Southold Historical Society Garden Tour: July 9, 2005

Thank you so much and thank you for mentioning the blue moon connection, too!

Now I can say "Charlie" without crying but I'm sure you're right and when that baby is placed in my arms I really have to have tissues ready!

pirl, i'm so glad I got to see your gardens. so many thoughts are conjured in my mind, all good! all of the above pix suggest one theme: love in its many, many forms, overt and subtle. thanks for sharing.

Thanks vossner! Love all your effusive wording - makes me feel it's pretty special, too.

Absolutely Beautiful and filled with love. What more can be said? Ed

Hi Ed. Thanks for the lovely comments. It's actually filled with love, ambition, compost and more compost. Anxious now for the first real big tomatoes. We already have the sweet 100's coming in an a hornworm that neither of us can locate, day or early evening!

Arlene, if I may call you that since we only met a short time ago-pirl, if you prefer.....I give your gardens standing ovations! What a marvelous display of devotion and love of nature. Although my lot is a little larger than yours, I will never be able to accomplish what you have with your magnificient displays, creativity, and hard work. I am supposed to be finishing dinner, but have sat at the computer, entranced with the beauty you and your loving husband thrust before my eyes. I intend to bring my husband to the computer, as soon as he gets home, to show him all the wonderful possibilites that lay before us. I'd love to copy everything just as you have laid it out, but I know that not only is it cheating in some way, but it is totally impossible. I got your e-mail about your coming birthday, and please believe me when I say you do not look it, and with the amount of work the two of you apparently do, you must not feel it either. God bless you and the wonderful legacy you have created. It is a tribute not only to nature, but to two fantastic people who are leaving this world much better than when they got here [although, may it be many, many, many moons from now-full ones at that,before anyone considers going anywhere]. I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed your lovely flowers; the great offspring of femme fatale, the Pauline Isabell Reid Loefter, the pinks, and the Beautiful. Hope I got that right, either way I loved them all. Thanks for the pleasures you have given us. Jackie

Jackie: reading your note was such pleasure. It's always nice to know that others like what they see. Pauline would have adored seeing her name in print! She had been the society editor of the local Albemarle, N.C. newspaper, before she married and came north to live.

I'm so touched that you're delaying dinner while taking the tour! That and the standing ovation are more than I could ask for!

Maybe another bonus about being outside so much is that we're not inside getting the house dirty! Less for me to clean.

I bent down to deadhead some Marguerite daisies about two hours ago and ended up cutting back lupine, iris, the daisies, removing spent scapes of daylilies, trimming one rose (after killing a mound of Japanese Beetles on the one remaining flower, tossing the wild vines of a clematis over the fence to let it cover the inside of the fence, cutting back digitalis, finding a weed 4' tall (not out yet), moving a monarda, cutting flowers for the table, etc. As long as we stay outside the work, and the enjoyment, never ends.

Jack and I hope we have many, many more blue moons together.

Thanks for your lovely thoughts and you can call me pirl/Arlene/Megan's grandma (she's 14 today) or Charlie's grandma (he's seven weeks on his way to being born).

Wow, your gardens are so beautiful pirl, and surely reflect the rewarding hard work that wen into them. Congratulations on a labour of love well done.
Christine

Thanks, Christine! It was accomplished over the course of three years. When I look back I wonder how we did it but it was in baby steps and now, just when I thought we were done, he's agreed to make one garden bigger: not much, but still bigger!

Arlene, what a perfectly lovely haven you and your DH have made. It is truely an inspiration for me and I am sure for others. The jogger lady certainly missed out when she hurried through. I think I could spend days wandering your garden and still want to see more (and probably still miss something). I love the curving paths and the mixture of color and form, quite the eye candy. Your Undine is lovely and the gnome home a hoot. Gonna make me one. Thank you for the cybertour. Blessings, mich

Mich: thanks for taking the garden tour. I just dismiss the ones who want to rush: it's their loss. This year I've really learned to appreciate the view of our gardens from my neighbor's yard. Quite a surprise when we were over there, working on her wild vines, I looked up and was thrilled with the view!

Watch out for that, Arlene. I looked up at my garden from a neighbor's yard a few years ago, saw my silk mimosa tree from that new angle, and decided it was the best looking tree in the neighborhood. By the time I got home five minutes later, half of it was draped across the fish pond. I had tempted the fates and they punished my hubris by splitting my tree in half. LOL.

I am so sorry about your mimosa! What a horrifying sight it must have been.

Actually our own trees, except for the big line of Colorado Spruces, is mostly "inherited" landscaping. There are two old dying dogwoods and a dying maple. The tall one by the rear terrace is a swamp maple and grows much too fast. It does give us shade and that's what we needed.

Your note makes me happy that we never did invest in trees!

Arlene,

I just took another tour through your garden, and I think that it was even better than the first time. I shouldn't be spending any time on the computer as I have so much gardening to do. We had a terrible storm here a week ago and I have been busy cleaning up and trying not to worry about squished plants. Lost the top 2/3 of a great many huge trees. It just breaks my heart to see such majestic trees reduced to rubble. We must concentrate on the fact that the house was spared as well as garage, etc. Others were not so fortunate.

Back to the garden tour.....what a delight to the eyes and an inspiration for us mere mortals. It is giving me so many ideas for areas of my own garden that I'm not thrilled with. Baby steps..... Thank you for sharing with us. If I ever manage to make it out to your part of the country, I hope that you will allow me to become lost in your magical garden for at least part of a day.

Marie

Marie,

You're always welcome in our garden and also welcome to come and take the plants we'd like to find other homes for. I'm just not capable of moving everything. I got a kick out of a neighbor's son-in-law and his wife, who dug everything for themselves and our neighbor, and left at noon. They still had to squeeze in a BIG black lab and their luggage!

Thank you so much for your invite to view your beautiful gardens! All your beds are devine, dramatic, with lovely Daylilies, Hydrangeas blossoms so heavy with flowers, Hostas and walkways manicured to perfection, Gnomes enjoying the splendor of lushness, garden art expertly placed in just the right spot and your gorgeous Clematis vining their way through the Roses, all show the love and attention that has gone into this magnificent garden! It is truly a "labor of love"!

Thank you so much for sharing it with all of us!!!

Thank you Shirley. We thrive on words such as yours. We do love our gardens but wish they weren't quite so good at growing so fast!

No wonder your grounds were picked again for the garden tour. They are truly spectacular. Thanks for such a grand tour. The only thing lacking was the taste of raspberry ice tea and of a homemade cookie.

Hi kell,

I only remembered about the cookies at 11:45 and I turned on the oven! Between cookies baking, guests arriving, and more batches of cookies, it took the entire afternoon before all the cookies were baked! People did appreciate them and one even wrote a comment in our guest book!

Thanks for taking the tour: we enjoyed having you stroll along with us!

Raspberry tea is so good! What type of cookies did you bake?
I love to bake and my waistline show it.

Sugar cookies, that I wanted to decorate like flowers but realized at the moment that I wouldn't have the time and plain old chocolate chips that everyone jumped at. I think when they saw me with the cookie sheet and spatula they realized they had just come out of the oven, not out of a box!

Warm chocolate chip cookies, cannot be beaten in my book. I bet you were the favorite house on the garden tour! Flowers and warm cookies!

Three of the eight homes did have some type of refreshment but I was the only one with cookies. The two skinniest people and the one heaviest woman (you can see her in the photos) had the most pleasure from them.

We finished them off with cocktails after the tour was over: something new for me (cookies and cocktails, not just cocktails)!

Hmm.. cookies and cocktails.. lol.. can't say I've done that before!!

As that character Mikey would have said: "Try it. You'll like it".

When you're tired and weary and exhausted it's divine!

There is a certain ring to it. Cookies and cocktails! LOL A new fad you have started Pirl!!.

Sure, leave it to me! Couldn't have started something healthy. Nooo.

well.. broccoli and cocktails just doesn't have the same panache does it?

worse - broccoli and prune juice...

Do you know what they call Prune Juice and rum?



A rum runner.

LOL!!! That is way to good ... ... ...

Credit goes to Johnny Carson, about 1965.

See before my time - your credit to me!

Your mother was just "late" having you!

Seeing my mom was only 3 in 65 um...

(yes she had me very young)

Fussy, fussy!

Have to be GenX here - yep in the rule book somewhere I have been told... yep yep yep right?

R,

I can't believe it. I am so blown away by your gardens that I feel humbled to have been talking to easily with you these past few weeks. After seeing what you've done, I'd send you everything I have if I weren't doing so already. How fortunate your area is to have you and Jack.

I hope we will be garden friends for a long, long time. It will take me that long to learn to be half as good as you've proven yourselves to be.

God bless you and thank you for making the world a more beautiful place to be.

Leslie

Les,

What a pleasure it is for us to have you revisit our gardens!

Now that we're gardening and trading buddies it makes it even more special. All you're sending me will make our gardens all the more beautiful. We have to have the best trade ever on DG. Thank you so much for your generosity to the Katrina victims by purchasing from the Lily Auction and then sharing the plants with me.

My daughter may be blessing me with a little Charlie next year but you've already sent me a garden blessing in "Charming Charlie".

Thank you and all who have visited our gardens: the pleasure was ours!

Arlene and Jack Ryan

Arlene, WOW!!! Thank you so much for sharing! I'm in awe. You must be exhausted, having all of that to take care of! I don't know how you do it! Your gardens are truly inspirational.

Kylee