The Garden Worm blog Digging up the best dirt on gardening!

Last week my sister Cathy and I made our usual visit to GardenScape, the annual flower and garden show for the Greater Rochester area put on by the GardenScape Professionals Association. The theme for this year was “Recipe for Springtime” and I think that was a difficult theme to pull off for the participants judging by the displays we saw. Wegman’s, of course, was right on the money with lots of veggies and fruits displayed beautifully, but the only other display close to the theme that we could recall afterward was an odd one featuring “stone soup” from the old children’s story. Seemed like old, wizened veggies were randomly thrown all around in the greenery. Not sure what was up with that!

On to the rest of the displays! We loved the bonsai, of course, like this wonderful pine specimen placed in a tree burl.

The Bonsai Society of Upstate New York put on this display with the incomparable Bill Valavanis demonstrating the art of bonsai and discussing some of his specimens. This picture is of one of our cousin’s (Mark Arpag) bonsai specimens. Mark described how it went from a pathetic piece of questionable plant material to this fabulous work of art! Incredible!

The Monroe County Parks Department had a great display, with all sorts of items carved out of the huge trees that they have had to take down over the year. Forgive the blurriness of this picture of their gigantic sprinkling can, as I was laughing so hard when I took it, but wanted to include it in this post.

They had carved a gigantic wooden seat from a tree trunk among other fun items from old trees and brought some huge, hollowed out logs for the kids to go through.

Their display also included a huge fish tank with some of the fish they stock the hatchery in Powder Mills Park with and these wonderful, bright tulips. I think the Monroe County Parks Department has some pretty creative people working there!

Cathy and I were impressed with the gorgeous hardscaping display by Bricks Landscape. We thought this outdoor raised firepit would be just the thing for us, especially with the s’more sticks, as we always love a good bonfire at the lake and now we could have one at home!

But the pièce de résistance of the whole show was the combined display by Oriental Garden Supply and Twin Oaks Landscaping. They won an unprecedented number of awards and certainly deserved them compared to the other displays. I was told that the stone work for this moon gate was built ahead of time, then trucked to the show and finish-assembled on site.

The display garden had some interesting features like the huge hand-hewn barn beam turned into a post for a wonderful lamp

and this odd fountain with the lion’s head. I don’t know what the significance of this is or whether the year inscribed on it means anything, but it seemed sort of out of place even though there was beautiful landscaping around it to make it fit in.

I felt a little disconcerted in their display garden. The plants and shrubs and trees and the way they were used I felt comfortable with,

but the other elements (like the stone bench, the lion’s head fountain, the bistro set, the beam lantern) seemed to be randomly chosen American urban-suburban oddities and less Oriental than I expected. Nevertheless, there were pretty little vignettes tucked in here and there to be found like this sedum/succulent container.

The outstanding plant selections and the way the colors and textures were juxtaposed against each other and placed in the landscape really made this display garden shine.

We had a good time, as sisters usually do when out on an adventure! Did any of you get to any garden shows recently?