Four-Stop Garden Tour On July 11

Will Benefit Shoreline Bird & Butterfly Garden

Four private gardens in Newtown will be open to the public for a one day garden tour on Sunday, July 11, from 11 am to 4 pm.

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,” he added. “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.”

Sunday’s Tour

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.”

Ms Eddison will talk with visitors about the evolution of her garden. Her seventh book (her latest release), 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 grows unusual shrub and perennial borders, a reflecting pool with coterie of jewel-like beds with native wetland, deer-resistant and unusual plants specially grown in her greenhouses for use in her installations.

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 within ten minutes of each other. The tour will be held rain or shine.

Tickets are $20, and will be available on Sunday at Heirloom Gardens, LLC, 59 Main Street. Directions to all the gardens will also be available at that location.

Newtown Deli & Catering is offering ticketed tour-takers a 20 percent discount on lunch, and The Pleasance, the garden at 3 Main Street owned by Newtown Bee Publisher R. Scudder Smith, has been  reserved for tour visitors who would like to enjoy their lunch there. Additionally, Kim Proctor, a Southbury landscape designer and artist who also illustrated Gardening For A Lifetime for Ms Eddison book, and helped design The Pleasance, will be on site Sunday afternoon.

For more information contact Dig It! editor Mary Jasch at 973-570-0759 or mary@dig-itmag.com, or visit www.dig-itmag.com.