If you feel you’ve seen a lot of coverage of Washington gardens lately, it’s true. This is my 26th post about the Puget Sound Fling tour in July. While I have a few more posts about places I saw on my own, including Gillian Mathews’ garden, Seattle nursery Ravenna Gardens, the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum, and Washington’s three national parks, today is my final Fling post. My fellow hot-climate readers, I hope these virtual tours have helped you get through the summer, as they have for me. And now our own glorious gardening season approaches, hooray!

The final garden on the Puget Sound Fling’s bonus day was the Galicic Garden, where the owners put music on outdoor speakers and a spread of food and drink on the patio and welcomed us to relax or explore. I explored first, naturally. The front garden gave me New Orleans courtyard vibes. A graceful figure spills water into a round pool, surrounded by palms, magnolia, and extravagant hydrangeas.

Those hydrangeas — giant corsages of purple — climb up into a palm tree’s shaggy trunk.

Moody

The water-carrying fountain figure as seen from one side…

…and the other.

Another hydrangea flanks a comfortably furnished front porch.

Towering lilies scent the air.

Another nuzzles a boulder.

Silvery eryngium gleams.

Pie-chart palm leaves

In the backyard, a 3,000-gallon pond features waterlilies, large koi, and cascading waterfalls.

Waterlily

A waterfall splashes into the pond next to a lacy, ironwork gazebo with a table inside.

Another waterfall, half hidden by lush foliage, cascades alongside a palm tree decorated with tiki masks.

Purple-and-white clematis

More fun tiki decor adds to the tropical ambiance of the back garden.

Loosestrife (Lysimachia paridiformis var. stenophylla) looking pretty

A garden room of Japanese maples will be glorious in the fall.

In a fenced vegetable garden, blueberries were ripening.

Pink clematis…

…and a veined, orange-red abutilon add color.

A pale hydrangea stands out against a rusty red Japanese maple.

Steely blue echinops

In the front garden, Austin’s Jennie Ostertag, a first-time Flinger with a popular TikTok called @JennieGardens, gathered a dozen Flingers to make a dance video.

Jennie brought so much energy to the Fling. Here’s a still from her TikTok dance that pretty much sums up the fun everyone was having. Want to watch the dance video she made? Of course you do! Here’s the link.

Organizers Paula Rothkopf and Camille Paulsen put together an incredible Fling experience for us. Huge thanks to them and their helpers, including Gillian Mathews, who put together the garden lineup for the bonus day in Seattle, for showing off their region so beautifully. What a wonderful 5 days in Tacoma and the Puget Sound region it was!

If you’re reading this and wondering if the Fling is for you, check out the Fling website for details. The Fling is an annual meetup and multi-day garden tour in a different city each year, open to anyone with a public social media account about gardening. If that’s you, we hope you’ll consider joining us next year in Memphis, Tennessee, June 5-8! And if you’d be interested in hosting the Fling to share the gardens and culture of your city/region with 100 garden writers, photographers, and influencers from across North America and beyond, contact me directly.

This ends my coverage of the Puget Sound Fling. I hope you’ve enjoyed the garden tours! For a look back at the adventurous and romantic Livingston Garden, click here. Stay tuned as I share over the coming weeks about Ravenna Gardens nursery, Chihuly Garden and Glass, national parks, and other gardens I visited in Washington before the Fling began.

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Digging Deeper

Join me for an evening of gardening community, learning, and inspiration at the next Garden Spark talk. On October 24 at 7 pm, Jennifer Jewell will explore how gardens and gardeners are powerful agents for positive change in the world, helping to address challenges as wide ranging as climate change, habitat loss, cultural polarization, and individual and communal health and well-being. Jewell, host of the national public-radio program and international podcast Cultivating Place, will explore that power through the lens of seeds: how they grow, where they grow, who grows them, who sells and/or controls them, and their care up and down the seed-sheds of our world. A handful of tickets are still available; click here for more info.

Come learn about gardening and design at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, authors, and gardeners a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance; simply click this link and ask to be added. Season 8 kicks off in fall 2024. Stay tuned for more info!

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