wordless wednesday

Columbus

Sunday, Pat and I took a trip to Columbus to tour the gardenshow and check out the Franklin Park Conservatory. Thank you Lona for the tickets. Anything in my garden is yours. The trip to Columbus is an enjoyable two hour drive. When we lived in Chicago, the trip to Springfield was a journey through flat. The only thing preventing us from seeing Lincoln’s tomb was the curvature of the earth. The trip to Columbus is through rolling farmland and much more enjoyable.

This year the Columbus Home and Garden Show celebrated the bicentennial of the City of Columbus, happy birthday Columbus! The gardens at the show were great, the best so far.  There were the usual combinations of hosta, tulips and daises living in blissful harmony.  I’ll always get a kick out of these combinations. If I could only have hosta in full leaf at the same time our tulips bloom.   We found an addition to our yard in the Japanese Pieris and another nursery to add to our must visit list. I noticed some mini hosta at one of the display gardens, started calling for Pat, when a gentleman handed me some literature and told me that guess what? Yep, they specialized in hosta. Say no more, we’ll be there in April.

 What's a few more hosta? I already have the pots.

 It likes shade, and I got shade.

 I always have stars in my eyes when I see Pat.

No trip to Columbus would be complete without a visit to the Franklin Park Conservatory. We were in luck, orchids were on display.

Akron Garden Show

Spring can’t be that far off. The Akron and Columbus garden shows are this weekend. The Akron show is the perfect size. It is large enough to make the trip, but not so large as to wear you out.  As has been the case every year since we started going to the Akron show, it snowed.  Maybe it’s Mother Nature’s way of telling our day lilies and irises not so fast.  The display gardens are always fun to look at and the show always has something special. This year it was a duct tape house building competition among middle and high schools in Summit County.   These kids put a lot of work into their projects.   The Duct Tape Guys were the main seminar. They had a combination comedy routine and seminar about, guess what?  Duct tape.  Boy it was a hoot.  When each of our girls left the house, I threw a role of duct tape in their car emergency kits. 

Hosta and daffodils, hosta and tulips. If I could only get them to grow together, I'd know that I finally made it as a gardener.

 I voted for the house with the flowers as the best in show. I hope it wins.

 Check out the interior. Now that is cool.

We already have one potting bench, but this one is calling my name. Now, all I have to do is get the stars , moon  and the planets all in alinment and then convince Pat. Maybe we can give up buying pots or more lawn ornamentation.

 I am shameless,just like these guys.

Tommorrow, we are off to Columbus and more garden show.

for a plant to be named later

Look what I got, a bag full of snowdrops. What a great start to the weekend. A colleague at work is also a gardener. I offered ligularia and hosta, if she ever wanted any. This led to a week long conversation about trading plants. Remember, one gardener's invasive plant is an other's exuberant low maintenance garden. We made a multi-plant trade. I got snowdrops today with double flower department of transportation orange day lilies and daises later. I traded  ligularia seeds, a box full of miscellaneous seeds and hosta, ligularia and chameleon plants once they pop up. I'm also going to help establish a garden at the school. Not a bad deal all the way around. Gardeners are just about the friendliest people in the world.

The Akron and Central Ohio Garden Shows are this weekend, so Pat and I are off in search of lawn ornamentation.

wordless wednesday

wordless wednesday

finally

I mentioned my desolate snow free back yard, and what do you know? Snow, a seemingly unending snow, pretty much since the last blog post, has been dropping on our piece of northeast Ohio.  Finally, winter has arrived.

they're back

You know how you have a favorite restaurant or tavern? Well, I guess these guys do too. Feed them and they will come. I know that I should be aggravated that this herd of deer (does 4 or 5 make a herd, or is there a smaller group name?) lunch in my back yard. But I’m not. I just love watching them. And hey, better bird seed than my hosta. One year these guys, or some predecessor, dug up a bunch of hosta.  That’s when I wanted to chase them with the Aztec. Pat warned me off by telling me that the home owners association would have me arrested and sent to a home.

I’m happy that these deer are daily visitors. Otherwise I would just have pictures of a desolate looking snowless garden to show.

wordless wednesday

garden show time

The Cleveland Home and Garden Show started this weekend. Normally it is an oasis of color in a universe of dingy white, but not this year. Nature has not cooperated. There is not a speck of snow to be found, not even hiding in the shadows like a Cuyahoga County politician. Pat had to dissuade me from starting spring clean-up. She’s right. It’s February for crying out loud. At any moment, we could get a couple feet of snow, but I digress.

The displays were fun to see. Only at garden shows do tulips and hosta share the same space. We also came across plants that we have in our garden. It makes me feel like I almost know what I’m doing in the yard when garden show displays use the same plants I have. We did see some new plants that we might just have room for this spring. 

What I really came for was lawn ornamentation. If we could find it at the food show, I knew that we could hunt some down at a garden show. Pat spotted people in the distance with steel pieces of art. , I I hoped they didn’t sell out before we worked our way through the aisles of hot tubs, patio bricks and assorted “as seen on TV” items. We found the reason I go to garden shows at the end of the very last aisle at the IX center. I think it was 2 or 3 miles from the entrance door and another 4 or 5 miles to the car. It was worth the hunt. There was a ton of neat stuff, or I should say, lawn ornamentation. I knew I reached my limit when Pat kept saying she didn’t like this or that, 6 or 7 times in a row. I asked the guy what other shows he displays. He’ll be at the Columbus show at the end of the month, and guess what? So will we.

We have room for a couple of these guys.

We gotta get some of these orange guys