14 May 2012 - Exploring 13th West

What a glorious day! 84 degrees, sunny, perfect blue skies.


We spent the weekend, with major help from David (thank God for brothers), finishing the raised beds and installing a seven foot high deer fence around the beds. Jack is determined that we will get veggies, and that the deer will not. Stay tuned. 

So, after work today we went out to pick up a couple tomato plants and assorted seeds. The nursery was on the other side of the valley, which was conducive to exploring on our way home.

The first thing that caused me to hit the brakes, perform a u-turn and pull over, was a pasture with Highland cattle and babies! I had not realized how small Highlands are. A pony is taller than these cattle, although not even close to as heavy.  Their hairy faces give them such a sweet look--deceptively sweet-- I might add. One of the mothers charged the fence when she thought I was too close to her baby. 

The babies were about the size of Labrador retrievers. They were racing around the pasture, bumping heads and having a wonderful time. Truly, they made you want to hop the fence and hug them.

 The mothers were not having any of me. They were watching their little ones very closely. You can see the fence looks more than a bit on the rickety side, so I stayed further away than I wanted. 

Don't they look so very picturesque with the mountains in the background? 

Upon arriving home, I checked to make sure they really were Highlands (yep, they were) and also discovered that a group of Highland cattle is not called a herd, but a fold. So a Scottish Fold is a breed of cat, but a fold of cattle are Scottish cows. It is a weird and wonderful world we live in.

Back on the road, we had scarcely made it a mile down the road when we saw a big sign for a Conservation Garden Park. A what? Naturally we turned in to check it out. What a surprise! The modern building houses the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District offices, but they have an education center with classes, seminars, plant sales plus acres and acres of beautiful gardens that illustrate how to plant in a desert and use water wisely. What a delight! 

We took the self-guided tour which walks you through areas that emphasize design, irrigation, planting and maintenance. It was beautiful. Fabulous specimen trees and so many ideas that my head was spinning. We would have stayed a lot longer if the tomatoes were not getting heat stroke in the back of the car. We will be going back, you can bet on that. And I'll have a notebook and pencil. 

The gates were all different: huge slabs of quarter inch plate steel with cut-out designs of gardeners doing things. Fun!

 There were many paths through the gardens: concrete sidewalks, stepping stone paths, and mulched woodland paths.


Best part? All the plants were labeled. 

The paths led in and out of seating areas, including wood pergolas or through metal arched walkways or more formal poured concrete benches. 

 Here's an example of a hot, dry setting with a stone riverbed. Big flat boulders double as seating. 

The garden designers somehow made ordinary plants look exotic in these combination plantings.

Tall purple smoke trees, spiky clumps of blue-gray ornamental grasses, rounded flowering shrubs... all combine into a landscape that is so much more than a sum of its parts.

Here in a more wooded area, the garden is about to explode into color with peonies, iris, poppies and  penstemon.    Mental note: I want to go back and see that! It should be absolutely spectacular.  The purple flowers in this picture are globe alliums.

It was a lovely day out, and we were teased by so many possibilities.