Garden Tour Season is Upon Us!

by Elsa Johnson

Garden tour season is upon us, and we’re doing our best, weather permitting, to cover the various events. We went on the Shaker Heights Garden tour about a month ago. We managed to see 5 out of the 7 homes on the tour before we gave up because of all the rain. We loved the variety on this tour, which bridged from the spacious very English manor garden professionally designed and maintained….

to the tiny and intensely intimate in scale, overflowing with plants and hidden nooks and crannies

to the fantastically imagined Japanese garden, which at the time we saw it was under about an inch and a half of water —

and a bit more.

Meanwhile, In Forest Hill Park…

Some of you may know that I work closely with various organizations to do environmental work (removing invasive species, planting trees) in Forest Hill Park, in both the East Cleveland and Cleveland Heights ‘sides’ (in much of the park there really is no way to know when you’ve passed from one governmental entity to the other). She has followed the death of so many of the park’s great old oaks with great distress. Last year, working with Dominic Liberatore, one organization she works with test (East Cleveland Parks Association) inoculated one of the oaks that seemed to be in the direct path of possible oak wilt (a year later the tree is still standing and alive). This year working with Chad Clink (Bartlett) we treated 4 oaks – one of them a recognized Moses Cleveland tree (although an inventory of trees in that area revealed that quite a few of them also qualify) — for Two Lined Chestnut Borer. Two were chestnut oaks showing some crown die-back and retrenchment, and two were close- by white oaks. We shall see what we shall see. Here are a few pictures from that process, which involves drilling tiny holes at the base of the tree into the capillary system of the root flares, and then using pressure to inject small amounts of the same pesticide used on Emerald Ash Borer.