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["Chrys B. Gardener" <cab69 AT cornell.edu>]

Tompkins County Open Day

Saturday August 6, 10 am - 4 pm

Admission: $7.00 per garden

 

Five very special private gardens will be open for self-guided tours for one day only on Saturday August 6. Each garden is unique, reflecting the personalities of the garden owners and include many unusual features.

 

Admission to each garden is $7.00. Proceeds from the Open Day are shared between the Tompkins County Community Beautification Program and the Garden Conservancy.

 

For more information, photos and directions to each garden, go to http://ccetompkins.org/tours

Garden Descriptions

The Filios' gardens, located on the Cayuga Lake north of Trumansburg, are anchored by beautiful stone walls and outbuildings, including a potting shed built by Achilles Filios in the style of his native Greece. The gardens include many flowers and ornamentals, but also have a strong focus on food production. Candy's vegetable garden displays her passion for heirloom pumpkins and an heirloom tomato collection featuring over 30 varieties. A very unique feature of the Filios garden are the “figgeries”, based on a technique for growing fig trees that the Filios' observed in an English garden. Other edible crops include grapevines, an apple orchard, chestnut trees and chickens.

The gardens at Heron Ridge, also north of Trumansburg on Cayuga Lake, are exuberant, colorful and whimsical. Enter the gardens through the stonehenge and down through the terraced gardens, which  include stone features, container plantings, a tiny water garden, statuary, quaint outbuildings and hundreds of blooming annuals and perennials. A boulder-enclosed vegetable garden is sited in a sunny spot next to the driveway. The plantings continue around the house with colorful planters on the back deck, a hand built brick pizza oven and a beautiful view of Cayuga Lake.

The Lipari garden in Alpine surrounds an 1840s farm house with borders,  a vegetable garden, and orchard. The gardener loves the process of gardening as much as the result, and delights in the thought that many of the plants in the garden started as seeds or cuttings. She uses metal frames as plant supports and borrows from her years in the Plant Pathology labs at Cornell with an abundance of old lab glassware perched on the metal frames.  A dry laid stone wall anchors new gardens on the hillside, using local stone and large boulders as a defining element. A small pond is also surrounded by laid stone.

The Orcutt garden in northeast Ithaca is a suburban property that has been developed into a series of garden rooms that make their property feel much larger than it is. Plantings in front of the house include trees, shrubs, ground covers, ornamental grasses and perennials that were chosen for their low appeal to deer, as this area is not fenced and deer pressure is high in this part of Tompkins County. Inside the fenced area lush, colorful perennials gardens completely surround the pool, and the deck is planted with large containers. A woodland garden next to the pool is planted with a textural mix of shade-tolerant perennials.

The Manzano garden in Freeville surrounds an 1800s farmhouse and the plantings are well-integrated with the sloping topography near the house and the surrounding woodlands beyond. Near the house, the pool area is softened with lush, tropical plantings, while the steep slopes behind the house are planted with a dense mix of perennials, shrubs and ground covers. Carlton Manzano is a plein aire artist and dozens of his paintings are on display in a barn on the property which he built himself.

Chrys Gardener
Commercial/Community Horticulture Educator
Cornell Cooperative Extension - Tompkins County
615 Willow Avenue, Ithaca NY 14850
(607)272-2292, extension 241
www.ccetompkins.org

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