We recently went on a Louisville garden tour that covered as wide a variety of gardens as one could find; gloriously native, wondrously creative, from-the-heart homemade and by-the-book linear.
Which caused me to come home and look through our several zillion seasonal photographs – (Which, by the way, I have on a splendid Power Point available for public-meeting consumption) – seeking a definition of our eight horticultural acres beyond seriously whimsical with elevated moods of well-flowered nonsense.
So I turned to poems to seek a more definitive definition.
Hidden Hill has meadow flowers
That can bloom for many hours
But if it’s yellow blooms you seek
You gotta wait at least a week
Which seemed like a pretty good start to a definition, but didn’t quite cover the wide variety of trees on the place, including the almost confused-looking, pink-and-purple tri-colored beech.
If it’s colorful leaves you seek
No need to wait another week
Our goofy beech is out in glory
Giving cover to this story
Which doesn’t quite cover all the whimsy that lives in our garden, most of it involving recycling old stuff that didn’t always amount to much even as new stuff. But it’s the thought that counts. Such as the teapot fountain given by staff and friends to Bob and Janet Hill on the occasion of their 50 years of quiet, even-keeled matrimony.
Teapot, teapot on a stand
Giving us a helping hand
Splashing water on our planet
Showing love for Bob and Janet
But there has to be someplace in all this for our Watering Can Man, who waited too long for even a bit part in the Wizard of Oz. He is pretty much the first thing people notice here while suddenly wondering what planet they are on.
Yes, our nursery has a man
Made in part of watering can
And metal plug to form a nose
While splashing water on his toes
And what’s gardening without the precious columbines that are much more sturdy and lasting than they look, are very happy in part shade, but will take more sunshine than you might expect.
Columbine, oh columbine.
Sweetly pink old friend of mine
Full of Mother Nature’s graces
Showing up in funny places
Finally, while once we were accused of having everything at Hidden Hill but the kitchen sink, that problem was solved with the remodeling of Churchill Downs – from which an old sink found a new home on our Halcyon Road.
Don’t you for one moment think
That we don’t have a kitchen sink
And trees and plants and other stuff
And that for now is quite enough