Do you love to make mud pies, grow a houseplant, eat veggies, or stop to smell the bouquet on your co-workers desk? Everyone enjoys a bit of green growing around him or her and then there are those that are passionate and needy when it comes to dabbling in the dirt. With this blog, we'll try to satisfy those needs and tell you about what's going on with the Anchorage gardening scene. You know, as I finally learned, it's all about the dirt.
Photographer and gardener Fran Durner (fdurner@adn.com) writes the blog.
Take an interactive tour of the gardens showing in Anchorage's garden tour, with photos and audio commentary from each gardener.
Deadheading and seed collecting
Harvesting herbs from your garden
Municipal Greenhouse Gardeners
Alaska Society of Outdoor and Nature Photographers
Alaska Plant Materials Center:
Fairbanks Georgeson Botanical Garden
Lazy Mountain Woolwood Gardens
Another beautiful pumpkin - 8/28/2008 4:06 pm
Plan ahead: 2009 Farmers Almanac is out now - 8/27/2008 1:52 pm
What Does Alaska Grown Mean to You? - 8/25/2008 3:16 pm
State Fair opens - 8/20/2008 5:07 pm
Happy Birthday Nickel! - 8/19/2008 9:30 am
Lunchtime light - 8/18/2008 3:00 pm
Farmer's Markets - 8/17/2008 7:26 pm
Floral carpet in Belgium - 8/14/2008 2:38 pm
An Herb Harvest - 8/13/2008 5:31 pm
An English garden - 8/11/2008 4:55 pm
Free Cooperative Extension Publications - While they last! - 8/7/2008 4:32 pm
The Tomatoes of Summer - 8/5/2008 4:39 pm
Creating Floral Displays - 8/4/2008 12:14 pm
August Calendar - 7/31/2008 3:50 pm
See Big Lake and Willow gardens this weekend - 7/30/2008 3:56 pm
Homer Garden Tour - 7/27/2008 8:49 pm
Dr. Armitage is a self-described plant nerd - 7/26/2008 6:34 pm
So many gardens, too little time - 7/24/2008 12:55 pm
State Fairgrounds in flower - 7/23/2008 9:38 am
Palmer Garden Festival - 7/21/2008 12:41 pm
Don't miss this weekend fun! - 7/17/2008 5:41 pm
Flowering indoor plants for low-light situations? - 7/16/2008 10:33 am
Posted: July 27, 2008 - 8:49 pm
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Visitors enjoying one of the six gardens on the annual tour. There is such a sense of place for any garden with the spectacular backdrop of Kachemak Bay. Photo by Fran DurnerThe rain finally stopped and the skies cleared a bit but not until the Homer Garden Club's annual summer garden tour was all over.
Note to self: must make a fire pit! Photo by Fran DurnerDespite the liquid sunshine, six gardens were still to be enjoyed today and each offered a little something different while tieing in to a sense of place. In fact one of the best views was not from a home but from an orchard high above the main house on a open slope with a swooping vista from Spit to glaciers along Kachemak Bay. Now, I just can't imagine giving over that view to an orchard but I imagine the owners probably enjoy it everytime they are up there and they are probably there a lot.
Filled with flowers and vegetables, this would be a lovely place to spend a morning. Photo by Fran DurnerThere were a couple other standouts, one being a light filled rooftop glass greenhouse I could imagine myself sitting in every morning while sipping hot tea.
Lapins cherry. These were so tempting but left for the owners! Photo by fRan DurnerAnother gardener's less fancy greenhouse was filled with fruit trees including mature cherry trees laden with plump fruit that looked as if each had been individually polished.
I loved the fire pit at the last garden visited and wondered if the large tub filled with water behind it was for watering the garden below or might have served a double duty as a plunge tank for anyone using the outdoor sauna beside it!
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1 July 27, 2008 - 9:45pm | rosmarinus
the Homer garden tour
Went on that too and took the very same picture of those cherries. They were the furthest along of any seen and just BEAUTIFUL. Beautiful to look at. Admire. Sigh over. My fingers twitched larcenously. And that wasn't the only place and the only fruit that gave that response.
Mind you, this is a really terrible summer in Southcentral. Climate Change is more PC because Global Warming hasn't hit the Kenai!
My friend and I didn't start from the ends of the tour list, we started in the middle with the orchard of Walter Johnson and Judith James, who had 40 different kinds of fruit...and since no one else showed up for awhile, we were able to follow Walter, the walking encyclopedia, around and learn what he liked, disliked and will change in the orchard (it's called "upgrading".)
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