Garden Tours in Buffalo Niagara
INTRODUCTION
A New Kind of Garden: livable, relatable, original, free spirited
The first inspirations for this book were some very special residential gardens in Buffalo, New York, home of the largest private-garden tour in North America: Garden Walk Buffalo.
How did it grow to be such a large and talked-about event? It didn’t happen overnight. It took twenty-some years to get that good, that original. During those years a new kind of garden was evolving, with a particular set of characteristics. They were all lush and traditional enough to be called fine gardens but also quirky enough to spark a new term: a Buffalo-style garden.
No matter the size or style, each one had its own kind of welcoming energy and a unique personality that spoke volumes about its creators. No cookie cutter landscapes here. Every garden was built and tended by the gardeners themselves. These are approachable, livable environments that bring a smile and warm the heart.
We (Sally and Jim) are keenly aware that unforgettable gardens occur in other places too. Both of us are gardeners ourselves, and observers of the garden tourism phenomenon. And we’re travelers who have noticed special features of gardens in many places across North America and Europe. We have often talked about the common denominators: What makes some gardens unforgettable? Could we bottle it and sell it, or explain it to others?
We knew we could, and the best way to start was with those extraordinary (mostly) small gardens of Buffalo.
Buffalo gardens have colorful front yards.
You’re about to meet some highly individual gardens and the gardeners who created them. Different approaches, different sensibilities, no two remotely alike. You might ask, if these gardens are all so unique, how can there be a Buffalo style?
Well, that’s just the point: These homeowners weren’t designing “by the book.” They weren’t professionals – some had never gardened before. But the common design thread connecting the hundreds of gardens of Garden Walk Buffalo is the individual artistic sense of the gardeners, their way of personalizing an outdoor space, their love of the objects and plants they bring to it. For this book we’ll show you how they achieved their memorable gardens – not always intentional, often hit-and-miss-and-try-again. These gardeners seem to intuitively understand certain design and artistic rules. They played with their space, with colors and shapes; they found creative ways to overcome challenges, like a neighbor’s ugly garage wall or a large tree in the “wrong place.” Most of all, they loved making something just their own that gave them joy. And they demonstrated for the thousands of visitors to their gardens how heart, persistence and go-for-it experimentation can make a garden fabulous even when it’s not exactly “by the book.”
Garden peeping is fun
Tens of millions of people visit gardens every year. International garden tourism expert Richard Benfield reported that “More people visit gardens each year than visit Disney World and Disneyland – combined!” In Buffalo, what began as a simple neighborhood tour of a handful of gardens grew and grew until it comprised 400 gardens that are visited by some 70,000 people each year over a two-day summer weekend. For many of those years we have been there too, as participants or tour guides, and also as interested observers of this remarkable event. We hear the comments of visitors as they stroll through the gardens: “I would never have thought to do that, but it works!”… “Could I try that at home? I want a garden like she has.” Sometimes we’ll also hear a voice lamenting: “I feel so inadequate.” It doesn’t have to be.
Garden touring doesn’t necessarily teach gardening or garden design. Sally should know; she has led tours and organized garden travel far and wide for many years. In response to what she saw as a real need, she developed a talk called Lessons from Private Gardens (what they can teach you) to help her audiences analyze what they saw during garden walks. The idea was to help people to learn to see – not just look – and to show them it’s okay to be copycats, and how to do it. In his blog, ArtofGardening.org, Jim also tries to take some pressure and guilt off regular gardeners by showing creative, personalized garden projects and explaining how almost anyone can succeed with them.
People enjoy getting out and visiting gardens – by the tens of thousands!
Other people’s gardens are teachers
Many remarkable gardens are not necessarily for everyday gardeners, but we can all learn from them and get inspiration, joy and fun from seeing them. Neither the gardeners we’ll introduce, nor your authors, want to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm or set the bar so high that a garden like she has becomes impossible. Every gardener, from the slightly scared beginner to the set-in-his-ways old pro, can get great ideas and techniques from special gardens and apply some of them in the garden back home. In this case, stealing is encouraged! Buffalo gardeners are a generous lot, delighted to share. Part of this book is about figuring out who you are as a gardener, what you like, and what you can and want to do yourself.
The biggest lesson from visiting special home gardens may be this:
Great gardens don’t just happen because of good plants and good gardening methods.
Both factors are important of course (you’ll find the necessary gardening how-to’s in Sally’s “Hort Tips” throughout this book), but the greatest private gardens became unforgettable (and more so over the years) because the gardeners were self-aware. The gardeners had made conscious decisions about their statements, their individuality, their identities. They were also realistic about what their yard and garden had to offer – its permanent features and site characteristics – and they worked with them. They had figured out their own uniqueness and their gardens’ highest potential, and used these to create the “wow.”
A book of unforgettable gardens
This book needed to be written. You’ll see why in the pages that follow. You can’t be in the middle of a massive garden tourism happening without wanting to tell the story. You can’t see busload after busload of visitors gasp as they walk into artfully designed, unforgettable little yards, without yearning to show everyone. We even brought a national convention of garden media professionals (GWA: The Association for Garden Communicators) to Buffalo to experience and broadcast the strength of the Buffalo-style phenomenon. These gardens, these gardeners, and their solid gardening how-to needed to be broadcast.
Creative
