CAROLYN'S SHADE GARDENS

Every year I attend a garden tour in Maine, and this year it was the Georges River Land Trust’s 27th annual “Gardens in the Watershed Tour“.  Each year the tour highlights gardens in a different area of the Georges River watershed, and this year it featured six gardens in Rockland, Owls Head, and South Thomaston.  The gardens were beautiful as was the scenery viewed while traveling between properties in this undeveloped area of Maine.  Five of the gardens are profiled here.  The final garden was so magical that it will get its own post.

Nursery News:  Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a retail nursery located in Bryn Mawr, PA, specializing in showy, colorful, and unusual plants for shade.  The only plants that we ship are snowdrops and miniature hostas.  For catalogues and announcements of events, please send your full name, location, and cell number (for back up use only) to carolyn@carolynsshadegardens.com.  Click here to get to the home page of our website for catalogues and information about our nursery and to subscribe to our blog.

.

The first garden was relatively small, running along the side and filling the space behind a house in downtown Rockland, Maine.  It was lovingly cared for by the owner and perfectly showcased the beauty of perennial gardens in Maine:

.

I loved these pale yellow, double daisies and lusted after the blue delphiniums that thrive in Maine but not in hot and humid Pennsylvania.

.

.

.

the vegetable garden

.

Next we visited a working farm, which produces most of the vegetables for Cafe Miranda, a popular restaurant in Rockland, profiled at the end of my last post.  To read that post, click here.  It consisted of 14,800 square feet of permanently established raised beds.  The beds are maintained organically, predominantly with hand tools.  All the vegetables are started from seed.  I have never seen such an orderly and well-thought-out vegetable garden:

.

.

.

The third garden, located in Owl’s Head on the scenic shoreline of Penobscot Bay, had a Pennsylvania connection: it was owned by a former Executive Director of Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, profiled on my blog here.  It featured mostly native plants in pleasing combinations among boulders and swales:

.

.‘Rozanne’ hardy geranium

.

.

.

My favorite part was this lovely view of Ash Island in Penobscot Bay.

.

The next garden was also on the shoreline in Owl’s Head, encompassing Dodge Point with an easterly view of Penobscot Bay and overlooking Owls Head Harbor to the west.  The property had a beautiful woodland filled with native plants as well as cultivated areas around the buildings and in pockets of soil among the ledges:

.

The woodland was filled with this broad-leafed, native aster.

.A beach on the Penobscot Bay side of the point.  Morning fog was just clearing when we arrived.

.The view of Owls Head Harbor, home to over 60 working lobster boats and two active lobster pounds.

.

It was great to see this native beach rose, probably Rosa carolina, rather than the ubiquitous and invasive, non-native rugosa roses.

.

A flowering sedum echoes the color of the lichen-covered ledges.

.

.

I saw this beautiful hosta there, but unfortunately the owner didn’t know the name.

.

More plantings in front of the house among the ledges overlooking the bay.

.

The final garden profiled here was a grand estate built on a thirty-acre former sheep farm on the shoreline in South Thomaston.  The perennial gardens behind the house were lush, but the harsh midday sun ruined my photos.  However, it was the ocean views and the house itself that drew the most attention:

.

The grand driveway sweeps up a hill to the house in the distance.

.

.

.

Carolyn