2023 Manhattan EMG Garden Tour

I'm not sure, in these days of 5G cellular and massive bandwidth, whether anyone needs the warning anymore, but I suppose there are those still out there on 26K modems, so Warning:  picture heavy!  Click on the individual pictures if you want to see them in more glory then these small blog photos!

Yesterday, June 10th, was our annual Manhattan Area Garden Tour, and Thursday, June 8th was the "pretour" for the EMGs, so ProfessorRoush was on picture duty.  I took about 290 pictures on Thursday evening and over 600 hundred on the Tour and kept 836 for the homeowners and EMG's to view.  A handful are here for your enjoyment.   Each garden on the Tour gets a commemorative stone like the one above. I'll bet, however, that unlike this homeowner most of you don't think about painting stones to look like ladybugs in your gardens!   The rain prior to the Tour was a little tough on the flowers, but this 'Peach Drift' seemed to take it in stride.

This year's Tour was cloudy and took place after a hard rain the night before, while the pretour was pre-rain and sunny, which made for some gloomy tour photos that were challenging.   The photo above, my favorite of the entire set, was taken at the Thursday pretour, and the evening light through the redbuds was a happy accident which I tried my best to recreate on Saturday.   It's just impossible, however, to follow good photography principles when the light doesn't cooperate (tour photo at right).   This pair, taken of the same area in different light, is quite illustrative of the importance of good filtered light in photography.

The Garden Tour had the usual distribution of features and focal points around each garden.  One house had both a running water feature and a koi pond.   The artificial heron at this water feature looks at home in the environment but is perpetually disappointed at the lack of prey in this short waterfall.

I always make sure I get photographs of the views through garden gates and at entrances to gardens.   The gates that lead us into the garden are often as beautiful as what lies beyond them, and they often reflect the character of the garden to come.

A couple of houses had deep enough features to support water lilies, but on the actually cloudy day of the tour, it was difficult to find one blooming.  I struggled just for you, however, taking multiple exposures to grab this photo for your enjoyment.

There's always a potting bench here and there among the houses, and this Tour featured two of them tucked away from sight.   This one is my favorite of the two, although it's a little too tidied up to be believable among the garden!

The garden containing the potting bench above really needed it, however, since it contained a vast multitude of container plants in a shady sitting area.  I loved the garden but I'm glad I'm not the one who has to keep all the containers watered there, containers including wall pots and window pots and porch containers and hanging pots.

Live fauna were lacking on this year's Tour, the cloudy and cooler weather keeping bees and flies and butterflies all suppressed.  In the pretour sunny evening I was able, however, to catch this swallowtail indulging in a large planting of milkweed.  He left me a little frustrated even then because he wouldn't climb up to the top of a bloom but kept hanging off the bottom.

Garden tours are always learning events as well, and at this one I learned that my iPhone 13 can identify almost any plant and completely free of charge.  I overheard a conversation between a gardener and a visitor complaining that his ID app needed an expensive upgrade and so my world just became a lot easier.  If you haven't discovered it, take a picture, like the one at the right, and then open it in Photos.  At the bottom, you'll see an information icon "i".   Click on the "i" and it gives information about the photo, but it also has a link to "Look Up--Plant" which correctly identifies this picture as "Veronica". 

Some gardeners, as always, are really good a creating vignettes and themes in their gardens.  Bunnies and Beatrix Potter held sway in the garden containing this bench.

I finished off, as always this year, at the K-State Gardens where plants and expensive bronze statues mix as one perfect unit to show off the things that grow best in Kansas, like Mr. Crane here in the fake swamp with milkweed beside it.   Yesterday, my thought here was that if I survive the Apocalypse, be it zombie- or diety-driven, I'm coming here soon after to make sure these bronze statues have a good home and are well cared for, especially the "Rose Girl" statue who graces the entrance to the rose garden and who would make a good companion to the cement maidens in my own garden.

I bid you, at the end of this long post, adieu, until we meet again, with Old Glory as it proudly flew over one of the gardens yesterday, gardens and gardeners alike expressing their freedom of expression and the beauty of creation on the 2023 Extension Master Gardener's Manhattan Area Garden Tour. 

2022 EMG Manhattan Garden Tour

Today, June 25, 2022, was the Extension Master Gardener tour in Manhattan.  Yours' truly, as usual, was the unofficial photographer for the group, so I spent the morning taking 814 photos in 4 hours, and 720+ turned out to be pretty useable.  I'm pretty proud of the fact that despite the heavy daylily bloom today (and at least one of the 7 gardens on tour claimed to have 800 cultivars), I only took around a dozen closeups of daylilies.  Of the other photos, I've selected my favorite dozen for you to view, my selection based on what I viewed as the most "artistic" photos. Without further ado, enjoy.   Click on the photos if you want to see them full size.

The light this morning was fantastic.

I thought this was the best daylily picture that I took.  It's not the prettiest or most unusual, but I liked the way the leaf draped across the blossom.

One of the gardeners is doing a great job recreating a prairie meadow planting.

At the same garden as the prairie above, lived this good girl.

Sometimes, a little woodland serenity goes a long way in a garden photo.

I don't know who Rex and Bogie were, but this homeowner loved them very much.

I'm calling this one "Stairway to Heaven".   That blue Kansas sky just kills me.

Oh, the colors here are just fabulous!

Had a serendipitous moment with this butterfly.

Again, Color!

Is it an entrance or an exit?   Only the homeowner knows!

2021 Manhattan EMG Garden Tour

ProfessorRoush seems to have slipped comfortably back into his continuing role as the unofficial photographer of the Extension Master Gardener's Manhattan Area Garden tour, albeit with a break during the skipped tour last year due to the pandemic cancellation of the Tour.  I won't comment here on the folly of canceling a GARDEN tour in a time when more of the population would have attended then ever, but that's all rain clouds and opportunities missed. 

Most importantly, I had planned to share in this blog what I thought were the 6 best photos from this year's tour, however, as usual, I'm failing miserably.   It's fairly easy, among 609 photos taken in 4 hours today, for me to weed out all the pictures with identifiable people in them since I shouldn't/can't post people without permission.  And my best intentions to catch a bee in the act of nefarious nectar collection went awry several times today; it was cloudy for most of the tour and the camera shutter speed just wasn't up to catching them as a still life.

It is more difficult than I anticipated to choose the best from the 50 or so daylily pictures and the various vignettes of gnomes and garden ornaments and from the delightful plant arrangements that were everywhere.  Ego aside, many of the pictures are quite good, despite the overcast and early start to the day.  My goal of  posting six photos became a battle to narrow down from 50, and then from 20, until I settled on these 8.   Well, on these 9 if you count the last wanna-be.  Who, anyway, could resist this bronze heron sculpture at the K-State Gardens in the middle of the created wetlands? 

Every photo here is unedited, just as I took them.  Normally I would have cropped them for the blog, maybe removing some of the blurred green space at the top of the picture of the fancy echinacea at the left, and perhaps reducing their size, but I thought you'd like them in all their vivid detail.  Point and click if you want to see them larger.  I apologize, in advance, for the multi-megabyte nature of this blog entry, but most these days don't have the limitations we used to have on download speed, do they?  I hope not.

Trains seemed to be the "thing" for the day and model railroads were laid out at two of the 6 gardens on the tour.  ProfessorRoush perhaps didn't fully appreciate their contribution to the garden, but the many children on the tour certainly enjoyed them.   I just kept thinking, "Okay, that's cute, but after a few times around the track, what would I do with it then?"   To each, their own tracks, I suppose.

With the garden tour a few weeks later in the year than normal, the daylilies were blooming everywhere.   I thought the prettiest daylily photograph that I took was of the pair shown at the top of this blog, but for a single entry, this yellow and purple-eyed daylily was too perfect to ignore.  

There was plenty of wildlife in the gardens today, with one garden featuring a box turtle enclosure with a half-dozen unfortunately photo-shy turtles.  I couldn't share the picture of one owner calling to her turtle, and a soundless still photo wouldn't do the moment justice anyway, but I can share these two sister felines who were intently hunting and torturing a vole in a garden.   Their actions seemed to dismay the garden owner, but then, cats will be cats, won't they?

I loved this quiet pathway fork, lit by the Japanese Maple on one side and shadowed by the 'Forest Pansy' redbud that hung above it all.  I was quite captivated by the light coming through the multi-colored leaves of 'Forest Pansy' and so the tour will cost me in real monetary terms since I'll have to seek one out now.  This was a hard area to catch without people walking through it, but thankfully, if you can identify the legs of the two ladies taking the fork on the right, then you're far more observant, or intimately knowledgeable of these ladies, than I am.

I'll close with this almost-picture of the Monarch butterfly on milkweed.   When the Monarch landed within reach of my lens, fluttering it's wings as it settled for a snack, I was adamantly sure I was about to get the perfect photo for the day, the crowning jewel of my efforts.  For a brief instant, I was still, waiting for this beauty to open its wings so I could capture that instant of miracle, of life and ecology in a single picture.  And then a nearby bumblebee came in like a Stuka dive bomber and the butterfly was gone, beyond my reach,
before my reflexes could trigger the shutter.   Such are the disappointments that come hand-in-hand with these many glorious photos.  Maybe next year.  Or the year after.

29th Annual Manhattan Area Garden Tour

The 29th Annual Manhattan Area Garden Tour occurred last Sunday and continued to be successful despite the mid-90's temperatures, blast furnace winds and scorching sunshine.  As in the recent past, ProfessorRoush was the unofficial photographer for the event, but this year he also designated himself as host for the post-Tour awards show.   Stay with me, I promise you, this is one show where the winners will stay on topic and not veer off into political rants nor personal advertisement.  And remember to click on the pictures to see them in their full glory.

So, without further ado, the envelopes please:

For Best Assembly of Cute Birdhouses as Ornamentation, the award goes to this shady group of avian condominiums.  The quality of this neighborhood seems to be first-rate construction but the neighborhood is overbuilt and lacking tenants.

For the Best Demonstration of Proper Birdbath Setup to Benefit Both Birds and Butterflies, this cobalt and river stone combination takes First Place.  You DO place rocks in your birdbaths so fluttery winged things have a place to land and sip, don't you?

 Best Individual Floral Bloom is hereby awarded to this perfect pink Asiatic lily, standing strong and cool despite the scorching sun.














The Most Whimsical Frog in Water was awarded as a tie this year because the judge had a hard time choosing between this dancing frog placed in a running water feature, or the acrobatic frog below it that appears to be doing yoga in a birdbath.  Neither co-winner really seems to care who won, as long as they can stay shady and cool.

For Best Use of Multiple Elements and Textures in a Single Frame, this beautiful vista drew oohs and aahs from the texturally aware.  Water, birdbath, rock, hosta, grass, daylily, evergreen, and deciduous shrub, all are visible in a single glance. 

 Speaking of birdbaths, Best Use of Small Artificial Ornaments to Compliment a Birdbath is given to this composition of ceramic mushrooms and a simple birdbath in a sea of ivy.  I thought the variegated liriope added a nice touch to this green expanse.

The award for Cutest Faux Window and Shutters was enthusiastically given for this bright composition against the weathered fence.  The bright red gathers the eye from across the room.

Best Kniphofia Appearing Alone in a Picture went to the mildly aging specimen on the right, while the Most Serene Almost- Natural-looking Birdbath award was captured by the serene and cool specimen depicted on the left photo.  The esteemed photographer seemed to have a "thing" for birdbaths on Sunday, didn't he?

The Most Restful Photo was easily claimed by this shaded hammock placed for an exclusive nap in full view of the garden.  Even I might be able to rest here and forget about the weeding that needs done.






Most Fabulous Placement of a Nude Statue in the Garden was taken home by this small statue which stood in front of an enticing outdoor shower enclosure.  All the tour visitors seemed to both admire the spacious shower and the fact that it was audaciously placed in a small backyard of a close neighborhood.  I expect that a plethora of such showers will spring up shortly in Manhattan, simultaneously increasing the cleanliness of local nature lovers and  opportunities for local voyeurs.

The immodest photographer gave himself the award for Best Composed, Framed, Uncropped, and Unedited Photograph for this simple capture of an enticing pathway through the woods behind one garden.  You just want to walk down the hill and then come back to rest in the garden chair, don't you?   I'm not sure what expert garden photographers would think, but I'm very pleased with the photo.  Well except for the errant branch nearby on the right.

I'm afraid I was captured by the gentle contrast of the Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) and butter- yellow lilies in this view.  Despite the harsh sunlight on the left side of the photo, it was awarded Best Photographic Floral Arrangement for the day.

The judge agreed with himself that Most Restful Concrete Frog Laying on Concrete should go to this lazy specimen for his unabashed repose.  I'm told he likes this position so much that he never seems to move.







I think I've covered most of the highlights of the 2017 EMG Manhattan Area Garden Tour, except of course for the many attendees who are not pictured because I don't want to run afoul of not getting their permission to show faces in public photos.  And I don't want to add to the NSA/FBI database of facial recognition software.  None of the ornaments or floral elements illustrated in this post, BTW, objected to having their picture taken or displayed here.  I'll finish the tour now with this very wise and accurate plaque having the last, and very appropriate, words.