Imagining Snow
Many people think a garden of white flowers is designed to reflect the moonlight yet bright moonlight cooperates for only a brief time each month and what if the moon flowers are not yet in bloom? Compare that to every day imagining white flowers as snow! It could cool our thoughts and inspire memories of cooler times!
Someone thrilled by a visit to Sissinghurst inspired a local community and community leaders, rotary club & Botanical Society to recreate European Style gardens in this country. Located along the Mississippi River, once the site of an old sawmill this garden didn’t make it into my garden guides. I found it only by recommendation of a local who insisted it could not be missed and I agree! It provides a treasure of such spectacular blooms that if you are anywhere near the area it is well worth a stop.
Two distinct gardens totaling 21 acres and divided by a small residential street comprise this Minnesota treat. The Munsinger Garden is the larger informal woodland garden that meanders along the Mississippi River. Up the hill is the Clemens garden and it features seven formal gardens. The Virginia Clemens Rose garden is in memory of the garden’s chief benefactor, and there is a perennial garden, a yellow garden, a resting garden and more worth two hours of strolling and enjoying.
If you are traveling this summer and hope to find a garden to invigorate you during your travel look for gardens everywhere! Ask at visitor information sites and make time to see what you can find. It is important to recognize that a small garden can be so spectacular and not even register in our usual sources of highway, garden guides and web information. A great website that allows you to search gardens near your travel destinations is www.gardenvisit.com/trip_planner, this site based in the United Kingdom, allows you to put in your destination anywhere in the world and then search for gardens or nurseries within the mileage you specify. It will show you the map and provide the link for the gardens in the area.
I garden with a great deal of serendipity and lack the discipline necessary to define a specific color plan for my own flower garden but to find a fully white flower garden is a spectacular surprise. It is said that Minnesota residents really love their winters, welcoming snow and the activities it provides. Perhaps as they wait through their “hot” summer season this garden of snow white flowers represents the season that is most delightful for them. In the mean time we can plant some white flowers in our garden, dianthus, alyssum and white vinca perhaps to cool us down in the dormancy period of a Phoenix summer.
originally published in Roots & Shoots
@http://cals.arizona.edu/maricopa/garden/mgcentral/uploads/RSJuly2010.pdf