Monthly Archives: July 2017

‘Gardens and flowers have a way of bringing people together…’

By Posted in Beautiful, Gardens, Natural beauty, Where to go Tagged , , , 6 Comments

We’ve been lucky enough to visit some of the most famous gardens in the world including Kew, Sissinghurst, and Kensington in England, Netherlands’ Keukenhof at tulip time, the National Arboretum in Washington, DC, Montreal’s Botanic Gardens, to name a few.

On July 8 we toured seven outstanding gardens right here in Montgomery County, Virginia, during the 22nd annual New River Valley Garden Tour, the best yet. I emoted all the way home.

They are different from each other, each enviable in unique ways, but if I had to pick just one, it would be the one where rust prevailed. Yup, rust.

The Angle-Relf garden is tucked away on a narrow winding road, set on a hill hidden from view if you headed east. The couple bought the rundown 40-year-old house in 1976 and set about taming its weed-covered four acres that was overly populated with locust and cedar.

To call their creative idyll imaginative is to beg a look at a Thesaurus for better adjectives to do it justice, perhaps fanciful or inspired or quixotic. The pair reclaim and recycle with humor and vision, and always with rusty overtones.

All you need is a rusty propane tank, a bucket and other odds and ends, and voila, a cow!
Wok, tractor seat, and shovel make faces with the help of pie plate, muffin tin, and other rusty bits.
Paint brushes are wide-eyed and all stuck-up.
Mandevilla aka rocktrumpet brightens a corner of the wraparound deck.
Hosta in the kitchen sink.
Wild colors flung about with abandon.
Marigolds blend with rust tones.
What else but a water garden?
Cement encrusted hats rest on bowling ball hat stands
Greenhouse view.
Tour de France rejects.
Round and round: hayrack wheel, BBQ grill, microwave rack.
Retired watering cans.
Giant mushrooms.
Children’s clothes cast in plaster mix.
Garden tools make art.
Breezes blow fabric art where rust reigns.

 

This year’s seven gardens, the Angle-Relf’s, plus the Golden’s, Hagood’s, Hammett’s, Ryan-Plunket’s, Schnecker’s and Wickham’s all all provided multiple chances to fall in love with gardening. It was an absolutely picture-perfect, weather-perfect day.

350 beautiful green acres framed by stream and mountains.
White campanula (bellflower) is a flag against the sky.
Brilliant red of Crocosmia (lucifer) blends patriotically with blue sky and white clouds.
Spring-fed trickle edges garden.
Campanula, aka bellflower or harebell.
Brilliant blue garden accents.
An exuberant dahlia.
Millstones are fountains in cascading stream.
I don’t even like gladioli but these are fantastic set between the brilliant wicker chairs and against the folly walls that are shingled with yellow poplar bark.
Every garden needs a rope swing…
and every front porch, one like grandma’s.
Hydrangea hideaway.
Invitating spot to admire a sweeping valley view.
July 4 fireworks by Mother Nature..
Onions, beans, and tomatoes make a garden too.

 

With apologies to Doctor Seuss.

By Posted in Beautiful, Fun, Gardens, Shopping Tagged , , , 4 Comments

Oh! the places we go
for a view, for a bite,
to see something new,
some special delight.

We’ll shop for a widget,
or bag of birdseed,
sometimes a beer,
and a burger we need.

Sometimes a movie,
or maybe a drive,
a stroll through a garden
glorious! alive!

In springtime flowers
need consideration,
colors and scents,
Mother Nature’s perfection.

We searched at the market,
we looked at Lowe’s,
the most unusual we spied,
was “nested” at Crow’s.

A surprise we found
in a big brown pot,
a cat was inside
very grumpy, we thought.

He would not be moved
nor enticed away,
he liked his pot
on that warm spring day.

Among flowers we bought,
were red geraniums tall
to plant in my pots,
no kitties at all!

Bright blue plant is dwarf, mounding morning glory, ‘Blue My Mind.’
Lemon Drop’ primrose. Heat and drought tolerant and OK in poor soil. A winner!
Duranta sapphire.
Can’t see me now…
…not now either.
Magenta impatiens and purple, red-topped primula viali
I wanted a purple petunia with white ‘paint spatter’ spots, but couldn’t see if for looking.
Five exuberant million bells and matching portulaca.
Geraniums await their pots.
Duranta sapphire blossom.
Saved cookie tins put to good use.
Farmer’s Market plant source.
Some geraniums for my pots.
Grumpy ol’ cat, no hat where he sat.

 

 

A ‘peak’ at a perfect day.

By Posted in art, Beautiful, Travels, Where to go Tagged , , 1 Comment

Mondays have a bad reputation and our Monday that week deserved the label. Awful. But the week redeemed itself with a Wednesday that was perfection.

After a quick trip down the mountain to Roanoke, we lifted our bottomed-out psyches at Mill Mountain Coffee and Tea, then soared with the Paul Villinski installations at the Taubman Museum of Art around the corner.

Villinski’s showcase exhibit “Passage” hovered, as if in an updraft, above the atrium. “Passage,” a large-scale wooden glider with a 33-foot wingspan reminiscent of the balsa wood gliders he loved as a boy, is part precise construction and part whimsey. A thousand black butterflies, carefully fashioned from reclaimed material found on New York City streets, cover the glider and appear to help it stay aloft. “Emblematic of hope and liberation,” the artist says.

Paul Villinski oversees installation of his sculpture “Passage” in Taubman Museum’s atrium. Photo, Stephanie Klein-Davis, The Roanoke Times.

Flight connotes mankind’s desire to leave our earthly concerns behind, Villinski believes. Maybe that’s what lured me — the promise of a few hours to leave behind my concerns from two days before. And it worked! I was spell-bound the minute we walked inside. Peter had to nudge me to turn my attention to the docent just inside the door. “You were transported the minute you walked in,” she said, laughing. Indeed I was. She told me that the glider would actually be air-worthy if it had skins, and if there were a very small person licensed to pilot it.

“Farther,” Villinski’s exhibit in an upstairs gallery, was equally, magically moving, with flights of butterflies and birds, and other flights of fancy that captivated us.

Both “Passage” and “Farther” will be at the Taubman through January 21, 2018.

“Aerialist,” 10′ wide wings made of knife blades, depicts risks of flight..
Close-up of more than 300 found knives.
Husband Peter studies a “Farther” display.
“Prescience, 2017” Dozens of butterflies seem to become a whole, large swallowtail.
Birds morph from obsolete LP records, musical notes in flight.
“Consonance” 1992, found gloves and gold leaf.
“Wishful thinking.”
“Comforter” made from unstitched cotton work gloves. Peter studies “Quilt” in the background.

 

“Homeward Bound,” juried art. Although I didn’t know it beforehand, seventy-four works  by fifty-nine Virginia artists, all winners to my eye, were housed in other galleries. Many pieces are made from found objects — bobby pins, keys, hats, old nightgowns, horsehair — plus fascinating paintings, drawings, and sculpture all helped make our day.

“Homeward bound,” is the Taubman’s first juried art show, and will remain only through July 17. Hurry home.

Genesis Chapman’s first place “Same place two years apart,” depicts a kettle hole on Bent Mountain.
Millicent Young’s “Predator” placed second with her sculpture made from grapevine and horsehair.
“Willie and George and the Briarwood pipe,” one of two third place paintings by Brian Sieveking.
“Power bear” by Susan Jamison.
“These memories too are bound to die,” by Mary Chiaramonte. This one touched me!
Matt Lively’s “Forced evolution.”

We ended our perfect day, such a welcome antidote to Monday, with a walk around City Market. There, I found the perfect peaches and blueberries for our evening to come. The peak of perfection, if I may say so.