Gardening insights and an intimate sense of place will be among the benefits of Blue Hill’s TOUR DE PLANTS

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A garden tour can be a thing of elegance. Beautifully trimmed lawns, colors bursting from flowerbeds, women wearing wide-rimmed hats and a sense that all is right under the sun. My day with two members of the Blue Hill Garden Club – Linda Monroe and Jan Crowfoot – was all that (minus the hats) plus a window into some of the most beautifully maintained, if not historic, gardens in their coastal town. Back in June, the two women drove me to several properties on this year’s Blue Hill Garden Tour, which will take place Thursday, July 21. We didn’t see all seven houses that will be featured, just a sampling. But what a sampling.

“It’s not just a show-off event,” assured Monroe. “It’s an opportunity to get a short cut. Garden supplies are expensive. Having someone help you is expensive. This way, you can see what others are doing and perhaps learn something for your own garden.”

This is only the third garden tour the club has arranged since 1980, my guides told me. Nearly 1,000 people showed up last time, and organizers are prepared for large crowds this time, too. Gardening is popular among Mainers but also among summer residents and visitors.

Either way, the gardens we inspected – even though it was early in the season – were testimonies of design, diligence, passion and artistry, whether the grounds were large or small, or whether maintained by the owners or by professional landscapers. It doesn’t matter to the garden tour organizers because, in the end, the garden is the thing.

“A lot of us feel if we had a full-time gardener, we could be on the tour. But I have a lot of weeds. I also have a lot of beautiful perennials but you have to look through a lot of other things to see them,” said Crowfoot.

The first stop was at Overlook right in town. Owners Leslie Clapp and Blaise deSibour didn’t start out with a grand plan for their 10 acres. They started small and expanded. And expanded. And expanded. Now 4 acres are gardened intensely. Others have a grazing field for horses or trails mowed through tall grass. It’s a pastoral paradise.

“The maturity of this garden is what is so amazing,” said Monroe. “Just look at that hydrangea.”

“It’s June 21, and everyone else is still looking for a bloom, and just look at that!” gasped Crowfoot.

The garden eased toward a deck attached to the main house, where Clapp also grows orchids in a sunny room. In the rolling yard, metal pipes played a song in the breeze. Water trickled over rocks. Birds gathered at feeders.

Clapp grew up not far from this property and, in fact, walked through it on her way to school as a girl. Now she is a photographer and hardcore hiker. The outdoors is clearly her home and her workshop. But unlike many gardeners, she also wants it to be a welcoming place for wildlife.

“My passion – as president of the local Audubon chapter – is planting for wildlife,” said Clapp. “I’m very conscious of what is good for birds and deer.” (One car in the driveway has the license plate BIRDR, the other has AT HKR.) Clapp keeps a list of bird sightings on her property. So far, she has counted 113, including woodpeckers (hairy and downy), chickadees, cardinals, goldfinches and house wrens. Worldwide, she has identified more than 1,200 species.

Still, she has a flower and vegetable garden not meant for all wildlife. Namely deer. A picturesque fence surrounds that area. (Clapp is, after all, a photographer, so the garden is, around every curve and flower top, picturesque.) The most powerful deterrent to her wild visitors, she said, is a “liquid” fence made from rotten eggs and hot pepper.

“It stinks,” she said. “But if you spray it on anything, deer won’t go near it.”

Clapp does all the gardening herself. “We don’t have much free time,” she said with a smile.

When I asked her about perfectly soft and lush lawns of green grass, she peered down at the occasional weed in her own lawn.

“Those other ones are a sterile green nothing,” she said. “Your weeds are doing a lot more than that lush green carpet.” That made the rest of us feel good.

Crowfoot was examining one of Clapp’s beds near a gazebo. “It’s nice to see an azalea next to an allium,” said Crowfoot.

“You never know what you’re going to see here,” said Clapp. She gardens April through November or, as she puts it, “just as long as you can go.” At every point, the garden has something in bloom. Her favorite is a crabapple tree that blossomed in May.

After Overlook, we moved on to the Elsie and Patrick Wilmerding property, which clings to a crest of rock on the side of Blue Hill Mountain. No one was home, but we paused to listen to the hefty wind sweeping by. Crowfoot, Monroe and I stood quietly for a while, peering over a wild blueberry barren with pert lupines and granite boulders toward the Acadia Mountains and the Camden Hills. Behind us, neat gardens cuddled up against the house.

“This proves you don’t have to have acres and acres of flowers to be on a garden tour,” said Monroe. “This is very manageable.” Then she pointed to the rangy barren and said: “The trend in Maine gardening now is to minimize the grassy areas, to look less suburban and to emphasize the things that are native. This is a lovely example of that.”

What a relief to those of us who don’t have time to prune and thin and sculpt greenery, but I suspect that a lot of thought went into making this property look so natural.

Monroe quickly turned back to the garden and began scanning over the floor coverings: “Is this myrtle or a vinca of some kind?”

Crowfoot was in her own reverie: “Isn’t this snow-on-the-mountain wonderful foliage?”

Soon, we were off to the next garden. As with our day trip, the stops on the tour are staggered to allow participants to take in the scenery. For instance, at the Ken Fox and Janelle Bedke property, a rose-toned Italianate house overlooking Blue Hill Bay, participants can spend extra time walking trails through wooded areas and past huge granite formations. A few miles out of town at Horsepower Farm, gardeners who grow vegetables – as well as flowers – can see a full portrait of sustainable farming.

Back on my private tour, we headed back into town. While the vistas from Blue Hill Mountain looking out were breathtaking at the Wilmerdings, the mountain itself became part of the view when we stopped at Scrivelsby. Set back far from the road, these gardens were originally designed in 1919 by landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, a New Yorker who had a summer home in Bar Harbor. Farrand had clients such as the Rockefellers, the Morgans and the White House. Scrivelsby may seem quaint compared to those, but its gardens are exquisitely harmonious with the property. The U-shaped house, which was built by a Boston architect in 1911, sits high on Peters Point. In the cradle of the U, a sprawling central living room faces Blue Hill Mountain on one side and Blue Hill Harbor on the other. Flowers and greenery partially frame the views.

With a room like that, the house calls out for a party. Alas, the house itself will not be open on the tour, but its owners Kitty and Thomas Clements III will serve refreshments in the garden during the tour.

“We have done this year in and year out,” said Kitty Thomas, whose grandmother had the “rusticator’s cottage” built. In addition to the flowers that two gardeners help Thomas maintain, she has one small placard in her garden. It reads: “Grow dammit!”

It’s an apt slogan for the garden club, too. It used to be a rather small association and now has as many as 120 members, some of whom have grand gardens, others of whom simply have an interest in gardening. About half of the members live in Blue Hill throughout the year. In summer, members meet once a month for luncheons and lectures by garden specialists or others who simply have good ideas for gardening. The garden tour is the largest event the club organizers. The money raised goes into a civic project such as the wrought-iron fence the club replaced around the cemetery, the flower boxes on the bridge or the outdoor furniture around town. “We use the proceeds to beautify our town,” said Crowfoot proudly.

But there’s another reason to go on the tour, too, said Monroe, as we drove away from Scrivelsby.

“I really feel that people are going to benefit a lot from the information they’ll pick up on this tour,” she said. “They’ll spend a wonderful day with family and friends. And it’s a way onto the Blue Hill peninsula.”

“It’s a more intimate view,” added Crowfoot. “If I go to a place – like Castine – and just buy bread, I don’t get to know it. But if I go to an event, I feel I see so much more of the place.”

“And the important thing about our tour is the variety,” interjected Monroe. “I don’t see how anybody could come away and think we didn’t tell the whole gardening story here.”

It’s a story told in blossoms and blooms, creeping vines and sunlit grasses, harbor views and mountain panoramas.

The 2005 Blue Hill Garden Tour will take place 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday, July 21. Look for wood flower cut-outs at each site, where tickets can be purchased on the day of the event. Tickets can also be purchased that day 10 a.m.-3 p.m. on the Blue Hill Village Green at Town Hall on Main Street. To buy tickets in advance, call 374-9933. Tickets are $20.

Tour Tips

1. Wear a sun hat or baseball cap.

2. Bring bug spray and sunscreen.

3. Water is available at each garden stop, but it’s always wise to bring your own.

4. Pack a lunch or plan to buy food at one of six local eateries.

5. Families are welcome, but baby strollers and gardens rarely do well together.

6. Pets do even worse; please leave them at home.