (pictured) are a hint to the abundance of summer which will follow. I have not planted any bulbs in the lawn, but I’m thinking of doing so in the fall. My daughter loved that you could walk through the flowering bulbs as if they created a meadow. It is those kinds of romantic vignettes that make Chanticleer memorable.
In this trip, I was also able to see things which are more hidden later in the season. To see how hard they cut back their shrubs teaches me how much to cut mine back. I wanted to much a hill in our garden with pebbles, but I hesitated thinking that they would roll down. However, at Chanticleer there is a hill as steep or steeper than mine mulched with pebbles (pictured) and they are not all sitting at the bottom of the hill.
Related posts: Garden Color at Chanticleer and Early Spring Containers
English Gardens: Christopher Lloyd’s Great Dixter – the battle is won
Telegraph.co.uk reports: “Many in the gardening world are over-joyed at the news that Great Dixter, the Sussex garden made famous by Christopher Lloyd, has just received £4 million of Heritage Lottery funding…What is more surprising is the level of debate it has inspired, led by one of our greatest historians Sir Roy Strong, who cannot see the justification for keeping a garden going after the death of its owner.” For the full story, click here.
Heirloom Gardener 
