Glorious Garden Festival Garden Walk

"Sarah Davis" taking a stroll through her restored garden.

Every June the local Bloomington-Normal garden shops and nurseries put on a Glorious Garden Festival/Walk in partnership with the University of Illinois Extension Master Gardeners, and if you're a garden voyeur like me, it's a peeping-Tom opportunity not to be missed.  The event always starts on the lawn of the The David Davis Mansion, one of our most prized local landmarks (read: "BloNo's method of laying claim to Abraham Lincoln fame"), and continues throughout the gardens of various nominated residents in the community. 
This was my second year attending, and I have to say, I marvel at the sanctuaries these "amateur" gardeners have constructed in the midst of a bustling town.

Sarah's Garden, planned by Sarah Davis (wife of Judge David Davis) in the 1870s, is always the first stop on the Garden Walk and is located on the mansion's grounds.  It is maintained today by U of I Extension Master Gardeners using plants that were known to be favorites of Sarah and even some that have survived from her original plantings (the surviving original plants are marked throughout the gardens with white lace bows).

The hollyhocks in Sarah's Garden look nicer than mine this year...

It's a living piece of history, and while I'm fascinated by the heirloom and old-fashioned-y plants in Sarah's Garden, I feel like the real fun of the Garden Walk starts when you leave public property and stroll into the backyards of folks whose landscaping you've been eyeing daily from a distance on your way to work or the grocery store.

Take, for instance, the McKnight garden.

Entrance to the McKnight garden.

The McKnight's live in one of the area's premiere subdivisions which happens also to encompass the Bloomington Country Club.  For six or seven years, my husband and I drove through this posh neighborhood on the first of every month on our way to the landlord's house to drop off our rent check (damned if I was gonna write that check a day sooner than I absolutely had to), gawking at the lavish homes and landscapes along the way and marveling how there were always swans paddling away in the mid-golf-course pond/water trap.  (I'm convinced they were either animatronic or chained by the ankle to an anchor at the bottom of the pond.)  Imagine our delight this past Saturday as Hubby and I followed the GPS nav-guy into our former landlord's subdivision, garden pass books in hand for our chance at seeing one of these places up close!

The McKnight garden is as lavish as their home, with overflowing planted containers of every shape and size in every possible corner.  There were several water features, one in the center of a "knot garden" (like this, but their's was longer and skinnier).  Euonymus vine was used as a ground cover throughout--almost a foot deep in some areas and trimmed with blunt edges like a shrub--and made for an interesting change from your typical mulch-lined beds.  The designer (who as it turned out was not the home-owner) created what people in the landscaping biz call "rooms" to give the feel of several small, enclosed gardens as opposed to one large space. In the center of one of these rooms, resting on a low stone table was this container:

Bonspaliered?

...which looks to me as if an espaliered tree mated with a bonsai.

One had the feeling, were she to pull back a bit of the euonymus, she might find the beds lined with dollar bills rather than landscape fabric...or perhaps that's just her blue-collar upbringing talking.  Yeah.  Yeah, it is.

Not surprisingly designed by the same guy, the Walker garden boasted a few ostentatious features of its own, including this cheery water feature:



...and this two-tiered pergola with stained-glass trim:


I'll get two of these...in red.  Thanks.

In truth, it's not my intention to judge.  Both the McKnight and Walker gardens are impressive showpieces, and given unlimited funds, I imagine I'd go whole hog, too.  I guess on some level, though, I wonder if it would feel like cheating if I could solve any garden problem simply by throwing enough cash at it.

More common on the Garden Walk were less-structured, more organic, occasionally kitschy plots, heavier on character than design principles and full of inspiration for the lay gardener.  The Stroyers embraced whimsy in their gardens with this colorful bed of annuals:


Do you see the rainbow?  Do you love it?!

 ...and a miniature fairy garden tucked away beneath an evergreen that I'd have missed completely had a friendly Master Gardener volunteer not pointed it out to me:


A little cutesy for me but creative nonetheless with admirable attention to detail.

 Trees were the stars of the Barringer property with over 100 of them surrounding the house and this gorgeous copper beech outshining them all:


What a trunk!

Ultimately, there was something to fit everyone's tastes on the 2011 Glorious Garden Walk.  It's a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning, a great way to get to know your community (see if there's a garden walk in your town!), and a fount of creative inspiration.

So I'm gonna leave it there.  Maybe I'll go start panhandling for my stained-glass pergola fund.

--M