Herb Fest

Hello everyone and happy Friday! It’s time to kick off another wonderful weekend. We hope you can join us tomorrow, the 15th, in downtown Cary for the 1st Annual Friends of Page Walker Herbfest.  Festivities begin at 9 am and include cooking demonstrations, crafts, live music, and activities for the kiddos. We’ll be there selling a huge selection of herbs at a great deal. Stop by and say hello!

We would also like to give a big thanks to everyone who stopped by our Wine & Design Trunk Show last evening!  A big thanks as well to NYFO Boutique, Lynne Ogburn Designs, Surcee, and Moon and Lola for sharing your gorgeous and unique fashions and jewelry designs.  We couldn’t have done it without you all.

NYFO Boutique

NYFO Boutique

Surcee

Moon and Lola

Surcee

Our own Master Gardener Allison modeling fashions from NYFO

And lastly, our heartfelt thanks for all of you who registered last night for our “Gardeners for the Cure” team as part of the Susan G. Komen 2010 NC Triangle Race for the Cure.   Our gratitude to Surcee and NYFO for donating fabulous prizes yesterday for a special raffle drawing for our team registrants.  And take a look at our cute team logo. Perfect for us gardeners!

Even if you cannot be present at the race on June 12th, you can still join the team and receive all the bennies Deborah is offering, including a special team Tee shirt, an after-party, and a 12% discount card for all your Garden Supply purchases for the rest of the year. Here is the link again for our team. Together, we can help find a cure for breast cancer.

Thanks for stopping by!  Hope to see many of you at the Page Walker tomorrow for the Herbfest!

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Summer Tropicals

Hi everyone!  Hope you all are enjoying your weekends and this fabulous weather we are having.  What a beautiful day it is!  Perfect for a little gardening.  And since I know you are all in the mood to plant, I am super excited to share with you some of our new arrivals down at the garden center.

A touch of the tropics hit Garden Supply this week with a big shipment of beautiful perennials and tropicals from Monrovia.  For 84 years, Monrovia has pioneered many new technologies and plant introductions including hundreds of patented plants, making them a leader in developing fabulous plants that will thrive in your garden.

Now keep in mind that since central North Carolina is in Zone 7, our winters are a bit too cool for these tropics-loving plants, but don’t let that deter you.  These gorgeous plants will thrive in our hot summer, providing you with lots of drought-tolerant showy blossoms all season long.  Treat them as you would any summer annual.  They do great in your container gardens, many can be grown in topiary form or trained to a trellis, and most offer interesting foliar texture as well as stunning flowers.

These topiary-form tree hibiscus do wonderfully in a pot on your deck or porch.  Just make sure they get lots of sun.

These are the ‘Orange King” and “Purple Queen” Bougainvillea.  The ‘Orange King’ has a strong vining habit providing quick cover and beautiful, showy masses of bronze-orange flowers.  They do great in patio containers and hanging baskets.

The ‘Purple Queen’ has rich, deep purple blooms which are displayed against handsome green foliage.  It has a compact, upright and spreading form.  Wonderful for planter boxes, fences or arbors.

We also have the Barbara Karst Bougainvillea in both topiary tree form and spreading form.

The spreading form offers a vigorous, showy vine with bright magenta-red blooms.  Gives a fine cover to patios or arbors, and is also a good ground cover for banks.

This next beauty is the ‘Sun Parasol’ Crimson Mandevilla. It is excellent for patio containers, offering a bushy vine with large trumpet-shaped flowers.

If you are looking for a touch of textural interest, check out this fun and whimsical ‘Pony Tail Fern’, Asparagus densiflorus ‘myers’.

This plants boasts long plume-like stems that hold soft, needle-like leaves.  Its fluffy appearance adds unusual textural contrast to container gardens.

And finally today, I would like to share with you another plant with fabulous foliar structure, the Black Jack Fig.

This attractive garden tree has sweet, elongated fruit in summer.  Its semi-dwarf form makes it a good choice where space is limited.

I hope you all have enjoyed this small taste of the tropics here in the heart of North Carolina.  Puts me in the mind of cool sea breezes, palm trees, and sandy beaches.  Time to bust out the Hawaiian print shirts and head on down to the garden center, as these plants won’t be around for long. I couldn’t help but notice they were getting snatched up yesterday about as quickly as they could be unloaded. 

Thanks so much for stopping by!  We have many more new plants to share with you all, so I’ll see you back here soon for more snippets from the garden.

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