Hot Tamale!

The first weekend in August brings the Berkshire Botanical Garden Flower Show.  The Garden hums with exhibitors, judges and visitors.  "Garden on Fire" is the BBG's theme this summer as well as the theme of the design classes in "The Grow Show".

In design, my favorite class was called "Hot Tamale!" a design in a niche.

This artistic design was reminiscent of Flemish master paintings with the great variety of vegetables including top Egyptian walking onions (little purple clusters on long stems).

Precise symmetry is not easy using vegetables!

These delicate dainty vegetables are in perfect scale and skillfully arranged as they run up and down the design.

Many were grown by the exhibitor.  Notice the flower made from a tomatillo upper right.

Using a combination of garden flowers including zinnias and onions to form a bouquet, the designer cleverly linked it to glass container.  Also more use of walking onions with their clusters are on the top.

Colorful peppers were wired with gold (aluminium) wire to form an undulating chain inside the vase.

Matte black forms a dramatic backdrop for this bold design sitting on a upside down glass container.

This designer was the only one to incorporate tamales into the design.  Notice, also, the draped cornsilk peeking out from the right.  Both added great textural contrast to the smooth peppers.

As befits an August show, growers brought vegetables in the horticulture classes.  This artfully arranged, bounteous basket won Horticulture Best In Show.

Are you hungry?  Cheers!

Potted Inspiration

Potted inspiration

What’s in your pot?

This is the time of year it is fun to see all the imaginative pots with their plants  bursting forth.  There is a lot of inspiration as well as lessons in color and texture in them.

 The creative hands at the Berkshire Botanical Garden used all manner of galvanized pots to create this welcoming group.  The grays play off the blue spruce behind them and set off the warmer toned plants to perfection.  Lesson: what is sitting in your garage to plant in?

Still at the Berkshire Botanical, this lovely column holds a monochromatic grouping with exciting contrast of form, all in green against green.  Lesson in balance:  Do you love the large alocasia leaves hanging out on the top, are not?  Does it work because of the big pot?  

The master colorists at White Flower Farm in Litchfield CT composed this red hot scheme of begonias, coleus and fuschia, with a little cool gray helychrisum peeking out of the right.  All in a stunning classic pot.

Doesn't every talented person make their own boat?  to use as planter?  This woven branch structure at the BBG is planted with a new scheme every year.

More structures in structures at Terrain, Westport CT.  These wood planters hold conical structures planted with alocasia and vines.  A big contrast between the huge alocasia leaves and the small vines.

These billowing window boxes in Stockbridge celebrate The Bride's wedding color scheme of purple and orange.  Fuschia and petunias are happy here.

In honor of the same scheme, I planted my doorway pots - old British washpails - with orange lantana, purple nicotiana, coleus, bronze fennel and grasses.  The fennel looks pretty good here, but not so good now.

What’s in your pot?

Cheers

Ashintully

Berkshire wanderings....

One part vanished stately home, one part romantic garden, all parts serene and very much off the beaten track, Ashintully, the Berkshire property administered by the Trustees of Reservations (www.thetrustees.org), provides a lush green landscape in which to spend an afternoon. 

  

Early in the 20^th C, Robb dePeyster Tytus and his wife, Grace, built a 35 room mansion on a hill overlooking the Tyringham Valley. Mr. Tytus died just after the house was completed, and a year later Grace remarried and had a son, John Stewart McLennan, Jr.   

Mr. McLennan spent childhood summers here and inherited Ashintully when his mother died in 1937. Destroyed by a fire in 1952, only the foundations and four Doric columns stand today.  He and his wife, Katharine, lived below the hill in a farmhouse, with a separate music studio created in the barn.  An award winning composer and musician, he began creating gardens and sculpting the land.

When we visited last summer, Katharine was still living there and she charmed us with stories of her husband and the gardens. She described her husband’s methods for working with the land, shaping it to his vision and finding the perfect stone or plantings to carry out his vision.  Above a dry stream bed gently curves through the landscape, bisected by and handsome bridge.  Last summer’s visit was when it was hot and dry, I am sure this stream is not dry in the spring.

A lead ram’s head acts as a finial to the end of the bridge.  There are lots of such details to discover.

Looking beyond the bridge, the path wanders off towards the woodland.  If you peer closely, you can see two ‘found’ columns drawing the eye on. 

  

Eleanor of Acquitane holds court in this garden.  The lush boxwood hedge shows off the lovely statue, which is notable for its beautiful drapery.

If you follow the trail up the hillside, you will reach the site of the mansion (top photo).  In the encroaching landscape, remnants of the old driveway and entrance court fight with the weeds.

Ashintully is Gaelic for “on the brow of the hill”.  What hopes and dreams must have been centered on that hilltop landscape and what a romantic ruin it is today.  It must be spectacular in Autumn as the leaves turn and fall, opening up the view from the mansion even more.

Cheers! 

PS  I am teaching a workshop, "Cutting Edge Design: Not your mother's flower arrangement", at the Berkshire Botanical Garden (www.berkshirebotanical.org) on July 20th from 10AM to 1PM. Do register and come!  I will be blogging about it later this month!