A labyrinth is designed to invite reflection. Unlike a maze, there are no obstacles; one can simply enjoy the journey along a defined path. So it is in the labyrinthine garden of HolLynn D’Lil’s home in the Sonoma County town of Graton.

A series of raised beds, the garden’s design has a second purpose: It allows D’Lil to tend every portion from her wheelchair via concrete paths.

The labyrinth is carved from land between D’Lil’s modest house and a creek. Each loop contains a theme with the design and plantings honoring the body, mind and heart. All leads to the center spiral, which D’Lil likens to the inner ear. It’s the culmination of a symbolic journey into her “listening-path labyrinth.”

She was a fresh graduate of Texas AM, driving home after a teaching job in 1967, when an automobile accident left her a paraplegic.

About eight years later, the disability rights movement began to get under way. “By now, I had two grade-school children,” she says, “children that I could not take to the library or the movies for lack of access.”

Wanting to be heard, she became involved in the 1977 sit-in at San Francisco’s Federal Building to urge the Carter administration to implement Section 504, the model for the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

That put her on the path to more than 30 years of involvement as an advocate for accessibility. She spent 11 years as accessibility specialist for California’s Department of Rehabilitation, served on federal and state boards, consulted on codes and regulations, and has presented hundreds of seminars throughout the state.

“One must listen in order to understand the diverse needs of the physically impaired and how best those needs can be addressed,” she says.

Eight years ago, needing a break from the demands of her work, D’Lil set out with a friend to explore the North Coast.

The trip home to Sacramento, took them through Graton, where she was struck with the town’s accessibility. “Shops, restaurants, sidewalks, there was nowhere I could not easily go,” she says. “Tiny Graton had it right.” Deciding she didn’t need to live in Sacramento to do what she did, she made the move.

Through her love of gardening, D’Lil quickly connected to her new community. She is now helping establish a park on unused property in the town center and is in her second term as president of the Graton Community Club, which hosts its 86th Flower Show and Plant Sale this month.

As she rolls through the labyrinth, raised beds allow her to tend plants using long-handled pruners and cultivators. Metal garbage cans put dwarf citrus within plucking height.

Lettuce is harvested out of a wheelbarrow. Runoff from the hard surfaces is diverted into an underground water-retention system that prevents overflow into the creek.

Charming touches are found throughout the garden: a heart-shaped red glass paperweight on a small bench in the “freeing of the heart” loop; an antique birdcage, dripping with potato vine; salvaged columns arranged like ruins at the back entrance.

When D’Lil asked her son if he’d build her a toolshed resembling an outhouse, the result was a miniature, ornate Victorian that D’Lil calls “the outpalace.” A path leads to her art studio, with its colorfully trimmed windows and doors.

Ponds in galvanized livestock tanks provide D’Lil with a “big education about dragonflies” as she follows every step of their life cycle: mating, egg laying, nymphs attached to cattails growing in the ponds, and emergence as the “simply gorgeous” bright-orange flame skimmers.

“The garden is a constant wonder to me,” she says. “I never cease to be amazed. All it takes is sunlight, water and a little food, and it becomes a work of art.”

Artistry extends into the concrete floors of her house; a painted rendition of the creek wanders through, complete with a stenciled fish and paw prints along its banks. A meadow of painted wildflowers takes the place of a rug under the dining table.

D’Lil added footage to her small house so she could install windows to frame views of the garden, which is certified as a Habitat Garden by the National Wildlife Federation.

There is nothing about the garden that shouts “accessibility,” yet it is something everyone can enjoy – as D’Lil believes all places should be.

Fall flower show

The Graton Community Club hosts its annual fall flower show and plant sale from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Oct. 12 at Graton Road and North Edison Street. Free; $10 lunch 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Proceeds benefit the local college scholarship program and the club’s building fund. (707) 829-1354.

Yvonne Michie Horn is a freelance writer. E-mail: home@sfchronicle.com

With a big greenhouse already in place, the Montana Women’s Prison is getting ready to start growing a lot of food.

Deputy Warden Bob Paul said an engineer who helped design the garden area estimated that the greenhouse and garden will produce enough vegetables to meet all of the prison’s needs and still allow for the donation of 1 1/2 to 2 tons a year to the Billings Food Bank.

The 80-by-30-foot greenhouse was recently built just to the north of the prison, which is at 701 S. 27th St. Plans are to plant a 7,500-square-foot outdoor garden next spring, after the whole area is fenced off.

Paul said the garden will help offset food costs at the prison and provide a community service with the Food Bank donations.

“And then the ladies get involved, getting some life skills and vocational training,” he said.

Last week, the Billings City Council agreed to vacate the alley behind the prison, selling it to the state for $20,772. Paul said the prison will have gates on either end of the alley but will not build on it, to preserve access to underground utilities.

A similar greenhouse and garden are planned for the Pine Hills Youth Correctional Facility in Miles City. Paul said the state allocated a total of $300,000 for both projects.

Behind the women’s prison, the outdoor garden will be planted on the south side of the greenhouse. Most of the quarter block of prison-owned property north of the greenhouse will be left vacant for now.

Paul said the prison had hopes of building a warehouse on that portion of the property, but there is no funding for such a project on the horizon.

A man who lives across the street from the prison and happens to be an arborist suggested planting an orchard on the land, Paul said, and that’s a possibility that the prison is considering.

Paul said the fence should be installed before winter, which is good news for the prison’s food service director, Bill Peterson, who wants to get a few crops like spinach planted for early harvest.

“With a greenhouse, our growing season will be just about nine months,” Paul said.

Closing the alley and fencing the property will also prevent people from getting too close to the rear of the prison yard. As it is, people have been known to walk down the alley and toss cellphones, cigarettes, cans of beer and other contraband over the fence.

The prison has already sunk a well that will provide water for irrigating the garden, and it will be used for watering the rest of the prison grounds, resulting in another cost savings, Paul said.

And though the main features of the project have been funded by the state, Paul said, the prison is still looking for donations of ground cover, weed barriers, wood chips and other supplies.

“If anybody’s got donations or resources they want to dump into this, we’d appreciate it,” he said.

It seems like every year the London Design Festival extends its creative tendrils further and further into the metropolis. This year it’s the turn of Seven Dials—the miniature round-about where seven quaint Covent Garden streets meet— to be colonised by the creative great and good.

Dezeen have comissioned 7 renowned designers to erect an installation each above one one of the Seven Dials cobbled roads. For the most part, the odd ‘hipstallations’ were inspired by the areas colourful development from inner-city to slum to thriving cafe culture hot spot.

The most visually spectacular of the lot would have to be Canadian designer Philippe Malouin‘s clear PVC “Bunting,” a playful twist on a British street icon. We also particularly enjoyed “The Birds of Seven Dials,” an arch of bird cages representing the areas forgotten past as a bird market—the cages poignantly left open and empty.

Paul Cocksedge contributed only this floating mobile phone number, tempting passers by to give it a call. We wont spoil the surprise for you. Give him a ring.

Walnut Hill Garden Club of Hanover will host a lecture and slide show titled “Gardening for the 21st Century” by Marie Stella, landscape historian and landscape designer, at 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 2 at Phoenix Lodge, Broadway and Washington streets, Hanover.

The lecture is free and the public is invited.

Stella holds graduate certificates in landscape design and landscape design history from Radcliffe College, Harvard University. In 2009, Stella’s home, Beaver Lodge in Shelburne Falls, which she designed and built for sustainability, was the first single family home certified to have earned a Platinum level “green” level, the highest rating possible from the U.S. Green Building Council LEED/E for Homes. The Center for Ecological Technology, a nonprofit organization offering green building services across western Massachusetts, certified the home. It was the sixth home in Massachusetts that had earned the LEED Platinum rating.

In her Hanover lecture, Stella will discuss how a sustainable landscape can address present resident needs without adversely impacting the ability of future residents to meet new and changing needs. Addressing environmental awareness, Stella will highlight ways to use plant material to clean air, soil and water and to restore the ecological systems.

Topics will include dry gardening, plant buffer zones, the lawn and invasive species. New directions in water management concentrate on the permeable ground plane, mulches and natural swimming pools without chemicals. Heirloom and unusual varieties of herbs, vegetables, fruits and flowers bind people to their past; Stella will discuss why it is important to preserve the full range of genetic possibilities of such plants for the future.

To reserve a place or for more information, call 671-826-6329 or email: walnuthillma@hotmail.com.
 

On Wednesday, Oct. 10, the Arrangers of Marblehead Garden Club will present renowned floral designer and lecturer Constance McCausland at St. Andrew’s Church, Lafayette Street in Marblehead. Refreshments will be served at 1 p.m. Donation is $10, payable at the door. For more information, contact Nancy at 617-750-3424 or Abby at 781-799-9231.

McCausland is a nationally accredited flower-show judge, past president of the Massachusetts Judges’ Council and has served as chairman of amateur competitions and exhibits for the New England Flower Show. Her designs have been featured at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Symphony, the Addison Gallery and at the Junior League decorators’ Show House. McCausland also enjoys gardening and is a landscape design consultant. Her garden has been awarded a gold medal by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

McCausland will be presenting, “Looking Back: A Glimpse of 80 Years,” discussing designs through the ages.

 

Entries to the Tui School Garden Challenge are closing soon, and Tui and Mitre 10 are urging New Zealand kindergartens, primary and intermediate schools not to miss the opportunity to practice and showcase their gardening talents.

More than 600 schools from across the country have already entered the annual competition, which challenges young New Zealand students to design, plan, grow and maintain a garden on their school grounds.

Once the competition closes on October 26 a panel of experts comprised of Tui and Mitre 10 staff will judge the submitted gardens on design, innovation and environmental elements such as recycling and composting to identify 10-15 finalists before the top three and overall winner are selected and announced on November 19.

Tui Products Ltd Managing Director Don Forgie says they are delighted with the number of entries they have received and are excited about the entries that are still to come.

“When the competition opened in July we had a huge rush with nearly 300 entries received in just one day. Since then we’ve received a steady stream of entries.”

“We’ve seen great ideas and enthusiasm for gardening from the many photos we’ve received from entrants. It’s certainly going to be a tough task judging.”

A host of top prizes are up for grabs with the overall winner receiving a $1000 Mitre 10 voucher, $1000 Tui Garden voucher, a ‘Can O Worms’ worm farm from Tumbleweed and a wheelbarrow. A number of spot prizes have been won with more to be awarded in the final four weeks before entries close.

Westport North School claimed the first spot prize. The school built a new garden using recycled material, such as tyres, bottles and even old fridge shelving to raise seedlings. Their compost Chimney-bots secured an early win for the team.

“Our garden vision is to create an edible impressionist garden that will explode with colour and flavour! We have chosen a range of edible flowers that will hopefully self seed and spread throughout our garden over time, we also have seasonal vegetables that we intend to rotate through the seasons, and we hope to gradually add more young fruit trees,” Carol Ferrier from Westport North School said.

Winners of the second spot prize, Featherston Primary School, created a soil-less garden, proving their budding entrepreneurship through selling ‘worm wine’ from their worm garden at their local supermarket to fundraise for additional projects. They also made hanging pea and bean gardens by using recycled milk containers, painting murals, building bird feeders and planting flowers designed to encourage bee pollination.

Pre-School competitors are also excelling in the garden. Methven Pre-School have recycled plastic bottles to create a glasshouse and Warkworth Kindergarten has made a scarecrow and bird feeders. Gore’s Oxford Kindergarten has created a strawberry ladder and ABC Hei Hei in Christchurch has used recycled plastic containers to make a water catcher.

To register your school in the Tui Garden Schools challenge, visit http://www.tuigarden.co.nz/competition/2012-tui-school-garden-challenge

Entries close soon!

Weston Primary School, Weston, North Otago.

Lower Hutt City Childcare and Education Centre, Lower Hutt.

Westport North School, Westport.

Last week I went on a press tour of Chalet Nursery and Garden Center in Wilmette. I’ve heard about the garden center for years, but I never would have made the trip myself had I not been invited to tour the garden and their tree farm in Wisconsin.

As part of the tour we also visited three gardens the landscape architects for Chalet designed in the North Shore. I have mentioned here before how disappointed I feel after visiting the gardens of some of Chicago’s most expensive homes.

Over the years I’ve known lots of gardeners that don’t have a lot of respect for gardens that are designed and maintained by firms where the homeowner is not involved in the day-to-day operations of the garden. My disappointment in visiting some rich people’s gardens has never been about that.

It has been in seeing jaw-dropping architecture and interior design only to walk out back and be disappointed by how little thought went into the garden. Gardens are an extension of the home and the homeowner, but are often giving little attention by many that can afford to put on a show with their garden.

I have often felt like, “This is it? I can do this with a bunch of Home Depot plants.” Touring the gardens of Chalet’s customers was completely different. For the first time I walked behind an expensive home and thought, “OK, wow, I wish I could have this.” And it wasn’t even all about the views of the lake and private beaches, but in the careful design and plant selection. I have now seen what is possible when a garden is design by skilled landscape architects and the customer has the money to achieve a vision, and it’s awesome! When I win the lottery I know who I’m calling to design my garden.

The tour to the tree farm was also pretty cool. I was on the tour with Carolyn Ulrich and Nina Nina Koziol of Chicagoland Gardening magazine. We got personal tours of the 183 acre farm where they have 150, 000 plants in production in 156,000 sq. feet of poly houses. At the lunch, which Chalet provided for us, we learned that 14% of Chalet’s green products are grown at the farm.

Since the North Shore is populated with such mature tree canopy, they grow over 100 varieties of hostas that their customers can choose from. If you are a shady gardener in Chicago it would be worth a trip to Wilmette to check out the options you have available. Their hostas are container grown for an extra year so you’re buying more mature and fuller plants at the same price as other places. We also saw some special Poukhanense azaleas and Japanese maples at the farm that will be available at their garden center in the next few years.

I wish I had spent more time walking through the garden center itself, but I had to catch the Metra back into the City. What I did manage to see myself really impressed me. If you like Gethsemane on the north side, you’ll like Chalet’s garden center too. Chalet also has that “special” garden center feel to it that you can’t experience at a big box garden center. I was too busy checking out the indoor plants and pumpkins to check on the price of the outdoor plants, but if the price of the indoors plants is any indication–the perennials and annuals are also reasonably priced. The little topiaries I was lusting after were only $15.00. I have seen the same plants going for $30-$50 bucks in Chicago.

Overall I was highly impressed with everything I saw and learned about Chalet. If you’re looking for a garden center in Chicago’s northern suburbs, I recommend checking out Chalet.

“The whole countryside was full of snakes sunning themselves along the roads and swimming in the ditches and newly flooded rice-fields. … Out in Sesshu’s old garden behind the temple, the pond was starred with tiny twinkling water-lilies.” Such was, in part, how Glenn W. Shaw described the rural outskirts of Yamaguchi City in his 1932 “Japanese Scrapbook.”

Shaw (1886-1961), an author, journalist and educator who was a long-time Osaka and Tokyo resident, would be delighted to know that the city’s surroundings have changed little since his visit — and that Sesshu’s old landscape design, best known as Joei-ji Garden, remains much the same, too. If anything, it has weathered into a state of even deeper antiquity as time has passed.

Sesshu Toyo (1420-1506) was an immensely gifted painter, but of his early works we know very little, as these perished during the civil wars in which much of Kyoto was destroyed during and after his lifetime. Hence Joei-ji Garden, executed in his youth, remains his earliest known work.

Interestingly, in the 15th-century art world, there appears to have been no conflict in the idea of a painter designing gardens. For further instance, the important garden designer Kobori Enshu (1579-1647), was, among other things, an arbiter of the tea ceremony.

Clearly, despite the traditional reverence for specialists, in those days such men of immense talent and creativity were free to exercise their gifts as they chose.

Sesshu was an artist who enjoyed great recognition during his own lifetime. Describing his work as naturalistic and spontaneous, a priest named Shuho — clearly not the renowned Shuho Myocho who founded the huge Daitoku-ji temple complex in Kyoto in the early 14th century but an otherwise invisible namesake — commented: “It seems as though his very blood were ink and everything he touched turned to painting.”

The American art historian Ernest E. Fenollosa (1853-1908) went even further, writing: “He is the greatest master of the straight line and angle in the whole range of the world’s art.”

Although Fenellosa never visited the garden, his remark hints at its geometrical aspect. Sesshu’s vertical subjects, the great vaulting, Song Period (960-1279), Chinese-inspired peaks and ravines of his silk paintings, were inverted in the Joei-ji Garden, which is an exercise in the horizontal.

There are other commonalities between his garden designs and his canvases. Instance the flat-topped rocks, which are a Sesshu garden signature — and one that is replicated in his painting. Even the islands in the pond at Joei-ji are flat planes without the usual upward contouring characterizing such features in other Japanese gardens.

Yamaguchi may seem an unlikely place to find a major albeit little-visited garden, as Japan’s foremost landscapes are generally in such hubs as Kyoto and Tokyo, where a combination of wealth and talent produced many fine examples of the art.

Although Yamaguchi City has now returned to its original provincial status, it flourished during the Sengoku (Warring States) Period spanning some 150 years from the mid-15th century, as many noblemen and their retinues gathered there for safety and brought along craftsmen. They were followed by the literati, who also repaired to the remoteness of western Honshu to escape the turmoil of Kyoto. Many of Yamaguchi’s temples and shrines, reflecting the tastes and sensibilities of the Imperial capital, date from this period.

Masahiro Ouchi, a clan leader in what is now Yamaguchi Prefecture, commissioned Joei-ji to be designed as a pond-and-island garden. Because of Sesshu’s fondness for rocks, it is now often listed as a karensansui (dry-landscape garden).

Since stone gardens are not generally places in which to stroll or even to physically enter, they must be contemplated in the manner of art, from a fixed position, a prescribed viewpoint. And, as in the presence of any arresting image, our own presence is temporarily subsumed when viewing these spatial works.

Gardens of this type are nothing if not iconographic, with the stone arrangements speaking of more than just pleasing patterns. Sanzon-seki-gumi, for example, a common feature in stone gardens, is a grouping of three stones; a design of scalene triangles in which the principal rock represents the Buddha and the two lower ones disciples.

The original idea of this arrangement was to trap malign forces as they entered the garden, and then — with the aid of the other auspiciously south- and west-facing stones — to deflect them. However, an alternative reading of the triad’s function is as a representation of Mount Sumeru, the center of the Buddhist cosmos.

At Joei-ji there are also the classic tortoise and crane rocks, standing for longevity and good fortune. Another rock bears an uncanny resemblance to Mount Fuji, Japan’s most sacred peak.

Framing is something that painters — such as Sesshu — instinctively understand. We could even go as far as to say that the frame turns the garden into art, or it at least signals the intention to make art.

One simple approach to this exercise in restricting and manipulating space is to alter perspective. Placing large rocks in the foreground and smaller ones in the background, and other objects across the garden’s diagonals, results in an illusion of distance and depth and a visual tension that energizes the gardens. This is notably true of Joei-ji, where the scale of the large foreground rocks is emphasized by the placement of the lower, flatter stones.

Because stone settings were part of a scheme to promote good fortune or forestall catastrophes, Sesshu would almost certainly have been familiar with the “Sakuteiki,” a Heian Period (794-1185 ) gardening manual whose purpose, beyond mere garden design, was to avoid calamities in people’s lives by the proper placement of garden elements.

In the manual’s mix of geomancy and superstition with common-sense landscaping, designers are inveighed to follow taboos connected to the positioning of upright stones, which can promote or restrict the flow of ki (life energy) — and to never place them in the northeast, site of the so-called devil’s gate through which evil spirits are wont to enter.

A near-occult vitality seems to link the power grid of stones at Joei-ji, where the rock arrangements are, as they were intended to be, almost animate. As such, they are in step with Japanese garden designers who talk about perceiving a call-and-response between important stones. In this dialogue, each rock “requests” where it should be placed.

My visits to Joei-ji have always been in spring or summer, but there are those who swear by a winter visit, when the garden, with its grasses, flowers and leafy backdrop scraped off, reverts to the Zen bones and ligaments that are probably as close as we can get to discerning Sesshu’s original concept.

Gazing across the garden, author and famed Japanophile Donald Richie once observed in an essay: “The impression is of a vast open universe rather than a particular panorama.”

This is especially apparent in Joei-ji’s borders, which are not boundaries so much as outgrowths of the garden that are closely in tune with the surrounding countryside.

This idea is echoed in the words of Kengo Kuma, a contemporary architect who noted, “The gardener is held captive inside the garden and is unable to stop the flow of time. … There is no completion for a garden. Time continues to flow forever.”

It is not possible to comprehend everything in a garden of this antiquity. Nonetheless, even without entirely grasping the structural schemata of correspondences and sight lines that formed a blueprint in Sesshu’s mind, we can still partake of the garden’s understated beauty.

This in turn, if only for a brief moment, can help to restore our appreciation of detail and to reconnect us to nature. But most miraculous of all, it can also decelerate the process of time.

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Pocono Garden Club

The Pocono Garden Club will meet at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 9, at the Monroe County Environmental Center, Kettle Creek.

The monthly design is titled “Pumpkin Patch,” a vertical design in a pumpkin (real or artificial) using fresh, silk or dried flowers. The horticulture entry is any blooming annual or perennial, one stem in a clear container, sized proportionately. The houseplant entry is any potted, fragrant or medicinal herb.

Shirline Moser will give a presentation on growing dahlias.

For information contact club President Joyce Love at 570-629-0574 or email her at lovemj@ptd.net.

Farm day

Get an up-close view of some of the farm animals that help to produce your fresh, local food during Mill Market’s Family Farm Day from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at the Hawley Silk Mill. The event is free.

Mill Market, open daily from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Fridays until 10 p.m., offers food and goods made within 200 miles of the Lake Wallenpaupack region.

Meet chickens from Spruce Hill Farm, pygmy goats from Windy Pond Farm, and enjoy samples of local honey from the Northeastern PA Beekeepers Association. There will also be exhibits by the Youth Council of Wayne County 4-H, the Penn State Cooperative Extension of Wayne County and Delaware Highlands Conservancy.

Find Mill Market at facebook.com/MillMarketPA, visit MillMarketPA.com or call 570-390-4440.

Birdfeeding basics

Environmental Educator Karen N. Boyle will present a program on feeding birds from 10 to 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 6.

Cost is $3 for members and children under 12, $5 for nonmembers.

To preregister, call 570-629-3061. Visit mcconservation.org.

Recycle old fridge

Recycling your old refrigerator or freezer and benefit the Boy Scouts through PPL Electric Utilities’ E-power appliance recycling program.

Until Dec. 30, PPL customers can donate the $35 they would have received for recycling their refrigerator or freezer to the Minsi Trails Council, Boy Scouts of America.

Customers who call 877-270-3522 or visit pplelectric.com/recycle to schedule their appliance for pickup must indicate whether they want their incentive to go to the Scouts.

For information about the Minsi Trails effort, visit minsitrails.com or pplelectric.com/recycle.

Fun with fungus

Pocono Environmental Education Center will host a class, “Fungus Among Us,” from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday at the center, 538 Emery Road, Dingmans Ferry.

Cost is $5. To make reservations, call 570-828-2319 or email peec@peec.org.

Farm tour

The Monroe County Conservation District and the Penn State Cooperative Extension are hosting the 2012 Farm Tour, which will connect consumers with local producers.

Participating farms are Apple Ridge Farm, Saylorsburg; Big Creek Winery, Kresgeville; Eagle Rest Tree Plantation, Stroudsburg; Gould’s Produce, Brodheadsville; Josie Porter Farm, Stroudsburg; Mountain View Vineyard, Stroudsburg; Paradise Brook Trout Company, Cresco; and Stryker Farm, Saylorsburg.

This self-guided tour will be held from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 13. Brochures and maps are available at participating farms, the extension office on Phillips Street in Stroudsburg and the conservation district. The website also has a link to an interactive map atmcconservation.org.

For information call 570-629-3060.

Bird seed sale

Aspen Song bird seed will again be featured during the Monroe County Environmental Center’s fall bird seed sale.

These seeds are designed without cereal grains or fillers to supply nutrient rich food to finches, blue jays, mourning doves and others, all of which can add color and sound to snow-covered yards this winter. Black oil sunflower seed, thistle seed, suet and specialty blends will be available in a variety of sizes at reduced prices.

The sale is from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 13. Ordering deadline is Thursday. Order forms can be obtained at 570-629-3061 or at mcconservation.org. All proceeds from the sale of bird seed and feeders support the center’s programs.

Rain barrel art

Residents and business owners in Stroudsburg and East Stroudsburg who are interested in blending art and conservation, are encouraged to submit a design for the “Retain the Rain” Rain Barrel Art Challenge to be in the running to receive a free rain barrel.

To enter, submit a design to the Pocono Arts Council by Friday, Nov. 9. Twenty winners will receive a rain barrel to paint based on their submitted design, and the barrels will be on display from March through October 2013. The contest winners can keep their painted barrels.

Design guidelines and entry forms can be found atmcconservation.org. The project is developed by the Monroe County Conservation District, the Pocono Arts Council, the Brodhead Watershed Association, and the Brodhead Creek Regional Authority.

Birding basics

“Introduction to Birding” will be held 10 a.m. to noon Sunday at Pocono Environmental Education Center, 538 Emery Road, Dingmans Ferry.

Enjoy a short hike with a knowledgeable guide who will teach you the basics of birding. All ages welcome.

Program is free for members and $5 for nonmembers. Call to register at 570-828-2319. Visit peec.org for details.

Howetown Farm Show

The Howetown Farm Show will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. today and Sunday on Route 196, Sterling, (south of Hamlin).

See demonstrations of antique farm equipment. Watch us make ice cream and enjoy a free sample. See ladies spinning, quilting and weaving. Take a horse-drawn hay ride.

Free admission and parking. Food available for purchase. For information, call 570-595-0452.

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Do-it-yourself gardening is this year’s theme for the 2012
Fall Garden Fest from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Denton Bible Church
campus on the corner of Mingo Road and Nottingham Drive in Denton.

The Denton County Master Gardener Association, a volunteer
organization of the Texas AM AgriLife Extension Service, conducts this
free educational event, and there will be something for everyone at the Fall
Garden Fest.

Birds, bees, fall vegetable gardens, fire-wise landscaping,
herbs, DIY garden design and water features, growing succulents and trees,
propagation and rainwater harvesting are just some of the diverse subjects that
will be covered in presentations, booths and demonstrations. The popular “Ask a
Master Gardener” booth will answer local gardening questions, and visitors are
invited to bring drawings and photos of their garden design or landscape
challenges for review.

Lectures by master gardeners begin at 10 a.m., with Don
Edwards sharing tips on composting and worm composting (vermiculture). At 11
a.m., Larry Legg will discuss fall vegetable gardening, and at noon, Holly Ross
will talk about “herbs from garden to table.”

At 1 p.m., Suzie Cook will demonstrate propagation of roses.
Self-guided tours of Shiloh Gardens, the church’s own community garden, will be
available. Everyone is invited to participate in a seed exchange by simply
bringing some of their favorite plants’ seeds, packaged and labeled, to swap
for other varieties. Youngsters will enjoy a 4-H petting zoo, a bounce house
and face painting.

There will be more than 40 booths offering educational
information and shopping opportunities.

Food and refreshments will be served by the youth from
Denton County 4-H clubs and live music will be performed by local bluegrass
band Flashpoint.

For details, visit dcmga.com, call 940-394-2883 or look for
the Denton County Master Gardener Association on Facebook.

JANET LAMINACK is the
horticulture county extension agent with Texas AgriLife Extension. She can be
reached at 940-349-2883. Her e-mail address is jelaminack@ag.tamu.edu.