Anchorage Garden Club Annual Tour Glimpse

Today was the Anchorage Garden Club's tour of gardens.  This is always a chance to get new ideas, but most importantly a not so gentle reminder to get working in the garden.  There's always at least one garden that makes it all worthwhile.  This time there were a number of gardens that I enjoyed. 

I think this first one was my favorite because of an overall combination of things:  probably the widest variety of plants; a number of spectacular individual flowers; while only about three years old, it looked fairly established;  names of many of the plants.



Look at how amazing the flowers are.  The first two are both red bee balm.

I think the bright red splashes in this second picture come out of those little buds in the previous picture.  This second plant is a further along. 

Artichoke

Dinner Plate Dahlia

Dinner Plate Dahlia Bud Opening

This is Jean Simmons, the gardener responsible for all the flowers above.






Jean's house was the lone South Anchorage location on the tour.  Then we went to see the cluster of four gardens in and around Bootlegger's Cove.

We were told this one is a bristlecone pine. That got our attention. From blueplanetbiomes:

If you could imagine a living tree as old as the pyramids of Egypt, what do you think it would look like? It would look like a bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva,the oldest known tree species in the world.

The bristlecone pine only lives in scattered, arid mountain regions of six western states of America, but the oldest are found in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains of California. There the pines exist in an exposed, windswept, harsh environment, free of competition from other plants and the ravages of insects and disease. The oldest bristlecones usually grow at elevations of 10,000 to 11,000 feet.

The oldest known tree is "Methuselah", which is 4,789 years old. . .

 As you can see, it is thriving in Anchorage, and it could have another 4,000 years to live.




I'm a sucker for birch bark and this tree was special.  I should have asked, because I couldn't get a definitive answer online.  Wikipedia lists some 15 North American birch species and 18 European and Asian species.




The bristlecone is the tree in the middle of the photo below, its top reaching the bottom of the big window.  The birch is on the right, and the tall skinny tree on the left is a poplar, I believe she said it was Scandanavian.

The newspaper clearly said to leave dogs and strollers at home.  That makes sense.  But the friend we went with was dog sitting and had the dog in the car.  But there were four houses nearby and we decided to walk around the neighborhood;  we'd just keep the dog out on the sidewalk.  When we got to the house on the left, the owner insisted we could take the Daisy around.   (She had her own dog with her in the driveway.)

As luck would have it, the President of the Garden Club happened to be visiting this garden and saw the dog in the back and let us know dogs and children were not supposed to be there.  (The paper only said strollers, not children.)  We assured her that was our intention, but that the owner insisted we take her rather than have one of us wait with her in front.  The owner didn't even know the President was there.  It was all worked out amiably.  Life is full of little surprises.