Mid west garden musings

I have been away in Minnesota this past week. Visiting Sarah and her friends and generally having a marvellous holiday.

But gardeners are always on the alert – what’s growing here? How are their design ideas adpated to the climate and can I borrow from them?

This is one harsh place to be if you love gardening. The winters are cold and very very long. We were out at Dan and Katherine’s gorgeous farm in Wisconsin (more later in another post) and in summer you just see fantastic opportunities for landscaping and enjoying the growing season and creating.  But I don’t know if I could manage the long pause in the projects for four to five months a year.

Sarah lives in town and a good long walk around her neighbourhood revealed all sorts of garden styles. Lawn is the default. Lots of lawn. But as most houses have this little steep slope up the garden, I was intrigued to see just how people landscaped this tricky area.

Slopes. They are my usual gardening design dilemma.

I was suprised to see just how much the hosta featured in the solutions. I do like this small leaved one in flower. It was most ubiquitous.

And as a lot of these gardens are small, I did like how people planted tomatoes and herbs in among the rudbeckias, sedums and sunflowers.

And speaking of tomatoes. I arrived in lovely glut season for them at the midtown farmer’s market. Orbs. By the bucketload.

Don’t they look tempting? I can see why people love canning in America. Who wouldn’t when you can get such a huge volume of tomatoes and find ways to preserve them over the long winter?

The beets came in all colours, the squashes were lurking in big bins at the front of stalls, and I was amused to see huge bouquets of dill flowers.

Was I missing a design trick here? No, it’s for pickling the cucumbers. People were walking away with huge armfuls of them.

But back to flowers.  Dahlias in the market, but not the abundance of flowers in the domestic setting.

Luckily the public planting – here at Hiawatha Falls – has embraced the easy shrub solution. Sedums and grasses.  I think these are calamagrostis, but I’m not sure.

The effect is pleasing. Not stunning, but then we all know that public planting schemes have to be low maintenance, low cost and high impact.

So sedums to the rescue. Again.