“Not Your Mother’s Garden Tour” is held to benefit the Library.
On a beautiful summer’s day in July, I participated in a special garden tour in Bowdoinham. “Not Your Mother’s Garden Tour” is held every other year when an “eclectic group of enthusiastic gardeners from Bowdoinham, Bowdoin, and Richmond” open their doors to visitors. We started at the Farmers’ Market at Mailly Waterfront Park: a feast in its own right with bakers, herbalists, bagel and cheese providers, and farmers offering vegetables. My car was already loaded with goodies when I started the tour at Brooke Thompson’s.
Brooke is an herbalist offering tours in Provence, France each Spring. Her own gardens were filled with flowers, herbs and veggies intermingled. Every so often, she had a stand with fresh tea or an elixir from a plant located and labeled nearby. So informative! An interesting idea is her use of bendable, styrofoam “pool hoops” to create frames for draping netting to thwart bugs and birds. Genius! She also had rich and plentiful compost bins which are the handiwork of her father.
On to the gardens of Kate Brinsmade. Kate has gardened over many years and has fabulous perennial beds throughout her land. She’s created flower arrangements near her back door, across the yard, into the woods, and around vernal pools of water. She has a lot of knowledge and offers pearls of wisdom. “If a plant does not do well in one location,” says Kate, “try another. Plants will surprise you and ‘move’ to a spot they prefer.”
Nan Curtis has also gardened for many years (perhaps 40?) and has learned a great deal about putting food by. She had neat rows of vegetables mixed with flowers in the lawn surrounding her house. Handy by in these rows, and every so often, were bins for collecting garden debris turned into humus. Nan had a huge patch of basil. She likes to gather large quantities of basil to make pesto—a creamy green sauce most commonly made with basil (or sage, parsley, marjoram, arugula or other leafy matter) mixed with parmesan, oil, nuts (pine or walnut), salt and lemon. She uses ice cube trays to form the pesto into cubes, freezes them, and then pops the frozen cubes out to wrap each one with strong, clear plastic wrap for long-term storage. Nan then uses the frozen cubes in her cooking throughout fall and winter by dropping one into soups, stews or sauces. Voila! An instant return to summer.
Peary’s Garden—the home of Bowdoinham’s Community Garden—had a brick-oven pizza in full swing with volunteers serving up lunch—so good! It was in the community gardens that I saw stalks of wheat growing for the very first time. Rumor has it they will make pizza dough from this wheat in a subsequent year.
I did not hit every stop on the tour, but was so glad to make it to Eleanor Groden’s on the mouth of the Abbagadassett River. Wowza to these gardens: a very full and lush home orchard with its own apiary and strong, healthy trees laden with cherries, pears, and plums, at the time of our visit. (Apples, hazelnuts, apricots and more are still coming!) The gardens are also surrounded by 150+ row feet of sunflowers and other plants that next-door-neighbor (and son) Six Rivers Farm is growing. A spectacular gardening effort!
Wow to this tour. Can’t wait for next time.
—Photography and story by Christine Macchi