2024 EMG Manhattan Area Garden Tour

 Warning:   Picture heavy!

On schedule, and a little later in the year than for previous tours, the Riley County Extension Master Gardeners held their annual Manhattan Area Garden Tour yesterday (June 22nd), with 5 private homes, the 2 community garden sites, and, of course, the KSU Gardens included.   If you've read my blog before, you know already that I am the unofficial annual photographer for the event and this year is no exception.  Here, I've included my favorite two pictures from each site.  and it wasn't an easy task to choose from the over 863 pictures that I took and kept for the EMG's. 

I wasn't at first sure about the community gardens being on the list, but at least it exposed all of us to the fact that Manhattan boasts the oldest community garden in Kansas, celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year..  I was also introduced in the gardens to the shocking color combination of burnt-red daylilies and pink phlox pictured at upper right, finding to my surprise that I rather liked this jarring adjacency, even though I'd have never planted these myself.

Color and creativity abounded on the tour this year.   This artistically-oriented homeowner had a number of these stacked-glass focal spots scattered around her corner lot.  I missed my chance to ask the gardener how they were held together and how they stay upright and unbroken in our Kansas winds.

One of the continuing themes of this year's Tour seemed to be "extra living spaces", with covered or screened porches, outside private dining areas, "she-sheds" or "man-caves" at nearly every home.  I was envious of this small, detached cottage annex at this home, with a one-room, perhaps 8 foot x 8 foot cozy interior populated by a loft bed, comfy couch, writing desk, and mini-kitchenette.  Oh, the writing I dream that I could accomplish there!

The most admired plant of the day (at least admired by the native fauna who count most) was at another home, where a fantastic hot pink Monarda stood out in the landscape and attracted bumblebees all during our tour.

I had many "favorite spots" in this garden, which contained natural outcrops of huge boulders as it's backyard border, falling away 20 feet down to nearby Wildcat Creek below it, but my eye kept being drawn back to this simple grouping and the genius of this lime-green-painted milk can, darker-green hosta, and the pink impatiens nearby.

 

A repeat garden on the tour, featured previously in 2011, was this cottage house, complete with a geometric garden painstakingly laid out and inspired by a mid-1700's Williamsburg garden the owner had visited.   Because I don't show people's faces here when I can avoid it, I was careful to take advantage of this moment when it was empty for a quick photo.  Notice please, the original  Revolutionary War-era flag flying from the garage.

This same home, placed near two K-State fraternities, also had a very shaded, fenced, private courtyard between the home and detached garage for some early morning and late evening enjoyment and rest away from the boisterous college activities.

A friend and fellow veterinarian had a garden on the tour that featured, unsurprisingly, a number of cat statues, fitting for the owner's profession.  

In fact, I can't limit myself to just two pictures from this garden as there were a lot of cute focal points, including this cute little maiden peeking from behind the pink bells.

It was also in this garden that I was introduced to and coveted the fabulous sedum below and also admired one of the few blooming roses on the tour, a climber whose name I don't know.  I'm lusting for that sedum and will have to go searching for it since I'm hopeful my colleague purchased it somewhere here in town. 

 

One home featured a lovely patriotic feel in the front, with the prominent flag and a comfortable front porch decked out in red, white and blue banners like Calvin Coolidge was going to speak from it at any moment from just behind that hale and healthy hedge of huge white hydrangeas (ProfessorRoush nails a quintuple alliteration!).   

To me, the patriotic feel of this property was continued in the back of the house in this combination of these bright red salvias and red-and-white petunias.  Or maybe I'm partial to them because I chose red petunias and white petunias and red pelargoniums and red and white inpatients, and a red begonia to put in pots and beds leading to my own front door this year.   I wonder, are these color choices subconsciously influenced by the fact that it's a Presidential election year?

Well, I need to get outside to the weekly mowing so I'll finish off by showing you, first, the newly-constructed, black-granite-walled reflecting pool of the KSU gardens.  I'm told the flanking channels, which are unchlorinated and barely visible here, will be populated in the future with water lilies and other aquatic plants.

I can't leave you, however, without also adding a current photo of my beloved 'John Davis' already in its 2nd, yet still bountiful, seasonal display of floriferousness.   Another year, another successful Garden Tour witnessed by this stalwart hardy Canadian rose!

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.