July 19, 2000

Green thumbs ready for Walk

Friendly Garden Club's annual Garden Walk this Thursday

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
       Learning her love of gardening from her two grandmothers and now a grandmother herself, this week Cathy Blankenship is facing an important milestone in her gardening career. Starting tomorrow, she will welcome more than 1,600 visitors to her home, putting her efforts at creating a Colonial Williamsburg-style garden under intense scrutiny by gardeners of all levels.
      Blankenship's back yard, in the heart of the Olde Town Neighborhood, is one of five stops on the Friendly Garden Club's 18th Annual Summer Garden Walk. A bright spot in the year for area gardeners, the Garden Walk is known as a place to get new ideas and check out what everybody else is doing.
      Accepting the invitation to be on the walk last fall, Blankenship has found that - as zero hour approaches - showcasing your efforts for hundreds of other gardeners is a mixed blessing.
      "It is both exciting and frightening, because these people will be such good gardeners," said Blankenship, a fourth-grade teacher at Immaculate Conception Elementary School. "One of my neighbors passed on the word to the Friendly Garden Club to come check my garden out and they wanted it on the walk."
      Blankenship is an inveterate gardener who, along with her husband, Charles, has transformed her backyard in the ten years since moving to Traverse City from Virginia. Starting with just a cement stoop outside of the back door, the Blankenships now have a deck plus a variety of beds, arbors, birdhouses and feeders scattered around the yard.
      The centerpiece of the back yard is her latest project, the Williamsburg garden. She started it last year, spurred by the beauty of the gardens she remembers seeing in Virginia, which were modeled after formal English gardens. She marked off a large square of her backyard, lined it with brick and crisscrossed the space with brick paths that defined the beds. The garden features a tree at each corner, a small bench at the back and spills of color, texture and scent from a variety of flowers and plants.
      "I go to the Farmers' Market on Saturdays and it is so fun there, they are so helpful," she said. "I bring plants I like home and just put them in the garden, that's why there are so many different kinds. I come out here for just a little while and suddenly it is 10 o'clock and my husband is calling me to come in."
      For the past 18 years, the Friendly Garden Club has sponsored the Summer Garden Walk as their main fund-raiser of the year. The money raised by these Garden Walks is used in a variety of programs the club sponsors throughout the year, including Arbor Day tree plantings, a junior gardening program, a scholarship to the TBA Tech Center and donating gardening books to libraries.
      The club also has civic improvement projects sprinkled around the area including the logo garden at the Open Space, plantings at the Senior Center and the Children's Garden at the Traverse Area District Library. Club members will also be actively involved in the upcoming restoration of the arboretum on the Grand Traverse Commons grounds.
      Preparing for the Garden Walk begins in the fall, as members visit gardens around the region and look for a common theme and geographical cluster. This year's in-town will also feature a new garden in the beginning stages, a landscape garden for easy maintenance, a vegetable garden with a pond and a mature garden.
      "We're looking for good teaching gardens so we end up with a variety because not everybody gardens the same way," said Terry Harding of the Friendly Garden Club, whose garden was on the walk last year. "We like ones that are only one or two years old and established gardens so people have an idea of what that looks like."
      The Friendly Garden Club's 18th Annual Summer Garden Walk is held rain or shine on Thursday from noon to 8 p.m. Tickets are available at area gardening stores, Tom's Food Markets, from members of the Friendly Garden Club and at other locations around town. The price is $5 in advance and $7 the day of the walk; children under 16 are free. For more information, call Sue Loney at 256-2107 or Dee Swanson at 947-5105.