It’s another busy gardening week! The Yorkton Gardener’s Market begins on Saturday, July 22 at the Prairie Harvest Christian Life Centre (corner of Melrose and Simpson Street); and if you are taking the self-guided tour of the Yorkton in Bloom winners, that is on July 22 as well! Call (306) 786-1776 for details.
Flower shows are a great way to see the best and beautiful of our gardens, and I’ll tell you about two of them that are coming up next month! If you are planning to be in Kamsack on Friday, August 11, you can take in the Saskatchewan Horticultural Association’s 73 Annual Provincial Show, 2:00 to 6:00 Pm at the OCC hall, hosted by the Kamsack Horticultural Society.
And meanwhile, here at home, circle Tuesday, August 15 on your calendar: that’s the date of the Yorkton and District Horticultural Society Annual Fruit, Flower and Vegetable Display Show from 1:00 PM till 5:00 PM at St. Gerard’s Parish Complex, 125 Third Avenue North, Yorkton. It’s a wonderful show and we’d love for you to join us!
I’m on a mission, gardeners. I know many of you take a daily tour (sometimes more than one!) of your gardens, as I do, just to see what’s new. We’ll stop to admire this or that, but often the beauty there never gets any further than the garden. So our task, gardeners, if we choose to accept it, is to bring some of that beauty indoors. Yes, I’m on a crusade to encourage all of us to step out of our gardener’s box and step into one of flower arranging.
Now don’t panic, I don’t mean that we should be creating majestic arrangements more suited to the lobbies of grand hotels! I am talking about appreciating the beauty a plant can give us by bringing a little bit of it indoors where we can see it and enjoy it.
I know sometimes we are reluctant to pick certain flowers from our gardens because we have been babying those plants along and if they finally produce a bloom, we don’t want to pick it! Or maybe we don’t want to destroy the overall look of a mass planting by taking flowers away. Or maybe sometimes we just don’t know what to do with the flowers anyway so we leave them where they are.
But this week, let’s challenge ourselves to bring something indoors. When I was a child, Sweet Pea always gave me the task every few days of making a flower arrangement for the coffee table in the living room, and one for the kitchen table. No flowers in her beautiful garden were “off bounds”. What fun that was! Sometimes, it would be just a dainty vase of bachelor buttons, or maybe one fluffy marigold (“First Lady” was always her favorite) in a teacup. Whatever I made, Mom gave it pride of place in the house, and best of all, we enjoyed the flowers or leaves in a whole new way, each and every day.
Mom’s wonderful wisdom in assigning this job to me not only gave me confidence to just “go for it” and create something, but it also encouraged me to look at the garden in a different way. Sometimes our initial glance at the garden tells us “there is nothing here that I can use”. But if we stay open to the beauty around us, we will suddenly see many possibilities: one hosta leaf in a tall vase; a few stems of beet leaves in a clear glass, so that the ruby stems are visible;
maybe three small marigolds floating in a dessert dish; or a few petunia blooms in a teacup.
Please give it a try: our season is so short, we want to enjoy our plants to the max!
Have a lovely week, wear a hat when you’re working in the garden, and visit us at www.yorktonhort.ca
