Colorful Planters

 I have been hunkered down all day working on maps and editing. Mostly maps. Here are some pictures from a couple of weeks ago. These planters are in Onekama.

This one has coleus, blue lobelia, a sunpatiens, and an elephant ear. Shows what a beautiful effect you can get without buying expensive plants.

This one has tuberous begonias and a grass.

And a closer view of just the two types of coleus.

And now I'm going back to maps. I want to get two more days worth done yet tonight.

See Onekama Township Parks

Holland Centennial Park Gardens

 I thought I showed you some pix last year of the gardens at the park where the Art in the Park vendor event is held, but apparently not. They are very nice!

The gardens are dedicated to L. Frank Baum because his family cottage was nearby, and it is believed that he wrote a fair amount of The Wizard of Oz while at the cottage. The book is a frame covered with 6000 plants. It is taken inside every winter.

I'll only show you a few of the garden beds. There were many! This one has several kinds of hosta - big ones- a purple heuchera, and a border of begoinias.

I love this! It's a very light-colored Hakone grass with really dark heuchera.

One whole garden was edged with alternate coleus and begonias.

Mass plantings of zinneas were bright! This has a racemed hydrangea behind it.

This was also one of my favorites. This is two different kinds of coleus both in the Flamethrower series. The red is 'Adobo Pink' and the green is 'Salsa Verde.'

I did OK at the event. The weater was cool (good), but drippy with sprinkles (hard to manage books, and lower attendance). The worst was I had a stomach ache all afternoon. Only a minimal clue why. Pretty much gone now.

I am declaring tomorrow a mostly rest day.

I may have figured out how to force Facebook to post a picture. We'll see. Of course it's a pain in the butt.

See Hemlock Crossing and More

Mason County Garden Club Tour 2026

It's been several years since I was actually home when the Mason County Garden Club Tour was being held, but this year it all worked out. The stops this year were all in Ludington.

This is a special year for the Club-- it is their 100th Anniversary, and also the 24th Garden Tour they have hosted. Because of this, 4 of the 7 sites were at public locations the club maintains, and one of those had a craft you could make. I may talk about those another day, but I want to focus on the 3 private gardens.

Here is a nice walkway corner. It's edged with the Donkeytail Euphorbia and filled with a petunia planter.

This garden had mostly traditional plantings and groupings, but it was nicely done. The owner mentioned the gardners' war with the urban deer (her fencing was removed for this tour), and ironically enough, I saw a doe and two fawns just around the corner, cruisin' for a snack.

This was my favorite, and it turns out I know the owner. This is just one view of the garden... it's filled with quirky garden art, different levels, and little nooks tucked between buildings and hedges and stuffed with plants.

Now I'll show you a few of my favorite plants, or pairings of plants.

This is another Heuchera- 'Changeling'- that I like a lot.

And here is a beautiful coleus planter. Coleus is a lot like the heuchera- they come in an amazing variety of colors and shapes. But they are annuals. (You may recall I tried to keep some over the winter- I had a little success which you'll see one day soon)

This is a really nice pairing of a coleus and a heuchera. Of course no one seems to keep track of the names of any of these cultivars, which you know I want to know.

Here is, perhaps, my favorite of the day. This is a begonia from a patented series called Space Age, possibly 'Black Hole.' Of course, I can't start playing with begonias unless I magically sprout a greenhouse, or at least more space with good light, to keep them over the winter.

We did not know where the gardens were located until we bought the tickets at the start. I had thought I'd walk as much of the route as I could since the day was not blistering hot. And after seeing the map, I decided I could walk the whole thing. 4.6 miles.

Did a little editing and some cleaning up at home.

Miles walked in 2026: 223.7
Miles walked for the Onekama Challenge: 35.5

See Mason County Garden Club Tour 2018

Philadelphia Flower Show 2026- Begonias

You know I love begonias. In my dream world I'd have hundreds-all different.

It seemed like there were not as many unusual ones this year, but here are a few. This one is 'Soli Mutata," and it's the only one in this bunch that I have shown from another year. The leaves supposedly change color in the sun- hence the name

Some of them didn't have a variety name. This was just identified as a Begonia Rex. All that means is that it's in the group of plants with over 500 cultivars that all have large fancy leaves.

This one is called 'Snoopy." I'm not sure why.

'Tiger Kitten' is similar to 'Kit Kat' and also another one called 'Little Darling,' so I guess you can't draw conclusions about naming based on something like spots.

This one was large and unidentified, but it took the red ribbon in its group.

And finally, this was only identified as being in the 'Superba' group. But it took the blue ribbon. Not only is it blooming, but the spots on the leaves are pink.

I was up more than I was down today, and I think I'll be good to go tomorrow. And go I must- to the grocery store!

See begonias

Visiting Margaret's Garden

I am going to try to get some plants going for the gardens over the winter. I do not have a track record of being very good with this, although I did OK last year. I'm going to try some coleus this year. Friend Margaret gave me cuttings from two different ones, a dark purple and this interesting variegated one. Look at the scalloped edges on the leaves.

She has a huge fenced garden- her whole back yard. She has vegetables and all kinds of flowers. A lot of them are tubers and bulbs she has to take in every winter. I don't have the patience for that at all. These are begonias that should only be good for one season. But she says she takes them in and every year they come back.

This is her back porch. Look at all the plants! She apologized because it's not at peak beauty. Hey, it's September. I think it looks great.

This is a really healthy Jimsonweed. She called it a moonflower. Common names are all over the map. It's Datura stramonium. Ingesting any part of the plant can cause severe altered mental states and even death. So, enjoy looking, but don't get the sap in your mouth!

There were lots of other things I could have taken pictures of, but I didn't. Oh well. These are the annuals along her front walkway. She says the petunias have bloomed all summer even without very consistent deadheading.

I enjoyed the tour! I'm glad she was home to show me. We had left it that I would come snatch some coleus from the front whether she was there or not. But I got the full tour.

I spent a big portion of the day doing errands. There weren't any big glitches with any of them, so that's good. I have a preliminary dentist appointment tomorrow.

I also edited and answered various correspondence, blah, blah.

See Margaret's Garden

Chillin'?

 We certainly weren't chillin' as regards to the temperature. It was a hot day! However, we definitely made today a rest day. Did some laundry and puttered a bit but mostly relaxed. It was a darn good thing we didn't need to go out in the middle of the day because Marie's street was being paved! This is accomplished so much easier and better than when I was a kid. And I know that crew was a lot hotter than we were.

I'll show you more pictures from Sonnenberg Gardens today. Here is another view in the Rock Garden. I sure did like that space.

This is just a nicely-blooming garden. It was actually part of the greenhouse complex- overflow plants.

Here is another long view of the Old Fashioned Garden. You can see hints of some of the blooms between the hedges. The architecture is such an important part of the gardens, it often makes the scene extra delighful.

This is a plant combination that I thought was particularly successful. Red amaranth, Amaranthus erythrostachys, and a pink coneflower.

They had combined these in several locations, and I also really like this. It's Persian Shield Strobilanthes dyeriana, and one of the begonias, maybe 'Gryphon.' You know I love begonias. When I get to be garden queen with an unlimited budget, I'll have a Begonia garden.

And for the orchid lovers, this is an Oncidium orchid, possibly 'Sweet Baby,' but there are a lot that are very similar.

We played a couple of games, and may be ready to do something more energetic tomorrow.

See Heart of the Lakes Trail paving See Sonnenberg

Having a Blast with Ellen

We went to the home of Marie's friend, Ellen, today.

She had some beautiful begonias in planters.

We ate lunch and then she wanted us to help her finish a jigsaw puzzle because she said she was having trouble with it.

Marie and I do a lot of puzzles. Our first, middle, and final comments were that there were a whole bunch of pieces missing from what was a brand new puzzle. It became a challenge to try to figure out where the pieces we did have were supposed to go. We would then take a picture and send it to the company.

When we started working on it, Ellen's son said, "They're probably all there, you just are being fooled." Right. Have I mentioned that Marie and I do a lot of puzzles?

Anyway, here's the status of the puzzle after we had put in or arranged all the pieces we had.

Then Ellen started to pick up some trays she uses to sort pieces. Ha! There were three more piles of pieces.

By then, we knew every missing piece by heart, and we had the whole thing finished in a flash.

Ellen was embarrassed, but I thought it was hilarious. The exact same thing happened with a puzzle I tried to finish at the home of one of my hosts on the big hike! We sure had fun.

In the evening we went to a Veteran's dinner- just a social gathering- with Ed.

See Inside the Trinidad

Mason County Garden Club Flower Show 2023

The Mason County Garden Club hosts a standard flower show every two years, and even though I was gone for 18 months, I managed to not miss one!

For a small club, I think they do a really good job with the shows. They found a larger venue for this one, too. Today, I'll just give you a sort of overview. The first two pictures are simply attractive plant-y decor that welcomed people as they came in the door.

Then you entered the main room. You may recall from all my posts about the Philadelphia Flower Show (and two previous Mason County ones) that the primary focus of a "standard flower show" is competition. This is where all the horticultural exhibits were. Think something like the county fair for 4-H.

I don't fully understand the categories, but one of them was "From the Ground Up," which had bulbs, corms, rhizomes and tubers in it. Within that category, there was a whole row of tuberous begonia entries. Today, I'll just show the line-up to give you an idea of the variety of entries, colors, etc. What I don't understand is if all these begonias would be judged against, say, a single iris (which wouldn't be blooming in July, but just "if.") which would fit in the same category.

Flowering Trees and shrubs included Hydrangeas. The white ones seemed to be organized separately from the colored ones. Here's the white row.

It's July, so there were a lot of lilies.

There were whole categories for just foliage. There were ferns, conifers, and hosta. Look at the range of sizes and colors of hosta!

Another room had photography and educational displays, and the third room had things like I show you all the time from Philadelphia- place settings, small niches, etc. I don't know if a small club chooses from a list of the categories they want to offer for competition. Obviously a small group can't have entries like the front porches, outdoor offices, etc that the Convention Center has room for. Not to mention that a small club needs to come up with a viable number of entries in each category.

There is plenty of good material here for a couple more days of blog posts. I'll probably show you some winners tomorrow, and then some of my favorites after that.

For a parting shot, here's the blue ribbon entry in "A Season in the Sun" Flowering Annuals. I think maybe a subcategory of one species in a planter or something. This is a New Guinea Impatiens. Stunning!

In other news, I got "in the zone" on one of my priority projects and worked hard on that all day. That means I didn't move around very much, so I'm a bit stiff. I better switch off with some gardening again tomorrow, but I always feel that if I'm really in a mood to work on something I'm supposed to be doing, I should take full advantage of that!

See MCGC Show 2021