If you can dream every square inch of a garden, every day of its year, and every flavor of its season, then you can make it happen.
— Monty Don, host of the BBC's Gardeners World
This webpage reviews plants, materials, and techniques used in a midwest garden located in Bloomington, Indiana. The gardener is a "transplant" from decades of gardening in Southern California, so this is a challenge dealing with new environments and microclimates. View the garden on a walk-though, May 2023.
By the way, what's up with the quote above? Who is Monty Don? He's a presenter at the BBC's weekly "Gardeners' World" TV show, and if you give him a chance he could become your gardening guru. Check him out at his website.
Most clivia seem to be orange but this variety (probably 'Lemon Chiffon') has a light ivory-lemon color with deeper gold at the throat. This plant used to grow outdoors in Los Angeles for years before transitioning to a purely greenhouse plant in Bloomington, Indiana.
It's really one of the most striking Regal or Martha Washington pelargoniums (it fits either category) so it's a sad circumstance that the plant isn't currently in commerce. Logee's carried it for a time and may do so again. You can ask Logee's to contact you when it's available.
Bluestone Perennials has a nice Pink Blend daffodil package and that's where this ivory double emerged. I like the thrill of the unknown -- you never know what colors you'll get, from orange to pink to ivory -- but it's a nice surprise when they bloom midseason in spring.
Looks nice! There's a sunken bed just to the north of it lined with rectangular stones and planted with hostas, hydrangea, ajuga, Japanese sedge, liriope, and nemesia. It's a nice place to sit and read or contemplate the rest of the garden. The large fountain is there too to give a nice moving-water aspect to the ambience.
A backward glance
She wasn't a gardener, horticulturist, or hybridizer but Marie appears to love all plants, so much so that she always looked for opportunities to be pictured with them..
Marie was born in 1897 in Charleston, South Carolina, the daughter of two musical parents, William Jatho and Jennie Müller, who appeared in light opera together before their 1887 marriage. William and Jennie had six children, four of whom survived to adulthood.
William died of tuberculosis in 1904 and in 1910 Jennie and her family moved to Chicago, surely a culture shock to children used to Charleston's warm climate.
Marie's formative years were in Chicago. She married Alva Elwood MacLaughlan (formerly Alfred Emil Petersen) in 1914 and had four children of her own. Alva was an accountant and the family moved wherever there was work, from Chicago to Indiana to California to Florida and back to Chicago. Whenever possible Marie liked to pose with near-tropical plants, here a Viburnum outside her home. On their final trip to California in 1946 Marie was pictured in an orange grove in front of a tree heavy with fruit.
If you want to know more about Marie, please visit the MacLaughlan webpage.
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