Time marches on, doesn’t it! Get out your calendars, gardeners, and let’s add a couple more listings. On Wednesday, September 20, the Yorkton and District Horticultural Society will be holding their first meeting after our summer break, at 7PM in the SIGN building on North Street in Yorkton. Our special guest speaker will be John Tropin, talking to us about “Water Plants and Fish Ponds”. I know many of you have lovely ponds in your yards, and John will have great information for us about how to start or maintain this project. So don’t miss it! And remember, you don’t have to be a member to attend the meetings, everyone is welcome.
Next, circle Friday, September 22 on your calendar, that’s the date of our Fall Plant and Bulb sale from 9:30 a.m. till 5 p.m. at the Parkland Mall, Yorkton. It doesn’t seem possible that our fall sale is not that far away, but there we are. It’s time to evaluate our yards and see if we need to replace or replenish any bald spots in our plantings! This is a great chance to do just that.
And don’t forget about the Yorkton Gardeners’ Market every Saturday from 9 a.m. till noon at the Prairie Harvest Christian Life Centre (corner of Melrose and Simpson, north parking lot). The advice here is, be there when it opens, because that lovely fresh produce moves very quickly!
I’d like to tell you about something that I saw at the SHA Provincial Show in Kamsack, and I thought it was just so sweet and so unique: fairy gardens. I don’t know where or when the concept originated, but it is a lovely, imaginative way to do up a planter, and every one that I saw in Kamsack was just beautiful!
A fairy garden is a miniature landscape created in a planter. From what I saw, planters that are low and fairly wide across the top seem best suited to this project. Each planter had an assortment of plants, none of them very big, and they were planted up to allow the additions of small accent pieces among the plants like little wooden houses, tiny fences, paths made out of pebbles, and in some cases, little statues of people or fairies.
When I looked at these gardening works of art, it occurred to me that this project is kind of like bonsai, by using miniature plants to create a landscape; and like a terrarium, by using a wide variety of plants in a small space. It also incorporates selecting plants to be a certain scale like in an alpine planting. And on top of that, there’s the fun of adding the little tchotchkes for a touch of whimsy!
I would think that if we were trying this project, we would want to use a container with good drainage. We would want to choose plants that have smaller leaves, to stay in scale with our little landscape. Some choices might be small ivies, small ferns, bacopa, alyssum, portulaca, I’m sure the list goes on!
I think that anyone who has a child in their lives would get a lot of fun working on a planter like this. And even if we don’t, it would still be an interesting challenge to select plants that would look tiny and to-scale even when they are mature and grouped together in a planter. We could create a miniature Zen landscape with rocks and a gravel path…hhmmm… the ideas are coming!
Let’s make a note in our gardening notebooks to try this next spring, just for fun! Hats off to the gardeners who created those beautiful fairy gardens for the SHA show in Kamsack; they were lovely and so interesting!
Visit us at www.yorktonhort.ca and have a great week!
