Inside the Community's Not-So-Secret Gardens

Green-thumbed area residents shared their gardening secrets with other community members at the 2011 Garden Tour organized by the Neighbors and Gardeners of Bayport and Blue Point.

A not-to0-hot summer sun served as the perfect backdrop for tourseekers who paid $15 and $20 to visit the seven best gardens in our area, from Bayport's Connetquot Road, to Blue Point Avenue in Blue Point, and all the way to Wilstan Avenue in Patchogue.

Diana Walch, who serves as Neighbors and Gardeners treasurer, explained that the tour raises funds to pay for watering and maintaining the 38 p0tted plants seen around Bayport and Blue Point. 

Walch is really the person to know because she helps to decide which houses get on the tour. The hardest part, she says, is getting people to agree to be one of the gardens on the tour.

Walch says she looks for flowers in addition to "hardscape," which are the lawn gnomes and other features that grace yards when deciding which houses make the cut.

Debra Jedlicka's garden- number seven on the tour- features two pink flamingos envoloped in a sea of whimsical flowers.  The flamingos at one time belonged to her grandmother in Queens, New York. Jedlicka had admired them as a child and then decided to put them in her own backyard garden. 

"They bring me back to my roots," Jedlicka said of the nostalgic item.

Do some of our community's greenest thumbs get carried away?  Not when gardening is their passion. 

"You can easily spend three hours a day if you're able but I never have a day when I spend less than an hour," Marianne Als said. "Its a labor of love."

Perhaps it was the combination of garden hosts sharing their true passion and the great early summer weather that made this year's garden tour such an eden.

Harriet Mihlstin put it best, "God sent us the rain so everything could perk up and today it's sunny for the actual tour," she said of the days of rain making way for a beautiful Saturday of perfectly bloomed flowers.