By Joyce Miles
Niagara Gazette
WILSON —
The temperature is soaring and the beetles have landed.
Must be time for a garden show!
Nine homeowners in the village and the town are rolling out a welcome mat this weekend for visitors to the Wilson Garden Club-organized walking/driving Wilson Garden Tour.
Mother Nature isn’t precisely in harmony with the gardeners’ plans. Ahead of the tour, they’re working extra hard to stave off the damage she seems to want to inflict on their prized plantings.
Marcia Sabey, chairman of the garden club tour committee, took a panicked phone call from a tour host over the holiday weekend.
“’The Japanese beetles have landed! What am I supposed to do?’” Sabey repeats, finding some humor in the caller’s horror. “Come get some liquid Sevin from me, I said; it’ll be OK.”
“Getting ready for the show can be a little stressful,” Sabey says. “All of us are working up a real sweat now, trying to make things perfect. They never are, of course ... but once you start hearing from people how much they like what you’ve done, you forget about it.”
It’s true, says gardener Lois Barnum. When she participated in the 2002 show, she found “getting ready was the hard part. Walking people through was a breeze.”
This time, while she’s still working hard on presentation, Barnum is more relaxed about the tour.
Among effects of the weather this growing season, everything’s coming into bloom about two weeks ahead of schedule, meaning the lilies and astilbe that should have been a highlight of the Barnum garden tour are now nearly spent.
That’s OK, she said; the focus will simply shift to other plantings on her property.
“You can’t argue with the weather,” Barnum said. “We’re all in the same boat.”
