Bridge Gardens, Peconic Land Trust

This past Thursday I had the distinct pleasure of joining my fellow garden club members in a delightful tour of Bridge Gardens. Bridge Gardens is on the south Fork of Long Island in the town of Bridgehampton and is part of the Peconic Land Trust organization.

If you are vacationing on Long Island or lucky enough to live here, and if you are into herb gardening, I highly recommend a trip to see this place. There are lots of other things to see there too such as the perennial border pictured above but the herb garden is superb!


A number of topiaries can be found (hmmm, my spell check likes topiary and topiary's but not topiaries?) dotting the landscape. Some of them jump out at you like this trio of swans, others are more subtle.


There's a small water garden which had a nice reflection for me to play with.


As I said before, the herb garden is incredible. There was so much to see, touch, smell and photograph here. I think our club spent 45 minutes checking everything out.


There are four corners and a center planting. One corner had cooking herbs, one was medicinal herbs, one was textile/household herbs and the last was ??? (I'll guess ornamental herbs?). There were Boxwood borders, Lavender borders and Berberis borders. The Berberis (Barberry) was such a beautiful shrub and I never thought of using it this way. One warning though, it does have sharp thorns!


The brick walkway had no weeds growing in it, Rebecca and I wondered how they managed that but never got around to asking.


I took a number of close up shots such as this one of Saponaria (bouncing bet - used to make a type of soap) but I'm going to post those on my Melanie's Perennials blog. I usually try to limit my posts to 5 photos so that people who still don't have high speed internet can also view them but there's just too much to share this time.


I thought the use of pots around the garden was charming and had to take a photo of the simple cinder block used to raise the pot higher. In my own garden I've been raising pots up like this and it makes such a difference!

There's a number of pieces of artwork and sculptures around the gardens. Many of them elegant, other's are quite whimsical.

Hidden in the back (I still can't believe I found it) was a piece of artwork that's right up my alley. A lovely shopping cart with a burlap border and planted with some yummy edibles. Now you know I'm going to need one of these. In my case I think I'd plant it with kitchen herbs so I can wheel it right over to the barbeque when grilling dinner :-)

Off to spend the day trying to water the gardens. While I love swiming in my pool every day, I do wish we had a bit more rain.

Enjoy!

Herbalicious

Heat and Humidity, it must be August. So what's a gardener to do when the mercury rises and all you want to do is stay by the pool?

Let's play with Herbs!

I grow a large number of herbs here at Old Country Gardens, some are perennials, others are purchased every spring. This summer though I learned a few new things about my herbs. First of all, they are just as happy (if not more happy) growing in pots.

In fact, as potted plants they are easy to maintain, rarely needing extra care. Just a simple pinch here and there and watering if we haven't had a recent rain. Better yet, put them in reach of your sprinkler system and you hardly have to do anything at all.

In this photo you are looking at a Thymus citriodorus (variegated lemon thyme), Mentha (basic garden mint that was here when we moved in) and Mentha suaveolens 'Variegata' (pineapple mint or also known as apple mint).

Just as an aside, I do not call them by their botanical names in the garden, I'm just including those here for readers in other countries that are looking for the same plants.

My mouth starts watering when I look at this photo. There are two different basils featured here (Ocimum basilicum in botanical terms) with the solid green leaf and the variegated Ocimum citriodorum 'Pesto Perpetuo' (let's just say citrus basil).

The citrus basil is a new variety and is patented so propagation is prohibited but what I've recently discovered is that most herbs have been around forever and of course, nobody holds a patent on them. This means that you can propigate most of your herbs till the cows come home and that's exactly what I'm going to do here.

It turns out that many herbs are quite easy to propigate with simple cuttings.

In this smaller pot are three plants, Cymbopogon (Lemongrass), Ocimum 'African Blue' (African Blue Basil) and Oreganum vulgare (true Oregano). Yum, all three are excellent for those fun summer dishes.

Here's a close up of the African Blue basil, a favorite of mine. I do admit that I let it go to flower as those blooms are just so lovely.

So tell me, what herbs are growing in your garden?