Surprise beyond the cast iron fences at the Dixon garden. (Bill Finch)
MOBILE, Alabama — It’s the big things. No, it’s
the little things. Or maybe it’s both together that make it so much fun to tour
May gardens in Mobile.
Every spring, volunteers with the Mobile Botanical
Gardens carefully select some of the city’s most interesting and elaborate
gardens, and help dress them up for the annual Gallery of Gardens.
This year’s Gallery, open for
viewing Friday and Saturday, May 2 and 3, from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m., features eight
different homes and yards that pull together the big and the small in some
unusual, intriguing and beautiful ways.
Did you see those photos of the Dixon house? The front garden, in
the Oakleigh Garden District, is built around a fern and palm glade. It’s a
surprising but stunning take on the lushness of Mobile landscapes. Around back,
however, southeast Asian and Japanese themes create a series of elegant and
quiet courtyards.
Tidy as a Dutch landscape, the McGehee home and garden. (Bill Finch)
It’s an exceptional garden surrounding an exceptional house, just like the landmark old Stone Tudor house on Government, which
will be showing off its garden of mature trees, azaleas, magnolias and
camellias. Visitors will also get a peak at plans to reconstruct the historical
features of the garden.
At the Allen home, The
Collonades, and at the ancestral Armstrong home, the expansive lawns are a
stage, and dancers with the Davidson Dance Company will celebrate the garden’s
fascination with heritage and birds and butterflies (not to mention birdhouse
collections). The Charingwood Home of the Millers, by contrast, is described as
a floral quilt of plant collections.
The size of some of these
houses and gardens is outstanding. But what’s just as interesting is to see how
gardens and their gardeners can transform homes and yards that are small and
relatively modest.
I can’t wait to see what all David Schmohl,
with Live Oak Landscaping, has done to his yard. I think he takes all the ideas
that his landscape clients are not clever enough to ask for, and develops them
in his own small suburban yard.
And I was delighted to see
the most graceful example of tree-pruned loropetalums in Mobile at the
Burkett-McLeod home on a modest lot in Midtown, along with a lot of other nice
surprises.
Tickets are
$20 in advance and $25 day of. Advance tickets may be purchased at the Mobile
Botanical Gardens office or MarketPlace, or at participating ticket outlets.
Group rates are available to groups of 10 or more. For more information call 251-342-0555.
Bill Finch is chief science
adviser for Mobile Botanical Gardens, where he teaches his popular Gulf Coast
Gardening classes. Email questions to plaingardening@yahoo.com. Speak to him directly on the Gulf Coast Sunday Morning
radio show, from 9 until 11 on 106.5 FM. Watch him cutting up with weatherman
John Nodar on the Plain Gardening segment on News 5 at Noon, every Friday on
WKRG.
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