Friday is volunteer day at Gaiety Hollow so I headed over there this morning…

The volunteers were taking their coffee break and “talking gardens”…

Along with the blueberry banana bread, Gretchen had Judith Tankard’s excellent book on the early and influential garden designer Ellen Biddle Shipman (for whom Edith Schryver worked in New York for City 5 years in the 1920’s)…

Gretchen had been searching for evidence that Shipman had ever used a white Lutyen’s-type bench in any of her gardens…and…

This is good news because we have such a bench, thanks to Nan and George Happ (kindly donated when they moved to an urban loft last year), look for it later this season!

But the talk turned to soil and compost and less glamorous topics…because every garden has less glamorous topics…

which make the more glamorous things possible…