NW Flower and Garden Festival

As I mentioned in my last post Louie and I spent several hours the other day at the NW Flower and Garden Festival.  It’s celebrating its 30th year as America’s largest family-owned garden themed show.  It’s truly amazing!   There are a number of of demonstration gardens, which are what I’ll be showing you here.  But there’s also a huge marketplace with hundreds of vendors selling all manner of garden products, as well as miscellaneous show type stuff.   There’s also a large plant market with a number of specialty nurseries who offer miniature conifers, bulbs and tubers, even Japanese maples.  I could only handle it for a few hours before sensory overload hit and we had to leave.  But I got a lot of good pictures and I want to share them with you here.

All of these gardens were created by dedicated teams of volunteers in just the 72 hours preceding the show!  Incredible!  Of course none of them would make it outdoors as planted – they’re not meant as literal gardens themselves and their job is to showcase various themes and styles rather than an actual garden design.  They move in literally tons of rock, soil, mulch and of course hundreds of plants, ranging from a few inches to 20 feet or more tall.  I always get a lot of ideas for my own garden, but of course it’s already so over-planted I don’t really have room for more.  But next year I’ll plan ahead better and get some bulbs at least.  But then the reason we go is just to enjoy the sights.  I hope you do too!

OK, thats about it.  It’d be nice if I’d been able to remember each display, but I didn’t have writing materials and it would have been too hard to remember each one anyway.  But I hope that just the designs themselves will be satisfying for you, as it was for me.  If you have a garden show in your area please do find time to go to it.  You’ll be supporting a good cause and be able to see some amazing garden displays and get your own ideas for your garden at home.  It’s worth the trip.

Happy Viewing,

Steve

Ikebana

I was at the NW Flower and Garden Show yesterday and saw the Ikebana exhibit.  The designs were so attractive and evocative I wanted to share them with you.  According to a pamphlet I picked up Ikebana is described as the Art of Japanese Flower Arranging.   This show was put on by the Seattle Chapter 29 of Ikebana International.  The organization is a worldwide non-profit dedicated to the promotion and appreciation of Ikebana.  It has members all over the world, and 147 chapters in 60 countries with some 7,500 members.  There are 21 of the many styles that are represented in the Seattle Chapter alone, and  there are many more – 3,000 in Japan, I was told.   Their website is http://www.Iiseattlechapter29.org if you’d like more information. Here are the pictures I took yesterday at the Show.

I hope you enjoyed these.  They’re much more powerful in person, of course, but these give you an idea of how lovely they are.

Steve

Onion Art II

With thanks to my cousin Marilyn’s cousin Patrick in France.  Wow!!  He sent them to her because she was having surgery and he wanted her to have something to cry about!  Interesting sense of humor.  I just love the photos and the amazing ingenuity of the unknown artist who created these masterpieces.  I did another post of these a few years ago.  Most of these are all new.

Onion Art

A cousin of mine just sent me these photos from France and I thought they were so cool I just wanted to share them. I don’t have much to say about them because I didn’t get any information,  just the pictures. But they are so unique and original I thought maybe some other folks would appreciate seeing them. That’s it. A simple post for a change… 😉

Enjoy!

Steve

PS. I credit my cousin Marilyn for sending these to me and her cousin in France Patrick for sending them to her… There are many circles that connect with this one here… 😉