With some recent rain soaking the garden nicely, the summer color is vivid and at peak right now. We’ve had a very busy couple of weeks since our Home Garden Tour almost a month ago! We finished most of our planting out in the gardens and have had some excellent tours come through the gardens quite recently. On Sunday, July 28th, we had over 80 attendees of the Perennial Plant Association national conference (Chicago) swing out to the gardens as part of a tour (two buses). We continue to fine tune the gardens for our summer visitors and our education programs continue to popular as well. Yesterday, we had another successful Horticulture Therapy Symposium with 60 in attendance. The StoryWalk, Story & Stroll and other programs continue to be a hit as well. Our 30th Anniversary continues to be a very successful year at the gardens. Many thanks, of course, to our excellent volunteers, supporters, members and visitors!

For those that check on my blog regularly, I’m sorry I haven’t been more regular in recent months. This year, in particular, has been quite busy and while I still find time to take a couple photos each day (interesting shift to using primarily the camera on my phone!), I rarely have the time or energy to put together a blog. I do hope to gain more momentum with returning to this format and will post as often as my available time and energy allows! Sharing the daily escapades of our staff and volunteers along with lots of plants continues to be the goal of this blog which was started over 12 years ago!

This blog features a lot of recent color at the gardens. With heat finally settling in this month, plants are really taking off out in the gardens – including the weeds! At the time of typing this blog, we are about 93% done with installing our annuals which was an amazing record of seven solid weeks of hardcore planting with our excellent volunteers. A recent shift to some very necessary weed control efforts has slowed down planting a bit but we still have some “filler” annuals and quite a few perennials to install over the coming week or two. Our volunteers and excellent grounds staff continue to be paramount in the success of having the gardens look the best they have in 30 years. A big part of celebrating the 30th Anniversary is to proudly say we’ve created another masterpiece and peak summer color is still yet to come (2 weeks?). We’ve had many visitors recently and I’m excited that we have two bus loads of attendees to the Perennial Plant Association (PPA) Annual Conference (Chicago, IL) coming to the gardens in a couple weeks and we’re excited to share the garden with many first time visitors (and green industry VIPs!). More to follow. Get down to the gardens!

I had a great day in Madison, WI today although the weather went from very rainy to a bit muggy! I was on Larry Meiller’s Garden Talk program (Wisconsin Public Radio) which is always fun. Larry is a great guy and the show certainly allows me to shamelessly promote the gardens to a wide listening audience. After checking in with our Friday grounds staff (Larry, Cindy, Chuck, Brian and Sean) at work, I drove through a typhoon to get up to Madison where I visited the Botany Garden and Allen Centennial Garden on the UW-Madison campus before the radio program. The rain had abated after the program finished so I headed over to Olbrich Botanical Garden and enjoyed a tour around one of my favorite garden (photos below). It was a nice day to get my “horticultural fix” in a different city although we’re looking forward to more momentum next week as staff and volunteers continue to refine, plant and beautify our 20 acre garden in Janesville for our 30th Anniversary year!

I’m finding that I’m transitioning to using my smart phone camera almost exclusively for photography in the gardens. After about 15 years of carrying around my Canon PowerShot camera (small, “point and shoot” style…), the convenience of having the phone ready to go has been nice. I wont totally abandon the old-fashioned camera approach but the resolution of modern phone cameras is equal or superior to what I was using previously. Regardless, there is no shortage of color out in the gardens as evidenced in these recent photos. Our volunteers continue to be exceptional in every way. We are over 70% done with planting and have even had some extra planting “episodes” (including last Wednesday and this past Saturday) to continue the great progress in filling the gardens with fun plants. I think our 30th Anniversary “look” out in the gardens will be exceptional although we are quickly trying to address some significant weed issues as the heat finally settles in after a cool spring and slow progression to summer temperatures.

I haven’t blogged in a bit as I’ve been swamped with keeping up with the progress of our spring planting. The 63.5% estimate (regarding percentage of spring planting complete) is quite arbitrary but we are moving quickly to install our annuals and perennials over the coming weeks and have been going non-stop since mid-May. The photo above shows five tough souls planting in the rain tonight out in the Wellness Garden let by Tina B. Our volunteers continue to be exceptional and we’ve had some great assistance with planting from not only our veteran volunteers but additional help from the Bower City Garden Club members, Mercyhealth employees and many others. We continue to see more visitors daily and the gardens have already hosted some early outdoor weddings. The weeds are catching up to us as we juggle planting and other duties but we’re doing our best to make our 30th Anniversary year the best it can be in terms of colorful, engaging and educational displays.