The Actual 2026 Garden Tour

 I'll continue with pictures from the actual 2026 Garden Tour, which was yesterday.  The forecast rain held off, the sun came out, and the temperatures were in the mid-70's, making it the best weather for the tour in my 19 years of witness.  And them last night the sky opened up and 3 inches of rain fell!  Again, I will let these pictures (all unedited, save one) speak (mostly) for themselves:  

If you're going to grow scarlet Bee Balm, there is much to be said for a mass planting!  Go big or go home!

This house had a nice porch wrapping around 3 sides of it; I'll show you one side, for envy's sake.  Want!

Sometimes it's just about the flowers.

This birdhouse is at the home of a native Austrian and models, in miniature, the mountain homes of that area.

 

In this shade garden, with the white Loosestrife backdrop, this bench is calling.

And to finish, this piece taught me that I need to use more reds and scarlets in my own garden;  see it pop!

Garden Envy activated: I wish these were all part of my garden!

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. 

Sunshine is Life!

Well, that didn't take long, did it?  The second day of 2020 and ProfessorRoush has already blogged twice!  I simply couldn't restrain myself from a quick entry, given what I found on a walk outside after yesterday's blog.

The temperature reached 50ºF yesterday around 1:00 p.m. and the sun was shining, so despite a brisk wind, I took the lovely Bella out for a walk.  Well, I walked.  Bella ran around like the world was brand new, sniffed the cold earth for awhile, and then rolled in the sunny buffalograss like the puppy she still is.  We sat for awhile, there in sunshine's embrace, me on the low granite bench in my front yard, and Bella on the warm grass, and together we contemplated how much trouble we would be in from Mrs. ProfessorRoush when Bella dragged all that grass back into the house on her fur.   We discussed running to the nearest Greyhound terminal and heading for Florida, but Bella finally convinced me that was a ridiculous overreaction to the moderate scolding we would undoubtedly get later.



I didn't think that I yet displayed my granite bench to you, the granite salvaged from our kitchen island when we remodeled, but I was wrong, so wrong.  I'm not shocked that I forgot about blogging about the bench, but I was chagrined  that the linked blog entry was clear back in 2014.   It seems like the remodeling project was just a year or two back.  Where does the time go, and why does its passing speed up as we age?  I wish, sometimes, I were more like the granite, impervious to time, ice, and burning sun, but then I remember that granite doesn't really get much accomplished year over year.



Showing you the antics of my energetic and loving Bella, however, was just a cheap ploy to draw you in for the real reason that ProfessorRoush is blogging again so quickly.  Worked, too, didn't it?  No one can resist a perky beagle!

I really wanted to share the photograph at the right and announce to the world that SPRING IS COMING!   Yes, only 9 or 10 days past the beginning of winter, the first daffodils are foolishly pushing stems above the frozen ground out there in my garden.  I was shocked to find them, even here in this bare patch of dark earth disturbed by some digging critter last fall.  Early?  I'd reckon so.  But I'm happy to see them all the same.  It's tempting to cover them up and tell them to go back to sleep, but instead, this old gardener will bow to their wisdom and leave them be, impertinent spring-rushers that they are.


 

Wee Bit O' Wind

A week or so back, I was awakened at 2:00 a.m. by the rising wind outside my window and, seconds later, the patter of rain against the pane.  Knowing that we desperately needed the rain, I smiled, relaxed, and went promptly back to sleep.  

Okay, okay, that's an understatement at best, if not a complete misrepresentation of the incident.    If I am fully disclosing what happened, the wind suddenly began to howl, there was a thunderclap that sounded simultaneously with a lightning flash that seemed to strike right above the bedroom ceiling, and I instantaneously levitated two feet off the bed and vertically onto the floor.   The rain began to pour like the Second Flood, and the nearby lightning and thunder continued for two hours while I lay awake and fretted that the house would explode into flame at the next bolt.  We haven't seen a lightning storm like that in years.

There were no  storm warnings on the TV or radio or Internet for our area, and so I didn't think much more about it (except to be happy about the 1.9" rain) until I got into the garden this weekend.  There, I saw the true nature of what must have been a straight line gale or downburst during the storm.  My Purple Martin houses were leaning and the bird feeders were askew (picture above, left).  I also lost a portion of a trunk off the Smoke Tree as illustrated (at the top, right).  Worst of all, the wooden post that held up my 'American Pillar' rose snapped off at the base (photo at right).  Replacing it will be a difficult and painful task due to the nature of the prickles on this rose, so keep me in your prayers.

 On the bright side, I recently salvaged a piece of Baltic Brown granite from our kitchen island during a remodeling of the kitchen and I made it into a wind-proof garden bench which, despite its unprotected placement to the north side of the house, stood up well to the worst the storm threw at it.  I think it provides a really nice formal touch to this area.  The new bench also proves once again that gardening in Kansas is often a simple matter of over-engineering and weighty solutions.  So now all I have to do is apply that knowledge and create a cement post for the 'American Pillar' rose, anchored down about forty feet into the bedrock.   That shouldn't be too hard, should it?