The Minnesota Landscape Arboretum is a picture-perfect setting for a photo symposium led by award-winning photographer Craig Blacklock on June 16. “Conservation Through the Lens” explores the power of photography to connect people with the natural world and includes technical presentations and optional small-group sessions (for a fee) with Blacklock. The event is from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and is geared for photographers of all skill levels. Cost is $70, $60 for arboretum members and includes lunch and arboretum admission, 3675 Arboretum Dr., Chaska. Register at www.arboretum.umn.edu/photographyclasses.aspx or call 952-443-1422.

Grants for growing

You could get $500 to start a community garden in your neighborhood. The Wedge Natural Food Co-op and Gardening Matters are giving nine local gardens mini-grants of up to $500. Applicants must demonstrate a project goal or need for their community garden. Special consideration will be given to gardens that serve low-income people.

The community garden must be planted in one of the following neighborhoods: East Isles, Elliot Park, Loring Park, Lowry Hill, Lowry Hill East, Phillips (Midtown, West and Ventura Village) and Whittier. Applications are due June 11. Go to www.gardeningmatters.org for more information.

Festival of perennials

Gertens experts will solve your perennial problems and offer garden design tips at the free Spring Perennial Festival, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 9 and 10, 5500 Blaine Av., Inver Grove Heights. Seminars on eco-friendly gardening, shade plants, butterfly gardens and other topics are scheduled throughout the day. Call 651-450-1501.

Learn gardening

Master Gardeners will share their expertise and the latest horticultural information on a variety of gardening topics at nine free programs in June at Hennepin County libraries. Topics are “Small Space Vegetable Gardening,” “Growing Berries in Minnesota,” “Edible Landscapes,” “Low Input Lawn Care,” “Growing Herbs in Minnesota,” “Best Plants for Tough Sites” and “Rain Gardening.”

For times, dates and locations, go to www.hclib.org/pub/events and type “Master Gardener” in the search box or call your local library.

 

Claude Monet’s beloved flower and water gardens in the north of France are world-famous. But for those unable to visit the artist’s iconic home, a trip to the Bronx over the next several months will offer a taste of Monet’s indisputably radiant living masterpiece — a riotous display of color, plant variety and landscape design.

“Monet’s Garden” at the New York Botanical Garden evokes Monet’s lush garden at Giverny, the impressionist’s home from 1883 until his death in 1926.

A passionate gardener who once declared, “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers,” Monet found endless inspiration from his exuberant gardens. The water garden alone accounts for some 250 paintings, including a series of monumental canvases that led to his Grandes Decorations at the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris. His flower garden is featured in at least 40 works.

The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 21, will feature a seasonally changing display of flora, currently a spring kaleidoscope of poppies, roses, foxgloves, irises and delphiniums inside the botanical garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservancy. It also includes two scarcely seen garden-inspired paintings, Monet’s wooden palette, rare photos of Monet in his garden and 30 photographs of Giverny by Elizabeth Murray, who has recorded Monet’s flower oasis for 25 years. These are all located at the botanical garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library.

A facade of Monet’s pink stucco house with its bright green shutters — a historically accurate replica by Tony Award-winning set designer Scott Park — marks the start of the exhibition. From there, visitors are led down the Grand Allee, a shorter recreation of Monet’s rose-covered trellis pathway lined on both sides with thick beds of vibrant flowers. The path opens up to a replica of his famous Japanese footbridge arching over a water lily pool encircled by willow trees and flowering shrubs.

“He could stand at his doorstep, as you can in this recreation, and look down the allee to the Japanese bridge in the distance,” said the exhibition curator, Monet scholar Paul Hayes Tucker.

“Since we know what flowers he planted, we can be very accurate historically,” Tucker said. “It is only a fraction of his undertaking but, nonetheless, an enormously rich and extensive fraction that will hopefully encourage people to learn more about him and if one is lucky enough to go” to Giverny.

In the courtyard outside the Victorian greenhouse, two immense water basins contain a plethora of water lilies.

Monet, who made a fortune during his lifetime, was constantly planting, replanting and redesigning his gardens. He would remove the water lilies in the winter so they would survive the cold and then replant them in the spring and summer.

“What’s wonderful is to think of Monet literally as planting a still life because it is in the end the arrangement of those water lilies that he paints in his pictures. He is constructing his painting, at least part of his painting, as he replants the pond,” Tucker said, adding that the job of one of Monet’s gardeners was to dunk the lilies so that the pads would glisten.

Summer months will see yellow and orange blossoms of nasturtiums, and lavenders, lilies and geraniums will fill the conservancy. In September and October, they will be replaced with chrysanthemums, salvia, sunflowers, asters, sages, dahlias and other fall flowers.

Among the rare artifacts in the exhibition are two paintings of his garden executed by the artist 15 years apart.

“The Artist’s Garden in Giverny,” on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery, was painted around the year 1900 and shows his flower garden with a dense arrangement of irises and decorative trees.

“Irises,” painted during World War I, is darker and moodier. On loan from a private Swiss collection and never before shown in the United States, it depicts a corner of the water garden that is replete with irises.

In a nearby glass case is one of Monet’s paint-encrusted palettes, “a place where literally the hand and the eye come together and where that mysterious poetic moment of realization takes place,” Tucker said. It’s on loan from the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris.

There are also documents and personal correspondence that provide a rich sense of how the gardens were conceived and how they functioned in Monet’s life and art. A digitalized version of one of Monet’s sketchbooks reveals his propensity to draw before he set out to paint.

“We think of him almost exclusively as a painter so these sketchbooks reveal … he would jot these pictorial ideas right in front of his motifs,” Tucker said. “They provided a kind of touchstone for when he came back to the studio and began to organize the picture.”

Hopefully, he said, visitors will come away from the exhibition “with a greater sense of how complex and inventive Monet was as an individual.”

___

If You Go…

MONET’S GARDEN: Through Oct. 21 at the New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern Blvd., Bronx, 718-817-8700 or http://www.nybg.org. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Adults, $20; children 2-12, $8. By Metro North Commuter Railroad to the Botanical Garden stop on the Harlem Line, which runs from Grand Central through Westchester, or by subway, B, D or No. 4 train to Bedford Park Boulevard station, then walk eight blocks or take the Bx 26 bus east to the Mosholu Gate entrance.

ST. PETERSBURG (FOX 13) –

The idea of clarifying a tiny sliver of Tampa Bay
so people can see what lives there may not be as far-fetched as some believe.

On the other hand, the doubters may be right. 

“We’re going to determine whether or not from a
scientific standpoint this is an element that’s going to go forward or not,”
said Raul Quintana, one of the city of St.
Petersburg officials overseeing the design of a
next-generation downtown Pier. “We’re not discounting it, we’re saying
let’s study it a little bit more, see if it really makes sense.”

The so-called underwater garden is one of the key concepts
to a design known as The Lens.  As
proposed, some of the casons of the current Pier approach would be left in
place, below the surface of the water. 

Those would be used to support elevated oyster and seagrass
beds. 

“Oysters do have a really strong affect on water
clarity.  So they’re natural filters,”
explains USF College of Marine Science biologist Dr. Ernst Peebles. “Most
oyster beds are in shallow water, so the key would be to provide the oysters
with shallow habitat.  And that would be
an artificial substrate of some sort.”

Clearer water would open a window people want to peek
through. 

“You always look in the water,” St. Pete resident
Connie Harder agreed. “I’m always looking for dolphin and fish, but you
can’t see anything” because the water is murky. 

Chris King, an avid fisherman making a delivery to Pier
businesses Monday said “There’s a lot of larger fish living around this
Pier than people actually know about.” 

Dr. Peebles confirmed bait fish always cluster around marine
structures, so their predators follow. 

Even so, “Expectations have to be realistic” he
cautioned. “You’re not going to have gin-clear water and a colorful coral
reef all of a sudden in Tampa
Bay.” 

The scientist also said nature will be unpredictable. 

“There will be days when people say, well I didn’t see
a thing, and then there will be other days when people see things that will be
memories that last a lifetime” Dr. Peebles said.

The underwater garden concept and other elements of the Lens
will be explained to the public at a series of forums that start this
week.  Quintana acknowledged those
meetings will be a two-way conversation. 

City officials will attempt to explain a $50 million project
that many people do not understand.  Yet
there is no final design, so public input is critical. 

For example: 
“The Hub, which is the land component,” Quintana said,
“What would you like to see there, what are some of the things that would
make this a better project?  And for the
portions going out over the water, we do want people to tell us how they would
use it, and what are some of the things they would like to see that maybe
aren’t shown in the concept.”

The architect selected by the city will use that information
and present a final design by the end of the year.  The current downtown Pier is deteriorating
and will be closed May 31, 2013, and demolished.

Here is a link for time and dates of future forums:

http://www.stpete.org/news/2012/5-25-2012_public_meetings_set_for_refinement_of_lens_pier_project.asp

Ken Regelson and Judy Wong had been organic gardeners for about 30 years. As such, they made the most of the small piece of land attached to their Boulder townhome, using raised beds in which they raised vegetables and flowers.

The beds were productive, but not all that attractive, so they decided to hire landscaper Susanne Thorne of Innovative Outdoor Designs in Lafayette.

“We thought we wanted general paths with berms and raised areas,” Regelson says. “We had a long list of requirements.”

Thorne met those requirements for organic, low water use gardening, but came back with a design that uniquely reflected Regelson’s and Wong’s commitment to sustainabily. She proposed a stonework Zia, a Native American sun symbol, similar to the one on the New Mexico state flag.

The Zia was particularly appropriate, since Regelson is a passionate advocate of solar energy, who founded the startup nonprofit EnergyShouldBe.org, which uses videos and facts to encourage renewable energy.

The raised beds in the Zia contain mostly vegetables, while xeric plants and flowers make up surrounding beds. In addition to plant choice, drip irrigation keeps water use low, and the use of raised beds with good soil means that a small space can produce a lot.

Thorne says the carefully planned 40-by18-foot space provides ample space for raising edibles and flowers.

“We created a really interesting space that’s productive to garden in,” says Thorne, who is a member of the Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado. “Half is devoted specifically to vegetables and herbs, the other half to drought-tolerant flowering plants that draw bees and butterflies.”

Herbs include basil, thyme, rosemary, sages and lavender. An asparagus bed and a sour cherry tree add to the usual annual vegetables such as tomatoes, eggplant and peppers. In addition to food, the garden provides fresh cut flowers all summer long, Regelson says.

As it turns out, the Zia is more than just beautiful and symbolic. Last year, Regelson and Wong weren’t able to plant their vegetable until later in June. Yet they were able to harvest a bumper crop — close to twice as much in less space as their previous raised beds had yielded — at close to the same time in the season.

“All the stonework makes it warm,” Regelson says.

The stonework also makes the garden attractive in winter.

“It’s a lovely place to entertain in,” Thorne says.

There aren’t too many places you can go where you can indulge all your passions at once, but I’ve found one.

It’s a bit of a hike, admittedly, but completely worth it to find somewhere that showcases architectural history, landscape design, organic vegetable gardening, a fork-to-fork cafe with great food and excellent wine, a garden centre, rare and heirloom plants, a gardeners’ club and a mail-order seed business.

The place is Heronswood, just over an hour from Melbourne at Dromana, on the Mornington Peninsula. I went there once before, about eight years ago, but that was before I was interested in real gardening and I was far more focused on eating the food than where it came from.

Back then I’d probably have wondered why anyone would grow vegetables in flower beds, and how a garden that’s open to the public could get away with being a bit, well, tatty. But now I’ve got it.

The garden at Heronswood is a living catalogue of the evergreen fruits and vegetables described in its catalogues and books. It says it has the biggest collection of fruit and vegetables for gardeners and the distinction of being the first in Australia to be certified organic.

A feature is the integration of vegetables and flowers with fruits and herbs. This inter-planting simulates natural plant diversity and prevents the build-up of pest problems so there is no need to spray.

The garden area is the equivalent of about 25 average sized suburban sections, and is so intensively landscaped and gardened that it’s no problem to spend several hours there. There are paths and walkways, water features, ponds, flower beds, lawns, trees, outdoor living and eating areas, the cafe, the historic homestead, the nursery, orchard and vegetable gardens.

“Imagine how much work it is,” sighed my partner the landscaper, who lamented the other day that he could work full time in our own 1ha garden and still not keep on top of it. He was later gobsmacked, as was I, to find out that there are only three gardeners at Heronswood. Questions will be asked.

Heronswood is no place for rushing. We wandered about for a couple of hours, discovering that the beds not inhabited by fruit and vegetables are showcases for all sorts of plants, chosen to match the microclimates of each area.

As we made our way back to the cafe for what promised to be a spectacular lunch, the partner became enamoured of Heronswood’s famous vegetable parterre, inspired by the medieval potager gardens. This ornamental and productive garden features many heirloom vegetable varieties, interspersed with flowers, and you can survey the layout from the comfort of a seat at the top, shaded by a foliage-covered pergola.

The spectacular lunch tumbled down the timetable as the partner snapped photographs, made sketches and took notes for several of his clients whom he felt must have a circular parterre.

My love affair was with an area where four raised vegetable beds, each 20sq m, were planted in a way that would feed a small family.

We each tested the produce of our favourite gardens in the thatched cafe. This English cottage-style restaurant takes recycling and sustainability to a new level and 90 per cent of the structural materials for the building were sourced from within 30km of the site. The thatch was made from reeds gathered in a nearby swamp, most of the timber was recycled, and the mellow yellow walls are of rammed earth sourced locally.

The restaurant uses an enviable range of freshly grown and picked organic fruit and vegetables. Whatever can’t be found within the garden is obtained nearby. Although the menu is not vegetarian, vegetables take priority, and each dish is named for the main vegetable component rather than the meat or fish it contains. It’s a smart, subtle and very tasty way gently to shift our attitude.

Heronswood limits its environmental footstep by using green energy, recycling, composting and reducing consumption of resources, and everyone who works there is strongly encouraged to be green in their practices and even to drive green-energy cars.

Yet style, beauty and design have not been sacrificed, proving that when it comes to sustainable gardening, you can, in fact, have everything.

For more information, visit www.diggers.com.au

Leigh Bramwell’s garden tour of the Mornington Peninsula was organised by Tourism Victoria.

NEW YORK (AP) — Claude Monet’s beloved flower and water gardens in the north of France are world-famous. But for those unable to visit the artist’s iconic home, a trip to the Bronx over the next several months will offer a taste of Monet’s indisputably radiant living masterpiece — a riotous display of color, plant variety and landscape design.

“Monet’s Garden” at the New York Botanical Garden evokes Monet’s lush garden at Giverny, the impressionist’s home from 1883 until his death in 1926.

A passionate gardener who once declared, “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers,” Monet found endless inspiration from his exuberant gardens. The water garden alone accounts for some 250 paintings, including a series of monumental canvases that led to his Grandes Decorations at the Musee de d’Orangeries in Paris. His flower garden is featured in at least 40 works.

The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 21, will feature a seasonally changing display of flora, currently a spring kaleidoscope of poppies, roses, foxgloves, irises and delphiniums inside the botanical garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservancy. It also includes two scarcely seen garden-inspired paintings, Monet’s wooden palette, rare photos of Monet in his garden and 30 photographs of Giverny by Elizabeth Murray, who has recorded Monet’s flower oasis for 25 years. These are all located at the botanical garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library.

A facade of Monet’s pink stucco house with its bright green shutters — a historically accurate replica by Tony Award-winning set designer Scott Park — marks the start of the exhibition. From there, visitors are led down the Grand Allee, a shorter recreation of Monet’s rose-covered trellis pathway lined on both sides with thick beds of vibrant flowers. The path opens up to a replica of his famous Japanese footbridge arching over a water lily pool encircled by willow trees and flowering shrubs.

“He could stand at his doorstep, as you can in this recreation, and look down the allee to the Japanese bridge in the distance,” said the exhibition curator, Monet scholar Paul Hayes Tucker.

“Since we know what flowers he planted, we can be very accurate historically,” Tucker said. “It is only a fraction of his undertaking but, nonetheless, an enormously rich and extensive fraction that will hopefully encourage people to learn more about him and if one is lucky enough to go” to Giverny.

In the courtyard outside the Victorian greenhouse, two immense water basins contain a plethora of water lilies.

Monet, who made a fortune during his lifetime, was constantly planting, replanting and redesigning his gardens. He would remove the water lilies in the winter so they would survive the cold and then replant them in the spring and summer.

“What’s wonderful is to think of Monet literally as planting a still life because it is in the end the arrangement of those water lilies that he paints in his pictures. He is constructing his painting, at least part of his painting, as he replants the pond,” Tucker said, adding that the job of one of Monet’s gardeners was to dunk the lilies so that the pads would glisten.

Summer months will see yellow and orange blossoms of nasturtiums, and lavenders, lilies and geraniums will fill the conservancy. In September and October, they will be replaced with chrysanthemums, salvia, sunflowers, asters, sages, dahlias and other fall flowers.

Among the rare artifacts in the exhibition are two paintings of his garden executed by the artist 15 years apart.

“The Artist’s Garden in Giverny,” on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery, was painted around the year 1900 and shows his flower garden with a dense arrangement of irises and decorative trees.

“Irises,” painted during World War I, is darker and moodier. On loan from a private Swiss collection and never before shown in the United States, it depicts a corner of the water garden that is replete with irises.

In a nearby glass case is one of Monet’s paint-encrusted palettes, “a place where literally the hand and the eye come together and where that mysterious poetic moment of realization takes place,” Tucker said. It’s on loan from the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris.

There are also documents and personal correspondence that provide a rich sense of how the gardens were conceived and how they functioned in Monet’s life and art. A digitalized version of one of Monet’s sketchbooks reveals his propensity to draw before he set out to paint.

“We think of him almost exclusively as a painter so these sketchbooks reveal … he would jot these pictorial ideas right in front of his motifs,” Tucker said. “They provided a kind of touchstone for when he came back to the studio and began to organize the picture.”

Hopefully, he said, visitors will come away from the exhibition “with a greater sense of how complex and inventive Monet was as an individual.”

___

Online:

http://www.nybg.org

Keene native’s new book has designs on your garden

“Design and Maintenance of the Home Landscape;

Practical Advice on How to Design and Care for Your Garden and Grounds”

Kathy McPhail Beaman

217 pages, $13.95

As far as Kathy McPhail Beaman is concerned, New Hampshire is now officially in frost-free June, so now comes P-Day: Planning and Planting.

Beaman, who grew up in Keene, planted her first Lilliputian garden of Johnny Jump-Ups alongside her mother’s large flower field. Decades later, Beaman became a master gardener through a program of the University of New Hampshire, kept on growing and learning, and then wrote a full gardening-year’s worth of articles for the Monadnock Shopper News. She has now assembled these reports from Mother Earth into her lively, you-can-do-it “Design and Maintenance of the Home Landscape.”

“We all lead such busy lives that gardening time has often been pared down to a minimum,” Beaman writes. “Because of this, a good landscape design is more important than ever.”

Keep it simple. Keep it practical (i.e., don’t plant where the delivery man walks). Keep it beautiful with a harmony of colors, a balance of blossom shapes, and eye interest through restrained repetition, not boring monotony.

“Have a reason for the things you do,” she stresses.

As for the stress of cutting back twigs, branches and limbs, Beaman does her best to help people avoid problems because she has found that some couples spell pruning as D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

Give a man a chainsaw and here comes the Mojave Desert. Beaman remembers how her father pruned their weeping willow so it would not weep again. But her mother did.

That’s one reason Beaman includes ample details about pruning plants well to remain natural looking.

“Unless you have very formal gardens,” she writes, “almost everything looks better, especially here in the woods of New England, in a natural state. I have been taught (thanks to UNH) that even hedges can be kept in shape with a natural look.”

Beaman pinpoints some specifics:

Shade and flowering trees — “Mulberries have messy fruit; black walnuts produce a toxin harmful to other plants.”

Spruce and pine — “Make sure you plant at correct depth in well-drained soil.”

Shrubs such as forsythia and lilac — “Few insect or disease problems.”

Broad-leaved evergreens including holly and rhododendron — “May require special attention; water into late fall.”

Groundcovers such as periwinkle — “Wonderful for keeping maintenance to a minimum.”

Beaman stamps herself a certified “clematis nut.” With 300 species of this vine, no garden has an excuse to be monotonous. “There is a clematis vine available for almost every garden situation — shining alone on a trellis or lamppost, clambering through shrubs and up trees and rambling along the ground.”

Construct paths to be free-flowing and meandering:

“A path curving around a bend behind a bush or boulder is an invitation to explore that most people can’t resist.”

When you’re tip-toeing down the garden path, you may come across the “yuck” factor. What to do with these plant-eating slugs and other aliens?

Instead of going nuts, Beaman suggests developing Integrated Pest Management. “The first principle of IPM,” she writes, “is to avoid the problem in the first place. This can be achieved by doing something I am always preaching about — put the right plant in the right place. Plants have their own natural defenses against insects and diseases, and when they are stressed they can’t use these defenses to their best advantage.”

To fight plant foes, diversify plantings, let lady beetles, mantises and spiders triumph over enemy insects, and keep your garden clean and watered.

If a pesticide is necessary, use the least toxic ones that are labeled “Caution.” Steer clear of products labeled “Warning” and “Danger.”

Beaman devotes a substantial section of her easy-to-use book to charts, graphs and outlines containing expanded information on diseases, fungi, plant symptoms, home landscape designing, tree forms, flower gardens and other aspects of making homes alive and colorful. “Remember the color wheel,” she suggests. “Red, orange and yellow are warm colors. Blue, green and violet are cool colors.”

Complementary colors are opposite each other on the color wheel. “Blue and yellow create a high contrast, eye popping vignette,” she writes. “Yellow is cheerful and warm, blue is cool and tends to recede into background. Opposites attract, but use sparingly.”

Flower gardens come with many options — butterfly and hummingbird gardens, all-blue or all-white gardens, all rose or tall iris gardens, rock gardens, container gardens, shade gardens. The all-season garden is perhaps the best and most common of all.

“The wonderful thing about gardening,” Beaman stresses, “is if something doesn’t work, move it. If you don’t like a particular color combination, change it. If you’re left with a hole in your border with nothing in bloom in July, remember to add or replace plants in that spot next year. That’s what’s great about gardening in New England — there’s always next year!”

Click photo to enlarge

Skot McDaniel and Sarah Farrell weren’t looking to build a business; they were just building a chicken coop for their six chickens, ones they raised as babies in their bathroom.

But when the garden design company working on the Novato couple’s edible garden asked them to design a coop for last year’s San Francisco Flower and Garden Show, they couldn’t say no. They formed Wingman Coops.

That’s where Sunset magazine’s editors spotted McDaniel and Farrell’s small henhouse and invited them to showcase it at the 15th annual “Sunset Celebration Weekend” taking place Saturday and Sunday in Menlo Park.

The event, which attracts 20,000 visitors, features a travel stage, a garden and outdoor living stage, two cooking stages with celebrity chefs, wine seminars for an extra fee, food-to-go from “the West’s best food trucks,” the “Ultimate Outdoor Living Room” and a fun “Secondhand Sunset” where items featured in the magazine and plucked from the closets of editors will be available for purchase.

“Sunset’s editors were at the show and had their eyes out for great chicken coops and just loved the coop that Wingman Coops designed,” says event spokesman Dana Smith. “Sunset’s had its own chickens for a number of years and believes that no matter where you live you can have fresh eggs, and that this was a great coop for the backyard.”

McDaniel, a structural engineer, says he and Farrell had simply “fallen in love”

with their chickens, and when they were ready to graduate from the bathroom to the garden, the couple wanted to keep them safely enclosed at certain times.

“They are so much fun to have,” he says. “When we go out in the garden, they all run over clucking — it’s like a little welcoming committee. And when we’re digging and weeding, they’re right there with us.”

The enclosed coops are designed for a small flock, are trouble-free, easy to maintain and safe from predators.

The City Dweller coop, featured at the event, houses six hens, has a wire mesh bottom with a droppings drawer in the lower area and a roost and nest area on the top with easy access for egg removal.

The optional covered enclosure is predator proof, and comes with a shaded area over the coop and a gate.

The cost for the City Dweller coop and enclosure is $3,000 and includes installation and delivery to Marin, Sonoma and most of San Francisco. The coop alone is $2,300. A smaller coop, the City Slicker, is also available.

McDaniel says Wingman’s emphasis isn’t on building coops “but in setting up successful flocks and bird consulting.”

So, for $100, the couple provides an on-site assessment for successful chicken raising with the fee applied to the purchase of a coop. The company also offers three sizes of chicken tractors, or portable covered runs, starting at $750.

For more information on Wingman Coops, call 328-7037 or go to www.wingmancoops.com.

Garden tour

If you’ve been ready for a leisurely garden tour, head north June 3 to five beautiful, healthy gardens in Healdsburg, all designed by members of the Sonoma County Master Gardeners.

The tour emphasizes how site challenges can be transformed into positive garden elements through creative solutions, but there is also expert advice and demonstrations on growing vegetables, composting, garden design, propagation, irrigation, bees and beneficial insects, container gardening, soils and mulches.

Best of all, there is a plant sale of more than 200 varieties of shrubs, perennial, grasses, ground covers and succulents all propagated by Master Gardeners.

PJ Bremier writes on home, garden, de

sign and entertaining topics every Saturday and also on her blog at DesignSwirl.net. She may be contacted at P.O. Box 412, Kentfield 94914, or at pj@pjbremier.com.

IF YOU GO
What: “Sunset Magazine Celebration Weekend: Fresh from the West”
Where: Sunset Magazine campus, 80 Willow Drive, Menlo Park
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. June 2 and 3
Admission: $14 to $16, free for children 12 years and younger.
Information: 800-786-7375; http://sunsetcw.eventbrite.com; www.sunset.com/cw

IF YOU GO
What: Bloomin’ Backyards
Where: Truett Hurst Winery, 5610 Dry Creek Road, Healdsburg
When: 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. June 3
Tickets: $30 advance, $35 at the door
Information: 707-565-2608 or www.sonomacountymastergardeners.org

NEW YORK — Claude Monet’s beloved flower and water gardens in the north of France are world-famous. But for those unable to visit the artist’s iconic home, a trip to the Bronx over the next several months will offer a taste of Monet’s indisputably radiant living masterpiece — a riotous display of color, plant variety and landscape design.

“Monet’s Garden” at the New York Botanical Garden evokes Monet’s lush garden at Giverny, the impressionist’s home from 1883 until his death in 1926.

A passionate gardener who once declared, “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers,” Monet found endless inspiration from his exuberant gardens. The water garden alone accounts for some 250 paintings, including a series of monumental canvases that led to his Grandes Decorations at the Musee de d’Orangeries in Paris. His flower garden is featured in at least 40 works.

The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 21, will feature a seasonally changing display of flora, currently a spring kaleidoscope of poppies, roses, foxgloves, irises and delphiniums inside the botanical garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservancy. It also includes two scarcely seen garden-inspired paintings, Monet’s wooden palette, rare photos of Monet in his garden and 30 photographs of Giverny by Elizabeth Murray, who has recorded Monet’s flower oasis for 25 years. These are all located at the botanical garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library.

A facade of Monet’s pink stucco house with its bright green shutters — a historically accurate replica by Tony Award-winning set designer Scott Park — marks the start of the exhibition. From there, visitors are led down the Grand Allee, a shorter recreation of Monet’s rose-covered trellis pathway lined on both sides with thick beds of vibrant flowers. The path opens up to a replica of his famous Japanese footbridge arching over a water lily pool encircled by willow trees and flowering shrubs.

“He could stand at his doorstep, as you can in this recreation, and look down the allee to the Japanese bridge in the distance,” said the exhibition curator, Monet scholar Paul Hayes Tucker.

“Since we know what flowers he planted, we can be very accurate historically,” Tucker said. “It is only a fraction of his undertaking but, nonetheless, an enormously rich and extensive fraction that will hopefully encourage people to learn more about him and if one is lucky enough to go” to Giverny.

In the courtyard outside the Victorian greenhouse, two immense water basins contain a plethora of water lilies.

Monet, who made a fortune during his lifetime, was constantly planting, replanting and redesigning his gardens. He would remove the water lilies in the winter so they would survive the cold and then replant them in the spring and summer.

“What’s wonderful is to think of Monet literally as planting a still life because it is in the end the arrangement of those water lilies that he paints in his pictures. He is constructing his painting, at least part of his painting, as he replants the pond,” Tucker said, adding that the job of one of Monet’s gardeners was to dunk the lilies so that the pads would glisten.

Summer months will see yellow and orange blossoms of nasturtiums, and lavenders, lilies and geraniums will fill the conservancy. In September and October, they will be replaced with chrysanthemums, salvia, sunflowers, asters, sages, dahlias and other fall flowers.

Among the rare artifacts in the exhibition are two paintings of his garden executed by the artist 15 years apart.

“The Artist’s Garden in Giverny,” on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery, was painted around the year 1900 and shows his flower garden with a dense arrangement of irises and decorative trees.

“Irises,” painted during World War I, is darker and moodier. On loan from a private Swiss collection and never before shown in the United States, it depicts a corner of the water garden that is replete with irises.

In a nearby glass case is one of Monet’s paint-encrusted palettes, “a place where literally the hand and the eye come together and where that mysterious poetic moment of realization takes place,” Tucker said. It’s on loan from the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris.

There are also documents and personal correspondence that provide a rich sense of how the gardens were conceived and how they functioned in Monet’s life and art. A digitalized version of one of Monet’s sketchbooks reveals his propensity to draw before he set out to paint.

Justin Newcombe says you, too, could have a garden worthy of royalty.

Queen’s Birthday is a celebration of Elizabeth II, Queen of England. I know there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing over whether Her Majesty is an institution worthy of our celebration but whatever your view, the British royal family is one of the most significant dynasties of recent times. Theirs is a rich history (written by themselves, of course) handed down in fable, song, text, painting, sculpture – well everything, really. From gunshot to gumdrops there’s the royal this, that and the other. Gardens have played a big part in what could be described now as a giant brand.

The British, particularly the English, have always valued an independence from continental Europe and the resulting insulation incubated many cultural idiosyncrasies.

One of these is the baroque garden of Hampton Court. The golden age of Hampton Court was during the reign of King William and his wife Mary from 1689. They created this homage to their wealth and power with the help of Christopher Wren. Open lawns with a strong “imposed” geography set the tone but many fountains and wide, pebbled paths also featured. Shady alleys were introduced and an old orchard was transformed into a “wilderness area”, a forerunner to the archetypal English landscape garden, which would echo through time, around the world, hand in hand with Britain’s domination of more than half the planet.

You may never have a pleasure garden on this scale, but the basic premise is still the same: a balancing act between control (human) and the natural world. A garden designed in this way is a kind of battleground. Depending on the influence of the time, different elements come to the fore. English baroque style was designed to describe man’s conquest over nature. Gardens designed 200 years later in the height of romanticism had an altogether different emphasis. This was a more outward-looking period, where science was asking some important questions and the old order was under attack from natural order. Sometimes romantic gardens had minimal lawns, with the most radical having the landscape garden approaching the house – as seen in the rise of the English cottage garden.

So what does that mean for you this weekend as you don the wellies and shuffle out into winter’s frigid clasp? No matter what kind of garden you want to establish, the basic tenets haven’t changed much. Control and domination rule the street front and the natural order rules the back. The rest is just a gradient from one to the other. If you follow that rather simplified recipe you’ll end up with a high-impact front garden with minimal plant varieties, strong lines and a robust sense of design.

As you move through the property this tight control can slowly unwind into a more casual living area: patio, pool, lawn and so on. These areas usually don’t have the municipal impact of the street front but are typically more interesting, with the back part of the garden becoming what used to be referred to as the landscape garden.

This basic recipe has established and re-established itself through time with the modern emphasis being on privacy. It will work well if you’ve got a postage stamp or you want somewhere larger to take the corgies for a trot.

By Justin Newcombe | Email Justin