Saturday With Alison and Nigel: The Tacoma Home and Garden Show Part One

I am of the strong belief that every garden show should begin with someone offering you complimentary chocolate covered something! More about the rest of the show later but first, all strung out on chocolate and the joy of seeing each other again, we looked for a sign to lead us.

It couldn't have been clearer! Like the three wise men (only two at this point as Nigel found a nice spot to read his book as Alison and I went on.) we followed the wondrous sign on the east wall and journeyed to behold the wonder of Bark and Garden's space. (Useless trivia: neither the number nor the names of the wise men from the east is mentioned in the bible, that stuff just got made up. Neat eh?

You may be wondering, like I was just what Bark and Garden would be bringing to the show. After having just visited last week I thought I'd seen it all but boy, was I wrong!

In talking with a nice gentleman working in the space he told me that much of what was coming to both this show and especially the Seattle Show (only a week away peeps!) was kept under lock and key as there were several new introductions that the nursery would be featuring at the shows.

Bark and Garden does a wonderful job of combining evergreens and other winter interest plants. With year round beauty like this possible in one's garden, it's tempting to rip out a lot of those silly seasonal things and replace them with longer-lasting lovelies like these. (O.K. even I didn't believe that.) But there are certainly a lot of gorgeous evergreens that can be included in our gardens for winter visual stimulation!

What's this gorgeous golden pine that costs less than a third of what 'Chief Joseph' costs? It's Pinus sylvestris 'Gold Coin' which came home with me. I'll do a side by side comparison of it and Chief Joseph in a future post so that we can see the differences and similarities.

The Tacoma Home and Garden Show is much smaller than the Northwest Flower and Garden Show and doesn't include many of the components of the larger show but it's a great place to visit in the winter to get one's engines running for the season!

So, you get the pattern, right? Throw some plants together. Make one yellow, one blue, and one red and you can throw in just about any other green shades. Something should be upright, something should be a mound of foliage, throw in something prostrate and you're good to go, add something weeping, even better. Oh, and make sure that they have different foliage that will compliment the other plants in the arrangement. Sounds pretty easy doesn't it? Why doesn't my garden look like this then?

B & G even had a nice display of indoor plants. The splotchy dieffenbachia caught my eye but since I kill house plants, it stayed to be adopted by someone with better skills.

The huge range of color, shape and texture of evergreens never ceases to amaze me!

This yew and threadleaf cypress combination is simple and elegant.

Another pine whose name I didn't get with nice gold tipped needles.

Last year I fell in love with a much smaller specimen of this at the NWFGS. It's a Sunlight Lace Hinoki Cypress that is an Isley (from Boring, Oregon) introduction. Ms. Alison was smitten with this one.

B & G also brought some Hellebores...

Is this foliage wonderful or what? Helleborus 'Platinum Rose' There were also many 'Anna's Red' in the display but none with the strong red markings of the foliage on the one I got at the nursery.

I had to get Rosemary 'Gold Dust' because you can't have too much rosemary, right? You can use the woody stems as skewers for things to be barbecued and if you've not tried throwing rosemary on your coals just before grilling, you might like the flavor it gives your food it's also a joy to smell the smoke of burning rosemary. Anyway, can you imagine how pretty this gold variegated foliage will look when it has purple/blue blooms?