Welcome rain brings forth delicate flowers between blades of grass

Almost an inch of rain and perhaps more due this weekend.  Hooray!  Already the lawns and pastures are seeing wonderful shades of green not noticed since early last fall (unless your lawn service has been fertilizing recently and you have been watering).

Thinking about gardens, Around Davidson recaps this week’s Horticultural Symposium, drops in on a well known gardener in our town, Leonard McRee, and reports on beautiful botanical gardens visited by Bill and Margo Williams.

Showing off Robin Wilgus' art on note cards were Davidson Garden Club members (l-r) Gladys Sanstrom (Robin's mom), Blanche Harris, Pam Grant and Jane Brumbaugh.

Davidson Horticultural Symposium XXVII

Twenty seven years and going strong!  Quite an accomplishment for a hard working group of ladies from the Davidson Garden Club, who have planned and polished, worked and worried over every detail of each symposium for almost three decades.  The minute a symposium is over for the year, a committee begins preparing for the next year, choosing a theme and considering guest speakers.

This year the theme was “Exploring Possibilities:  Rediscovering Home.”  Lacy Woods Dick chaired the event this year as she did last year.  Davidson Garden Club President Mary Wilson Stewart also was much involved in the planning.  The symposium lectures were held in the Knobloch Campus Center on the Davidson College campus.  The weather was picture perfect for last Tuesday’s event – especially considering the past two years when there was winter snow.

Davidsonians enjoying a break between lectures at the Horticultural Symposium were (l-r) Garden Club President Mary Wilson Stewart, UNCC Urban Institute Director Jeff Michael and Symposium Chair Lacy Dick.

Tuesday morning’s first speaker was the energetic Chip Calloway from Greensboro who spoke about restoring gardens around old homes.  The second speaker of the morning, Darrel Morrison of NYC, was also very well received as he talked about landscape design using native plants.  (Both great topics for our area.) Following the morning lectures, lunch was served to the more than 325 attendees in the college’s Vail Commons with beautiful table arrangements prepared by Pat McCall and Caroline Plyler.  Afternoon workshops were marvelous with speakers signing copies of their books and plant sales offered by Dearness Gardens of Huntersville during the breaks and at the closing of the day.

"Rediscovering Home" by artist Robin Wilgus for the 27th Davidson Horticultural Symposium

In the atrium of the Knobloch Center, UNCC’s Larry Mellichamp displayed a fascinating collection of “bizarre carnivorous botanicals.”  Another nearby table of great interest presented the art of Davidson’s Robin Wilgus who has provided the symposium’s cover art for the past 16 years.  Each year her art is auctioned but note cards showing her donated piece are available for sale.  Sixteen years of note card designs!  What a talent and how interesting that when asked, a half dozen persons at the sale table each chose a different note card.  Also nice to “note,” that all proceeds from note card sales go to benefit the 2012 Symposium, area environmental groups, public gardens and scholarships for students in the green industry.

Hats off to the members of the Davidson Garden Club for yet another successful symposium.  Well done.

Leonard McRee knows how to handle a hoe!

A LOVE FOR GARDENING

Always a pleasure to visit with Leonard McRee who grew up gardening in Newton, N.C.  His parents always had a big garden so early memories were of growing, weeding, shucking, shelling, canning and freezing produce.  Leonard and his wife, Beverly (who also grew up in Newton), moved to Davidson in 1976 with their two young sons, Jon and Jason.  Leonard gardened for years behind his South Main Street home but now retired from Duke Energy, he tends a larger, fenced plot on East Rocky River Road.

Leonard, with Beverly’s help, still cans and freezes vegetables to enjoy after the garden stops producing.  Green beans always produce a bountiful crop but Leonard commented that nothing tastes better than freshly dug Kennebec potatoes in the spring.

He sends annual soil samples to the state for analysis finding that his ground usually needs more lime.  His fertilizer of choice is 10-10-10 and the rows are prepared with Leonard pushing his “push plow.”  If you are missing bagged leaves at your curb, it is possible that Leonard has put them in his pick-up to use as mulch around his plants.  Some squash, tomato and cucumber seedlings are started in peat pots in the McRee home but seed packets of radish, spinach and Swiss chard are already carefully dropped into the well prepared rows.  Currently in his early garden, Leonard also had onion slips and a few cabbage heads.

Well prepared ground, a source of water and a fence are absolute necessities for gardeners in our area.  As Leonard stated, he can control the weeds but not all the varmints.  Deer continue to be a garden pest as do those cute little hedgehogs that waddle right up to your new sprouting beans and mow them all down!

Thanks, Leonard for a garden visit.  Around Davidson hopes to visit a number of gardens this spring and provide readers with tips for success in the dirt.  (Know a great garden or gardener?  Let me know.)

Mom Margo stands with son, Danny, who had just won a stuffed dog for her at an arcade on the Santa Monica Pier.

BEAUTIFUL GARDENS IN CALIFORNIA

Margo and Bill Williams and their younger son, Danny, have recently returned from a Valentine visit with their older son, Ben, who lives in Santa Monica.  Since Ben and his girlfriend, Sun, did not make it east for Christmas, it was a perfect excuse for Mom and Dad to leave the N.C. winter weather behind and head to sunny California for a few days.  Sun and Ben live in Santa Monica about six blocks from the ocean and love their location.  They manage to walk almost everywhere and seldom fight the traffic to make a trip to Los Angeles.

Margo, Bill and Danny found beautiful weather during their California visit.  They spent one day in Huntington Gardens in Pasadena which covers 127 acres with a Bonsai Court that was of particular interest with its world famous specimens.  The garden tour was particularly enjoyable and included a marvelous lunch stop at a tea room with tiny sandwiches, salads and scones.  Palisades Park and the Third Street Promenade provided many hours of interest for the family as well.  Lots to be said for the easy going west coast life according to Margo.

The beautiful Japanese garden area of Huntington Gardens in Pasadena

For an update on these young people, we can report that Sun is an architect practicing in Santa Monica.  Ben works there in the computer world of variable and statistical analysis.  Danny continues to live in Mecklenburg County and works for the big construction equipment division of Hertz, covering a territory from Lincolnton to Kannapolis.

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Have news for Around Davidson? Write to Brenda Barger at hbarger@bellsouth.net.