Everybody lies

posted on Monday, June, 8th, 2009 in default

Turns out I had quite a busy weekend. After we spent Saturday admiring cars, yesterday turned into flower day for me and my mom.

It was not only the long-awaited day of the annual flower market in the orangerie of our little local castle Belvedere, it was also the day of the Open Gardens this year.

The flower market in Belvedere is always something special, because not only is the location more beautiful than your average market square in town (though ours is quite nice, actually), you can also always find some not so common flowers or plants there that you would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

Dad doesn’t come along to these markets, because the only things he is interested in, gardeningwise, are vegetables and frruit-bearing trees and stuff like that. Flowers are a total waste of time for him. So I went with my mom, as usual. This year we could take things very easy, because we weren’t on the lookout for anything in particular. We had already bought all the flowers that we really needed from the other annual flower market in town a couple weeks ago. So everything we would find in Belvedere was just gravy.

Of course, we found some stuff. And as usual we bought whatever took our fancy and then on the way back to the car desperately tried to figure out where exactly to plant it later on. Funnily enough, there’s always room somewhere. That’s the beauty of a big garden.

Although the market has always been quite popular, I was impressed with how many people were there this year, even though it wasn’t the best weather and it was still quite early in the day. But instead of spending all day up there, we had other places to go as well.

Open Gardens is a fairly new tradition in our neck of the woods. I had heard about it from other countries, but in my region I think they started this thing only a couple of years back. Basically it means that normal people open their private gardens for visitors during that day. You pay a symbolic fee of 3,-€ to get access to all of them.

This year there were 36 gardens in and around town participating, but we only made it to 9 of them. The problem is, because they are located not only in town, but also in the outlying villages in the region, it takes sometimes more time to get from one garden to the next than it takes to actually walk through the gardens and have a chat with the owners.

But nevertheless I always enjoy the opportunity to take a look into gardens in unexpected places. Especially in town there are sometimes quite the cozy little retreats tucked away behind tall walls. And it will never cease to amaze me just how many flowers you can squeeze in some of these tiny little places.

We missed the day last year because of bad weather, so this was just the second time we did the round. But I think it can become a great tradition, because each year there seem to be different gardens involved. And whereas the first time around there were a couple of duds, this time we found only beautiful places with interesting owners and we borrowed quite a few ideas to adopt in our own garden – which, after all, is the whole point of this exercise.