I wanted to take a quick minute to talk about our storefront garden. We’ve been working hard on it all year, so we think it deserves a mention!

What kind of garden, you ask?

It is a demonstration garden for the wonderful seeds we carry: Seedsavers, Renee’s, High Mowing, Baker’s Creek, Ohio Prairie Nursery, and Wild Thyme. Fabulous stuff! If you’re thinking about making some seed purchases and wondering what those little guys will grow up to look like, this is the spot to check it out!

It is a rescue garden for many of the annuals we had left over. We don’t want to let every unclaimed plant languish in a pot, so a few souls find a happy home here for the remainder of the season. They look great and still have 4-6 weeks, maybe longer in this unseasonably warm year!

It is a pollinator garden: annuals and perennials procured and grown to help pollinators, especially the bees, whose population has suffered such catastrophic losses in recent years. To make our little friends feel welcome, our garden is full of Salvia, herbs, and a variety of fragrant flowers.

Finally, the garden is a child’s garden. Our garden is not sedate, it is not polite, it is not conventionally elegant, and it is certainly not by the book. It is instead a mass of never-do-this combinations. It is the riotous, madcap, ebullient garden that my mother let each of us plant inside the foundation of an old ruined outbuilding when we were small children. Heights are not carefully gradated; colors swear. I love it.
My parents loved all manner of gardening: my mother, flowers; my father, trees. Both loved vegetables, which grew well in our 300-year-old barnyard. Both loved animals and were especially fond of birds. Both, my mother especially, were active in a number of conservation organizations.

This garden is a thanks and tribute to both of them with lots of love.

Please come on by and see it! We have most of the plants you’ll find there, many of them in 4” pots, many great for a fall garden or container, perennial garden, educational school garden, you name it. Ask us questions about it. We promise we’ll tell you anything you want to know!

– Penny