Thai sala and tropicalesque garden at Olbrich Botanical Gardens
August 19, 2022 For my final post about the Madison Fling back in June, I’ll share the Thai Garden, a surprisingly exotic-looking space at Olbrich Botanical Gardens. First, that glimmering golden pavilion! Called a sala, such a pavilion “is a common structure in Thailand generally used as a shelter from ...
Meadow garden in gravel at Olbrich Botanical Gardens
August 18, 2022 A meadowy gravel garden at Olbrich I keep hearing about a new way of planting in gravel to make easy-care, low-weed, low-water gardens. The idea is, you scrape away 4-to-5 inches of soil, add a 6-inch-high barrier around the planting bed to contain the gravel at a ...
Planted plaza, fountains, and rose garden at Olbrich Botanical Gardens
August 15, 2022 For Part 2 of my visit to Olbrich Botanical Gardens during June’s Madison Fling, I’ll show you the Rose Garden. I confess the words “rose garden” never perk up my ears. Sure, I like roses OK, but so many rose gardens are really rose ghettos, planted in ...
Snapshots from Olbrich Botanical Gardens’ meadow, event, and herb gardens
August 12, 2022 Coneflowers at the entrance to Olbrich While in Madison for the Fling back in June, I had time for a pre-Fling visit to Olbrich Botanical Gardens, and then of course the garden was on the official tour schedule as well. Double Olbrich! I first visited this fine ...
Cindy Fillingame’s glowing, rainy-day garden
August 09, 2022 Let’s pedal on into another lovely Wisconsin garden from the Madison Fling in June, this one belonging to Cindy Fillingame. An old, three-wheeled bicycle greets you out front, a tub of yellow pansies glowing behind the seat, pink penstemon popping up through the spokes. While Austin continues ...
Ann Munson’s woodland garden invites mystery and play
August 05, 2022 Woodland gardens aren’t show ponies of dazzling flower color. Their beauty shines through in subtler, shade-loving foliage plants, in dappled light glinting through leaves, in cool shadowed paths that gradually reveal tucked-away art and secret hideaways. Such is the garden of Ann Munson, which I toured on ...
A garden on wheels and colorful decor convert driveway into patio garden
August 03, 2022 When you arrive at a purple Victorian-style house on a Rainbow Row, with a dozen planetary-painted bowling balls tucked amid foundation ferns and coleus, accented by jewel-toned bottles on a bottle tree — well, you know you’re in for a tour of a fearless color-lover’s garden. Such ...
Green-roof prairie and fantasy gardens at Epic Systems, Part 2
July 30, 2022 The fanciful, theme-park landscaping and architectural design of Epic Systems‘ corporate campus made for a one-of-a-kind tour during the Madison Fling in June. While I’d read about Epic’s imaginative design, I had not heard about its ambitious efforts at sustainability. According to the company’s website: “Epic’s buildings ...
Epic Systems campus, a fantasyland of gardens and architecture, Part 1
July 29, 2022 One of the zaniest, most eye-popping destinations on the Madison Fling tour in June was the corporate headquarters of medical-software giant Epic Systems, located in the rolling farm country of Verona, Wisconsin. Soulless lawns, sprawling junipers, boxwood hedges, and other ubiquitous ground-fillers of corporate landscaping are banished ...
A sun-to-shade retreat in the garden of Rita Thomas
July 25, 2022 “The garden has been my retreat, my laboratory, and my playground,” Rita Thomas told us at the Madison Fling, a 3-day tour for gardeners on social media, held last month in and around Madison, Wisconsin. For 35 years, Rita has been playing in her Fitchburg garden, learning ...
In the moment at Rotary Botanical Gardens
July 21, 2022 Entry pollinator garden, and one of the last photos from my old Nikon Something unwelcome happened to me at Rotary Botanical Gardens on the last day of the Madison Fling. My trusty old Nikon D5000 camera croaked. Well, it didn’t actually die, but the shutter began to ...
Shady oasis with folk art and inviting central patio
July 20, 2022 The exuberantly planted and decorated garden of Jim Ottney and Jay Hatheway has secret hideaway vibes. Located at the end of a dead-end street in charming Stoughton, Wisconsin, 20 miles southeast of Madison, the garden hides behind a screen of trees and shrubs. A winding path leads ...
Constellations of clematis at Janet Aaberg Garden
July 17, 2022 Glorious clematis vines greeted us at nearly every garden we visited during the Madison Fling last month, but Janet Aaberg’s garden stepped it up a notch. Thirty-two different varieties of these starry-flowered vines grow in her garden, and every one appeared to be in full bloom. This ...
Allen Centennial Garden on UW–Madison campus
July 16, 2022 Allen Centennial Garden, a free public garden at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, offers a pleasant garden stroll around a Queen Anne mansion. The garden was our final stop on the recent Madison Garden Bloggers Fling tour. I also made a quick visit with friends before the Fling ...
Nearly extinct American chestnut – a vision from America’s past – at UW Arboretum
July 15, 2022 I was lagging behind, catching up with a friend as my fellow bloggers hotfooted it after our fast-talking and even faster-walking tour guide at UW Arboretum, a stop on the Madison Garden Bloggers Fling. Time was short, and the guide was beelining to noteworthy trees. During one ...
Native prairie garden replaces half the lawn in the Grosz Garden
July 14, 2022 A shoulder-high, prairie-style garden makes a graceful swoosh through the sunny backyard of Linda and Phil Grosz in Middleton, Wisconsin. As the second stop on the Madison Garden Bloggers Fling tour in June, it immediately grounded me in the Upper Midwest, land of the tallgrass prairie. Linda ...
