Horticulturally, the month of May is opening night,
Home-coming and Graduation Day all rolled into one. ” Tam Mossman
On Saturday, May 19, the La Jolla Historical Society will host its popular perennial event, the Secret Garden Tour of Old La Jolla. This year’s tour promises to be another wonderful day that will allow you to stroll through the garden gates of seven enchanting La Jolla gardens.
Betty Vale, the 2007 chair, extends an invitation to this sellout event: “Join us and meander through breathtakingly beautiful gardens of La Jolla, featuring an array of landscape styles and plant species “” Mediterranean, island tropical, English and more, that reflect the enduring charm and hidden scenery of La Jolla.”
The tradition of the garden tour is to keep the locations a secret until the day of the tour. On tour day, the garden locations are revealed when reservation holders check in at Wisteria Cottage (the future home of the La Jolla Historical Society) and receive their tour maps and programs. The idea of making the garden tour a secret came from our garden tour’s co-founder and creator, Susan Vandendriesse, who researched a secret garden tour held in Cape Cod ” the rest is history.
Longtime La Jolla resident and internationally recognized artist Georgeanna Lipe will serve as this year’s honorary chair. Georgeanna has always been dedicated to the Historical Society, and for many years she painted several of the tour’s most memorable gardens, including the former oceanfront residence of actor Cliff Robertson, the historic Casa de la Paz. Georgeanna even came to my garden a few years ago at 5 a.m., when a local TV station televised its morning news program there to talk about the Secret Garden Tour.
This year’s Secret Garden Tour poster and program will feature a painting by La Jolla artist Jane Fletcher. The painting is of the historic, vine-covered storybook home on Fern Glen, The Florence Palmer House, Historic Site No. 692. The Fern Glen home and garden were one of the many highlights on last year’s tour, which featured not only its whimsical gardens, but also a family of turtles and a “living” gnome who posed in the garden surrounded by towering hollyhocks.
Each year, a painting from the garden tour is chosen for the following year’s poster and program. All of the gardens on the tour are assigned an artist and their paintings are offered for sale. I was very fortunate to purchase the painting of the Fern Glen home, which is near and dear to my heart since I helped to restore the home and have it historically designated.
The Secret Garden Tour also features talented musicians who will play a variety of instruments in the gardens and designers who create imaginative outdoor entertaining displays. A hardworking committee has selected a wonderful array of gardens for this year’s tour, and along with the garden owners they are very busy putting all the details together to make this an event you will not want to miss. Besides, can you think of a better way to spend a spring day than wandering down a garden path surrounded by flowers?
In addition to the regular self-guided tour, an exclusive Platinum Tour will shuttle patrons to the gardens with docent guides, followed by lunch at the La Jolla Country Club. All tickets are limited and sell out in advance. If you are interested in attending, think ahead and reserve your tickets by going online to the Historical Society’s Web site, www.ljhs.org, or call (858) 726-0227 for a recorded message. Both the Web site and recorded phone message have important tour information.
Also, to help you get into the spring gardening mood, Weidners’ Gardens has selected some of North County’s most unique and extravagant gardens for the Community Resource Center’s sixth annual Garden Tour, which will take place on April 28. Call Weidners’ Gardens for more information, (760) 436-2194, or the Community Resource Center, (760) 753-1156, ext. 1305.
” Linda Marrone, a local Realtor who specializes in historic and architectural properties, is one of the founders of the Secret Garden Tour of Old La Jolla. Her historic home and garden were featured on the 2001 tour.