On a super sunny sultry Saturday last September…
…We visited the University of Tennessee hort campus for their annual fall plant sale.
This is a garden that is open to the public. It changes from year to year with the plantings shifted and improvements made using the free labor provided by the students attending the Horticultural School.
It is a good place to get ideas for the Fairegarden…
…And learn stuff. The sign reads: How is the Garden growing? Power Plant Garden (center) Plants valued as energy producers and alternatives to fossil fuels. Cool.
This year it looks like the hort school has teamed up with the art school, for there were several new additions out and about.
Daughter Semi was captured in some of the images to give perspective of size. Yes, she is height challenged, like her mother.
The garden exploration was limited that day due to the setting up of a wedding in the rose garden. This might just be me, but it seems the florist did not do their homework colorwise, for those UT oranges were not blending well with the pink roses. And this is from the eyes of a person who believe all of Nature’s colors go together. Not this time they don’t, but may the happy couple enjoy a lifetime of wedded bliss anyway.
Since it was a plant sale, a few items were purchased, including this Carex morrowii ‘Silver Spectre’. The literature said it was related to C. ‘Ice Dance’, which loves the dry sloping clay conditions back home so we decided to give it a go. Also purchased: Kniphofia hirsuta ‘Traffic Lights’, Primula ‘Miss Indigo’ and Ilex verticillata ‘Winter Gold’.
There was a plant being tested that looked to be an aster of some sort, very similar to Heterotheca villosa ‘Ruth Baumgardner’, only shorter. I gave it high marks!
We had raced over to the sale after a little league baseball game in which offspring of Semi, LTB had played well, hitting it to the fence several times. He was tired and not particularly happy about being in the gardens. Semi wasn’t into plant mode either, and they were packing up the tables to shut down before the wedding guests started arriving. Maybe next year we can go earlier.
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More posts about the UT gardens:
Frances
