GardenBook

  How fortunate  the citizens of Chicago are to have this masterpiece in their city . This trip, I cleverly booked myself into a hotel that was under a 10 minute walk to the garden. I cleared my pre-breakfast calendar , packed for my flight to Boston that afternoon, downed a cup of in-room swill and headed out to Millenium Park. You'd have to work at it to find a climate more dissimilar to mine, and yet this garden continues to inspire me every time I visit . Design is design; habitat is habitat. This is a living garden, surrounded by concrete and skyscrapers.Finches swayed on the seed heads, bees were industrious. I even saw a bunny.What a gift to us all.

 Sometimes business travel lands me near a garden. Who can resist ? Not me - I ended the chores of commerce on Friday and spent the rest of the weekend traveling from garden to garden in New England. Base camp was the garden of my friend Deanne , an artist by trade and a gardener of extraordinary talent. Deanne loves her containers; for her each one is a garden. Her masterful use of color and texture , both within the individual container and it's position relative to the containers around it has created a tapestry that cloaks her entire garden, moving from one colorway to another seamlessly , with no sour notes. Everything you see here is in a pot... ...including this robust Brugmansia In the driveway garden containers combine with plants in the ground. And even more containers line up on the opposite side. Lets move to the back yard.. This one is as tall as me. Hey look, theres stuff in the ground too ! How about this window box ? Ever...

 Sooner or later, it's time for a little oral torture. Occasionally ones dentist provides a bit of ambiance to take the edge off. Some have nice art on the walls. Some have magazines that aren't from October 2007 and have more readable  content than People or Womens Day. My dentist has actual quality music piped in. But Dr. Jed Fox of Pittsford New York, drills, fills and pulls in a garden. Feeling whiny after the hygienist was mean to you ? Suffering through Novocaine drool? Somber after writing a big check ? Go stroll in the garden-you'll feel better ! As if the Lotus weren't enough, he had really cool dogs too.    Now THIS is a pond.   The reflecting pond.

 The imaginary friends and I met in Buffalo this year  (see some background here: GardenRant ) We decided it was time we give Garden Walk a try, so into western New York we came, from California,  Ohio, Mass, New Hampshire, Virginia and Connecticut. Even though we toured steadily for two days , we missed whole neighborhoods. The sheer volume of gardens was staggering, and the bonus was the splendid architecture -block after block, mile after mile. Thumbs up Buffalo.  One of the really intriguing neighborhoods was along Dorchester Avenue where my friends and I dropped our jaws and strolled along the street oogleing the median strip for 2 long blocks, cameras on overload , wondering if the city did this, and if not..who ? At the end of the line, where Dorchester met Bidwell Parkway, we saw a lady with her hose dragged across the street , watering the plantings. Remarkably, she told us that the individual homeowners were  responsible, they water, they plant, the...