There are all sorts of gardens

I've been getting out and visiting my garden friends. It has been a delightful tour of plants and personalities. Plants that make up the gardens, and personalities who pick the plants that make the personality of the gardens. Joe and I stopped in to Charlotte's lovely woodland garden a couple of weeks ago. This garden is a gem of a shade plant garden, chocked full of delicious combinations, textures, special objects and "garden moments". Charlotte is a gem of a gardener. She takes meticulous notes, pays attention to the smallest details, asks lots of questions, has every plant catalog I think she's ever gotten, and knows everyone around who gardens. She's a bundle of fun filled energy packed into a small space, and her garden reflects just that.

Barbie also has a shade garden, but on a much larger scale in many ways. Barbie's expansive eye for texture and fun has taken her in a completely different direction. Hers is the home of the "big leaf" plant. She's got Fatsias and Farfugiums, Colocasias and Alocasias, Musas in several colors, bigleaf Japanese Maples, hydrangeas, and Xanthosomas. But she doesn't stop there. In our hot and humid south, roses are usually a garden bust. Only the most studied and determined and diligent of gardeners even bothers to try. But she is the one who can pull it off, and in huge bouquets. Then there's her growing conifer collection, grasses, agaves and alpinias to bind the big plants together. She keeps records of growth rates, rainfall, temperature. She tops all this off with a full coop of Rhode Island Reds and Bard Rocks, and a huge vegetable garden. In other words, there's a "WOW" at every turn.

Now Ozzie's garden......What can I say?? This small reticent man is the opposite of his garden. He lets his rare, regal, unique plants speak for him. They tell of expeditions to China, Viet Nam, Europe and Japan; of collections of seed along mountain ridges and purchase of plants from the most sacred and secret nursery stashes; of breeding for the most exquisite, the most useful, the most desirable of plants. I've been to Ozzie's many times. I can't even get my fingernails into the breadth of his collection, much less a grasp on the true character of this incredible garden. Quietly, deliberately, patiently he answers my questions. Loudly and insistently this week's explosion of flowers or fruit or color call to me from nooks and crannies all over his garden. I could visit once a week for years and learn a completely new lesson every week.

My most recent trip was not to visit a garden. Yet as I go through my pictures, I must include Saultopaul in the lineup of plants and personalities. My friend Susan is an artist with a fine eye and skilled hand for the most minute detail. At her NW Georgia farm, she has used nature as her palette with that same skill, and orchestrated the components to their best advantage. Susan is a reader. Susan is a thinker. Susan is a moss gardener. Susan can take the most minimal of nature's elements and show me how to see them in rich and meaningful ways.

John Muir said "In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks"

No kidding......