Take-away ideas…

I love touring other people’s gardens, even if it took them two orders of magnitude more resources to create their’s than I can put into mine. In a good garden – even one that took a half-million dollars to create – there should be some ideas that can be poached and replicated for practically no money, right?

Last Saturday Jenna, Lukas and I visited some of the gardens of the 2010 Wildflower Center Garden Tour. And while the two that we visited took considerable resources to implement, I came away with one idea I will be copying. And all it will cost me is about $1.89 in hemp twine.

That’s right… bamboo trellises. In a garden that has to have taken possibly a $100,000 or more to create (owned by Christine Ten Eyck, founder of Ten Eyck Landscape Architects), amongst the magnificent but earthy Berthold Haas fountains, the pervasive mile or so of drip sprinkler tubing, the uncountable tons of trucked Hill Country karst limestone, boat-loads of organic soil and hundreds of varied plantings, one idea struck me as being eminently practical, sustainable, and completely affordable. And it just so happens I have a pile of cut bamboo waiting for this little bit of brilliance.

Ideas I have in mind for it include a privacy trellis/screen for the trumpet and passion vines to help us gain some shielding from the neighbors (and their sterile South Florida yard), some walkway borders, and of course, vegetable trellises. A little scouting on Google revealed some simple methods of lashing bamboo.

Now all I need is that ball of twine.

More photos from the garden tour.