Water-Wise Tour Retrospect

Plano's first and my garden's first landscape tour was last Saturday. I am not sure anyone knew what to expect. Based on the turn out and response received to my garden, I think the tour went well. At least 243 people passed through my garden during the six hours the tour was open and more continued to stop or drive by for the next couple of hours. Somewhere around 3:20, the doorbell rang and a woman that said she had a late start wanted to ask questions and look around. I was exhausted after being outside in the heat since 7:00 AM and I was hungry. I declined as politely as possible and directed her to this blog. While I was turning her away, another couple walked up. I told them they could look around, but I was going inside because I was tired and hungry.

Here I am speaking about asparagus or drip irrigation or squash bugs or something. I have no clue. It was a crazy day. This photo was taken by my co-worker, Elaine, sometime around 11:30. I started placing plant tags around the garden an hour before the tour officially began and I was still carrying the last handful that I picked up as people started coming into the garden. Up until a few minutes before this photo was taken, I was without my hat, sunglasses and water. I thought I would have had an opportunity to go back inside before this time, but I was answering questions non-stop from the time the first visitor arrived. At one point, I just had to excuse myself and run inside. 

The volunteers and several visitors thanked me for having the plant tags. I thought they would be a good idea since most of my plants would be unknown to most of the visitors. By the way, thanks to the three Live Green in Plano volunteers that helped answer questions. I would have been in trouble without you. 

The next photos were taken as the sun was setting on tour day. I had hoped to get a few pictures while the tour was taking place, but it was just too busy. As I mentioned, visitors had a lot of questions. Often, I would be in the middle of answering one question when someone else would come up and ask another. My apologies if I did not get everyone's questions answered fully. I tried.

I think the most asked question of the day had to be "How old is that cactus?" Everyone was surprised that it is only about six years old. I spoke to a couple of people that said they read the blog, but nobody ever mentioned my comment in a post where I said I would give a cactus pad to the first three people that asked for one. Since no one was asking for them, I started offering them to people that expressed an interest in the cactus. 

Another subject of many questions, comments and photos was the horsetail reed growing in a stock tank in the front yard. There may be more stock tanks showing up in Plano in the future.

There were several plants still in bloom, like this Rock Penstemon which did not begin blooming until the week of the tour. Although I have made a point of including native plants in the garden that will extend the blooming seasons as long as possible, I was concerned that there would not be much blooming by tour date. There was no need for those concerns. The garden was full of blooms. People were surprised to find out that I did all of the design and installation of the garden myself. One woman asked if I had a regular job. I assume she thought it required a lot of time and effort to maintain the garden. The truth is, I do not spend much time on maintenance. Most of the time in the garden is because I am expanding or changing things around.

Remember my storage area in the backyard that was filled with rocks, flagstone, and other landscape materials? Here it is after being cleaned up. I moved the flagstone and hid everything else in plain view. One example is the boulder footstool, front and center.

Another example of hiding in plain view is my plant shelf made of extra concrete edging.

All of my homeless plants that still need to find a place in the soil were clustered in a corner.

I made a dry pond out of the remaining boulders. Can you get more water-wise than a waterless water feature?

I made this sedum planter out of an old metal bird bath. A hole rusted out of the bottom years ago and it was just laying around in my storage area with the rocks. Somebody asked me how often I watered it. The truth was that I only watered it once because I created it the night before. I think she kind of figured that out and teased me a bit.

Here is another view of the sedum planter. The flowering tobacco was an attention getter. The tallest one is about six feet tall and no one had seen this variety before. They were comparing it to the foot tall ones frequently found in the home centers. This variety is Nicotiana sylvestris. It will often return from the roots as a perennial or reseed. It is relatively drought tolerant, even with the large leaves.

The Purple Horsemint was a standout in the back garden. It was in peak bloom. I was concerned that some people would be afraid because the flowers were swarming with bees. As far as I could tell, there were no panic attacks and no stings. People loved the Giant Coneflower too.

Several people were educated in asparagus gardening. They were unfamiliar with its growth habits and harvesting. For anyone else that is interested, you harvest spears as they first poke out of the ground in the spring. Any spears that are not harvested will continue to grow to a height over six feet tall and produce fern-like foliage. Visitors were also introduced to the many things you can make with cattle panel, such as asparagus cages, tomato cages, and arches for vine crops like squash and beans.

I was surprised that there was so much interest in my Wooly Pipevine. The leaves are not especially attractive once they mature and are chewed on by pipevine swallowtail butterfly caterpillars. Most of the caterpillars had crawled away to pupate and I had an opportunity to point out the pupa to a few visitors. There was one caterpillar munching away that attracted much attention. One visitor thought I was joking when I called this a pipevine since it was growing on a copper pipe trellis.

I am happy to say the garden came through the tour relatively unscathed and a lot of people learned a little about some unfamiliar plants and a different approach to landscaping.  More people will have an opportunity to see and learn from my garden in the future as I was asked to participate in tours for two gardening clubs. Maybe the landscape standard in Plano is beginning to change.