Wilmington Garden Day a Great Treat

Wilmington Garden Day was this past Saturday, an annual event done to benefit children's charities. We started out at WynEden in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. It was said to be inspired by Muir Woods, in Marin County, California. Above are just 2 highlights from this property, a bamboo forest and a one acre pond, and  beautiful orchids (Cypripedium reginae, I think).

Next are 2 completely different gardens, Fair Hill Farm, in Chadds Ford, an  expansive country spread with areas ranging from a garden built around an old barn foundation, to a formal boxwood garden, to a Royal Paulownia forest arrayed around an historic stone home. Then we switched to a North Wilmington Beechwold neighborhood home with an attached greenhouse and a several outdoor seating areas, boxwoods, fountains, and statuary.

A regular star on this annual tour is Frog Hollow and I'm not sure what is more interesting--all the varieties of hosta and other plants or Mr. Thyrum, the owner and Chief Tinkerer. You see him above with one of his inventions, a pond with a glass column filled with water that the koi can swim up into. He had to use a shop vac to suck all the oxygen out of the top and get the water to rise, like in a barometer. Above this is a metal dragonfly hanging on a wire from a tree branch which slowly drips water into the pond. The secret for getting water up into the tree is a plastic tube and a pump pushing the water up the tree. Just one of the plant stars is the Maui Buttercup hosta, above.  The peacock sculptures, below, seem to be contemplating a verrry large egg!

The last home to be featured today is in Brandywine Hills, north of Wilmington. Before the home was built by one of the architects at Winterthur in 1935, the area was hills, woods, and rocks. Most of us would just give up and not even try to garden, but the owners here embraced the rocks and you can see a pond above that was built AROUND a rock! Amazing, as were all the rest of the gardens on Wilmington Garden Day.