July was a big month here in Buffalo. In addition to the usual Open Garden days and regional weekend tours, we welcomed 72 Garden Fling attendees from 26 states and Canada on July 9-12 for three full days of bus tours (mornings) and neighborhood walks (afternoons). 

Brenda Fox had one of the few truly rural gardens we visited.

After the Fling group left, it was time for Garden Walk, in which about 300 gardens opened for a weekend.

This suburban garden was packed with water features, places to sit, sculpture and – oh right – plants.

Though I was a co-organizer of the Fling along with Jim Charlier and Shirley Verrico, I was also one of those first-time Fling visitors, as I had not personally been to most of the gardens we visited. They’ve been available to me – on Open Gardens for years – but when I get home from work on a nice summer evening, I tend to stay put in my own garden, with no energy for getting in the car to visit other people’s. 

This arts and crafts house has a shed to match (below)

Thus, my experience of seeing Buffalo-area gardens I’d long heard about but never visited was eye-opening. This is what I learned:

Most area gardeners are way, way neater than I am. I had pretty much already assumed this, but I was unprepared for neatness brought to impeccable extremes, as in the well-organized suburban farm of Jeff Leyonmark (no good pix – see the link at the end for much better photography of the entire Fling than anything I have here). Meticulously arranged raised beds of vegetables are framed by ornamental areas, with never a speck of soil out of place or a weed in sight. I’ll never grow onions, no matter how cool they look, but I was impressed. The pelargonium theater was more to my taste. It had heirloom varieties I’ve been growing for years, but never as successfully. 

As always, the houses competed with the gardens for visual interest. One pair of gardeners in Snyder, a northern suburb, echoed the architecture of their house in designing a shed that’s one of the nicest I’ve ever seen. 

This plant collector in the Southtowns had some very cool hydrangeas.

And then there is all the whimsy. Some Fling attendees have made multiple posts totally devoted to human head planters, buffalo statues, gargoyles, gnomes, hubcaps, vintage signage and other objects they spotted in Western New York gardens. I don’t know that we are the garden whimsy capitol of the U.S., but we’d be in the running. Here’s my bottom line: if the plantings are there, the whimsy, in proportion, works, which was certainly the case in all the gardens we toured. 

“My Art of Noises,” by Burke Patterson

Our piece of outdoor sculpture was classified as whimsy by a few. It’s called “My Art of Noises” (after the British ‘80s-era band) and it’s made of cast bronze, cast aluminum and salvaged steel. The artist modeled the cast aluminum heads after an interesting 1933 artwork he had seen by Renato Giuseppe Bertelli entitled “Profilo Continuo (Testa di Mussolini),” which translates to Continuous Profile (Head of Mussolini). The artist is by no means an admirer of Mussolini but he was intrigued by the way the profile becomes infinite. The title refers to the fact that, with a good strong push, the heads act as chimes. Whimsical? I dunno. 

I was thrilled to tour the Draves Arboretum, a private Level III arboretum (ArbNet rating) I’d only seen briefly, but even happier to see a nearby 42-acre rural garden. People think small and urban gardens  when visiting here so we try to occasionally challenge those expectations. It’s an accomplishment to maintain a garden like this, which depends on trees as well as perennials, in the face of a voracious deer population. 

Tom Draves, founder of Draves Arboretum, explaining how to identify trees from their inner workings.

Like other Fling attendees, I got such a sense of place from these gardens. They are so confident. They have created their own rules and made spaces that push against limitations.

Rachel Balk, of Illinois, made drawings of each garden we visited and presented them to the owners.

Don’t take my word for it. Go here, where all the blogs and social media posts (much more of the social media) and videos – so far – are collected. You’ll also find all the sponsors and thank-yous, so I won’t be repeating that here. 

Josh Smith of Buffalo’s Silo City (downtown grain elevator complex), stands atop a project by Marlene McCarty, “Into the Weeds (A Deliverance Garden)” which features resilient, wild-growing plants historically used by women for reproductive health, sexual autonomy, and medicinal care.

That said, I do feel overwhelmed and very grateful for the enthusiasm that our visitors showered on the gardens and gardeners they visited. We didn’t show any expansive and  expensive properties – I’ve seen plenty of those on other Flings and enjoyed them. But we just don’t have them here – at least not with gardens worth looking at. The moneyed class in WNY seems to content itself with seasonally maintained traditional landscaping. That can be quite elegant in its quiet way, but not for a garden tour.

This canopy of willows is another Silo City project, combining ecological restoration, utility (shade) and sculptural installation.

Our visitors saw gardeners who are trading plants, wintering over cuttings, starting seeds and designing their properties in remarkably effective ways. They very rarely use outside help, with notable exceptions. I probably got as many interesting ideas to try out for myself as anyone who visited from afar. 

Next year, we’ll be in Portland – find out more here.