SLGC’s Own Visiting Gardens Ideas – We Are Looking for Yours!

In this newsletter you will see ideas from the GCA for glorious overseas travels, for one-day garden visits at Martha Stewart’s home in Maine or, during the freezing season at home, in Naples, Florida, for those of you who winter near there.  But we are also planning more local visits for our own club members.  And we would very much appreciate knowing what you would like to see that is closer to us at home!

When I first joined the SLGC, we had a full-scale club meeting complete with a bus trip and a chef-fy seated luncheon at the Chef’s Garden in Huron.  Our President suggests that it may be time to go there again, and I agree – Show of hands?  You need not commit for certain right now, but if you think this would be a fun day, please let me know at robinslgc@gmail.com so I can make arrangements.

Now in the planning stage is a two hour walk-and-talk in downtown Cleveland, seeing the new sculptures in the gardens of Public Square, the floral installation that many of our members helped to create at the downtown library, and our club’s Centennial garden sculpture installation on Lakeside.  We plan to offer an optional lunch to follow.  Does this idea intrigue you?  Let me know!

Personally, I have always wanted to visit Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Columbus.  Is anyone else interested in a day-long trip like this, perhaps taking in more than one site, or is the club more interested in shorter events? 

Northern Ohio is home to a great many arboreta, both large and small, as well as specialty display gardens for roses, daylilies, azaleas, and various flowering trees.  Is this the sort of garden visit that amuses you?  Or a tour and lecture of a Japanese style garden?  Northern Ohio has a lot of these also.

Or would you prefer to visit specialty nurseries?  We used to have some very special “shopping trips” from time to time.  Now that Covid closures are in the rear view mirror, this could be a wonderful thing to do again – or visits to special plants sales!  If there is some such activity you would like to do as a small group, please let me know so I can schedule it!

Finally, in our pre-Covid era small groups of SLGC ladies embarked on multi-day travels in caravans of a few private cars.  Your VG committee is looking at a five or so day loop (includes drive time both ways) around Michigan, or perhaps similarly visiting great public and private gardens in the Chicago area.  This sort of travel takes a lot of planning.  If you might be interested in taking part (again, nothing will be set in stone right away), please let me know which might be of more interest to you so I can get started on designing something special.  We might include an historic house tour as well, or a bit of shopping -- I brought home 15 lbs of mushrooms from our tour that ended in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, some years ago. 

The photo illustrating this article is from our SLGC Visiting Gardens trip in April of 2014, on the front porch of the mansion at Cylburn Arboretum in Baltimore.  We enjoyed crabcakes at the Baltimore Country Club that night, having spent three days seeing private and public gardens and a GCA flower show.  Later we travelled to Longwood Gardens, the Mt. Cuba Center, Winterthur (where we also enjoyed show of the Costumes of Downton Abbey), the native gardens as well as the art of the Brandywine River Museum, and the mushroom farms.  As you see, we were all still smiling!

The VG Committee will do the research, the schedules, the planning.  But we would dearly love to know what kind of visits you think would be fun.  So speak up, Friends, and let’s hit the road!