Its been a long time since my last news bulletin on the garden at Gaiety Hollow.  The National Garden Conservancy team was here for a visit in August, and a LOT of work has been done…done by volunteers.  The Gaiety Hollow Garden welcomes volunteers on Friday mornings from 9:00-12:00 and let me just add that not only is it work/fun and you are helping an amazing cause, it is an excellent short course in pruning, brick restoration, invasives, transplanting, and numerous other garden activities and techniques.   Just showing up to take pictures, I’ve learned a LOT!  (…and there is always somebody there who really knows what to do and instructs…as well as providing coffee…)

The project this month has been the brick paths.  As lovers of Lord & Schryver gardens know, L&S LOVED brick paths…nowhere more than here, in their home garden.  Over time though, brick paths get weedy and the Gaiety Hollow paths had begun to look like this:

here’s me last spring taking some pre-easter egg hunt photos, but note the brick with a new bunch of weeds beginning to take hold in the April rain…

So The Tuesday Morning Gardeners from FOBG (Friends of Bush Gardens) came across the street and started the process of digging the weeds out from between the bricks.  BUT, as Gretchen Carnaby pointed out…you have to dig DEEP to also get rid of the weed SEED.  I arrived at Gaiety Hollow at the end of the process,

so today I went to the little Tea Garden at Deepwood Estate to watch the FOBG Tuesday gardeners work the brick paths there.  This garden was planted in 1932 and though no planting plans exist, we’re fairly sure it was done by Lord and Schryver for Alice Brown.  The restoration work in this garden began in 2007, and it was a joy today to see it looking absolutely beautiful…but I digress.  My mission was to see the team at work on the weed-seed-clearing and they were in full swing when I arrived…

I went back later in the day to check out their work and it was looking very good…with lots of sand to sweep in later after a bit of watering…

To see this garden looking so beautiful after seven years of hard restoration work was wonderful.  Heavy pruning, installation of a drip system throughout (coming to Gaiety Hollow at the end of September), replanting, weeding, tending…well I think you should go take a look.  This garden is just down the path from the parking lot at Deepwood Estate, on the right.  It looks absolutely beautiful at the moment…a calm oasis.