General Forum

This year with more time on my hands, I've had greater opportunity to visit the gardens of fellow NARGS members. Each visitation is such an eye-opening learning experience that I thought I should start this thread to document some that I have visited, to share with you those elements that I found most inspiring. I encourage other NARGS forumists to post their garden visit experiences too, highlighting positive impressions or memorable things learned.

The landscape here seems flat and easy walkable. But don't be deceived!
If you follow the old paths - people have walked here for several thousend years - it is no great task.
Here you head due west, an important trade route between west and east crossed these plains.

Also moss have a kind of flowers. When the sporophyte developes on top of the gametophyte you can get a nice combination.
This is a kind of Polytrichum.

Did I hear a request for a thread just on grasses... ? ??? I'm sure I did! :D

I'll kick this off with an alpine-ish one (although, as you can see, I am just growing it in the border), Festuca gautieri syn. scoparia 'Pic Carlit'. This photo is old (2007), and the two plants are rather larger now. It's a very prickly grass... that and the nicely-rounded shapes always put me in mind of two big hedgehogs crouching beside the path!

Are there any fungi experts out there?
1 -3) We spotted this subtly-coloured beauty in the bark mulch today. I don't recall seeing one like this before, with the topside almost as ridged as the gills on the underside.

4) This more pedestrian one is growing amongst the Geranium orientalitibeticum... and looking rather tasty, actually! :o

Here lots of plants have done their flowering for this year but the ageing flowerhead can be of interest.

Monarda punctata (spotted beebalm) is an under-appreciated native species, very different looking than what one normally associates with Monarda. It has yellow flowers that are spotted, and even showier colorful bracts that are pink shading to white in my plants. Web photos reveal it is quite variable in color, flowers from light yellow to dark orangish-yellow, bracts can be red, green, buff, or yellow. Best treated as a self-sowing short-lived perennial or biennial.

Here are some links to pictures Cindy took of the garden and anything else that struck her fancy. Most of them were taken in the garden here, but there are also pictures of Dan Johnson's garden, the Chapungu exhibit at DBG, Harlequin's Gardens in Boulder, border collies, etc.

Am I the only person who wonders, from time to time, if I have too many plants? I was worried that the new rock garden would look bare, but my sister came over today and said she thought it looked good. No wonder; it has over a hundred ice plants as well as tons of other plants.
I keep finding new ice plants to try, but when I walk over to the garden with plant and trowel, I discover there's no room. I either have to move something I just planted, or put the new plant somewhere else. There isn't very much of "somewhere else", either.

Here's what's been in bloom recently along the Bow River uplands (my cycling route to/from work)...
1) Big drifts of brilliantly-coloured Hedysarum boreale