day tripper

My sister arrived for a visit at the beginning of Week Six of The Artist’s Way — and coincidentally right at the beginning of the intense deadline madness.  All summer we’d discussed visiting Park Seed Company and Wayside Gardens, as their trial gardens and headquarters are about a two-hour drive from where I now live in South Carolina.

These companies have had a profound impact on me ever since I caught the gardening bug in college.  I used to peruse their mail-order catalogs until I had practically memorized them, and I learned so much about growing things in my region from them, as they are also located in USDA Zone 7.

In short, I really, really wanted to go see their home territory.  Their famous trial gardens.  Over two acres of them, just to test the newest varieties and seeds in these hot and humid conditions.  The very idea had a pilgrimage feel to it.  And yet… I had all this work waiting for me.  I knew what I “should” do, because my Ego was repeating it sans cesse in my ear:  cancel and stay chained to the desk.

But my heart whispered, “Just go.  The work will be here when you get back.”

I’m so glad I ignored my guilt-tripping internal voices and went day-tripping instead.  I ended up spending time with my sister (one of my all-time favorite people, and a creative fuse lighter for me) and experiencing a portion of the journey as my artist date for the week, as we took off in opposite directions to explore on our own for a while.  (We’ve perfected this art since my teen years, during visits to bookstores when we had wildly divergent interests, finding each other only when there was a find we just had to share — or merely comparing notes and discoveries at the end.)

These gorgeous trial gardens also seemed a particularly apt choice of Artist Date for Week Six:  Recovering a Sense of Abundance.  Nature is abundant even when it’s the end of the season and things are shutting down…as we discovered when we got to the visitors’ welcome center, which had a little sign posted in the window:  Closed for the season.  No signs advised us not to explore the Beauty that was right out there in the open, though.  There was so much to see still, even at the end of September.

And it certainly looked like I made the right choice when we arrived there — if the glorious weather was any indication.  The sky was breathtaking, and the weather was mild and perfect.  Well, mild for South Carolina, at least, which means I only had to escape twice to a bench in the shade.

1. Entrance 2. Nasturtium ‘Salmon Baby’ 3. Late-blooming, ethereal clematis 4. Bi-colored basil* 5. Clematis close-up 6. Mandy getting a closer look at the begonias 7. Begonia blossom 8. The part of the gardens that made me feel better about how bedraggled parts of the Victory Garden are looking lately 9. Chinese flame tree 10. Seed pod of same (doesn’t it look like a sleepy dragon’s eye?) 11. An abundance of gomphrena that made me reconsider my attitude to this plant 12. Close-up of the ornamental grass Mandy wants to plant in her front yard 13. She even brought her planting diagrams with her — amazing, no? 14. Flowers within a flower

* If any of you just happens to know the name of this basil, well, shoot me an e-mail or put it in the comments, okay?  My sister brought an entire gardening notebook, organized and with a layout of her home and planting areas carefully drawn, questions to ask any gardeners we stumbled across, etc.  I brought a tiny notebook in my purse, which I immediately forgot to bring out of the purse in the oohing and aahing and general gushing over the sights.  But I would like to try this bi-colored basil with purply blossom stems next season…