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An All-American Garden Tour in Newtown, Connecticut
by DIG-IT
Garden Tour in Newtown, Connecticut Benefits the Bird & Butterfly Garden At Lockwood Farm, Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station
Four private gardens in Newtown will be open to the public for a one day garden tour on Sunday, July 11, from 11am to 4pm. The tour is sponsored by DIG IT! Magazine to benefit the Bird & Butterfly Garden at Lockwood Farm in Hamden, Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES). The Bird & Butterfly Garden is maintained by the Spring Glen Garden Club of Hamden. DIG IT!, the Art & Science of East Coast Gardening, is a free, online gardening magazine covering Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
The one-acre Bird and Butterfly Garden is a partnership between the CAES and the Federated Garden Club of Connecticut (FGC). Designed by FGC members, it is handicapped accessible. The garden’s three areas – butterfly meadow, native shrubs on a sand hill, and a formal garden with butterfly plants, two ponds and a berry patch for birds – require continual maintenance, updating and funding.
“It’s a sanctuary for people to see the plants and landscaping arrangement there. It’s an enjoyable, peaceful place for people to visit with a tremendous display of plant color. It’s an educational experience as well and the plants are labeled,” says Dr. Louis Magnarelli, CAES director, who is trying to keep the station intact despite budget issues. “No state dollars can be used for the upkeep of this area. State funds for our operating costs have been cut. Private funds, including donations from the public, are used to pay for the replacement of plants, hiring a seasonal, temporary worker to assist with upkeep during the summer, etc.” Proceeds from the garden tour will benefit the Bird and Butterfly Garden. People can visit the garden during normal workdays and talk with CAES scientists.
On the Newtown tour, visitors will experience the gardens at four special properties, including noted garden author Sydney Eddison’s 49-year-old garden made famous with first book, A Patchwork Garden. Her 2.5-acre garden imparts a sheltered, protective ambience with terraced perennial/shrub borders, mature rhododendrons and trees and container garden surrounded by woodland. “Even I am simply astounded. It wasn’t meant to be something other than our life,” she says of family and friends. “I just loved doing it. The intent was not to make this enormous garden. I was just so enamored of the activity.” Eddison will talk with visitors about the evolution of her garden. Her seventh and latest book, Gardening for a Lifetime: How To Garden Wiser as You Grow Older, will be signed and for sale.
Other gardens include the garden of Brid Craddock, president of the Connecticut chapter of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers. Her 2.5-acre garden with unusual shrub and perennial borders, a reflecting pool with coterie of jewel-like beds. Native wetland, deer-resistant and unusual plants specially grown in Craddock’s greenhouses for use in her installations will be available for purchase for tour-takers on tour day.
Another garden’s mature tropicals and exuberant hardy giant plants create a jungle-like, exotic cottage-garden within an English-style structure. The two-acre property and buildings are listed on The National Register of Historic Places. A Master Gardener/landscape designer’s garden for flowering shrub lovers has herbs, roses, more than 50 hydrangeas, potted plants and mature shrubs usually seen only in catalogs. Each garden is distinctly different; each exhibits diversity of Newtown’s landscape and its resultant design. All are located within ten minutes of each other.
Newtown Deli & Catering is offering ticketed tour-takers a 20% discount on lunch. Eat in or take lunch out to the gazebo in The Pleasance, a town garden reserved for tour visitors. Kim Proctor, Southbury landscape designer and artist who also illustrated Eddison’s book, designed The Pleasance, originally a gas station/tractor repair shop. Scudder Smith, owner/publisher of The Newtown Bee, owns the five-acre garden.
These four special gardens in Newtown will be open to the public only on Sunday, July 11, 11am to 4pm. Rain or shine. Cost: $15/person with pre-registration received by July 7 or $20/ person at the gate. To pre-register, please send check or money order for $15/person payable to DIG IT! Magazine to: DIG IT!, PO Box 397, Augusta, NJ 07822. Directions to gardens will be provided upon registration. To pay on tour day, visitors can stop first at Heirloom Gardens, LLC, 59 Main St., Newtown, to register at $20/person (cash or check) and get directions to the other gardens.
Information: 973-570-0759; mary@dig-itmag.com; www.dig-itmag.com
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published June 21, 2010
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