A little adventure

This week I went with a local garden club to Hornbaker's Nursery. They had some truly amazing gardens and the selection of plants was second to none. Over 500 variety of hosta! Who knew? This nursery was about an hour and a half away and I could have spent the entire day there and a lot of money! I actually ended up not buying a thing - just too much to choose from.

So when I got home, I started researching plants. I love working in my garden and since the house is only 3 years old, there were lots of gardens I needed to put in! While researching, I came across a website the does plant exchanges. Once again, who knew? Well, there was a post from a sweet woman who said she wanted to "gift a new gardener" with some perennials from her garden. We exchanged emails for a couple of days and set up a time to meet.

Her family lives out in the country about 2 hours west of here in an area called Chadwick, IL. They are farmers and have a cute farmhouse and lots of smelly cows! :) Oh, and of course, beautiful gardens around her farmhouse.

We stopped in Dixon, IL (location of Ronald Reagan's childhood home) for lunch at a local diner then continued out past farm after beautiful farm to Karen's house.

We had a tour of her gardens and she let us have whatever we wanted from her garden. It was overwhelming, all the choices. I think I ended up with over 20 plants! I will have to get a list together of what I got and of course start taking some pictures once they flourish and bloom! One of my favorite things was an iris w/ variegated leaves.

We didn't get back until evening time and the plants were looking rather dry/wilted so I quickly got them in the ground all around the yard. It was dark before I was done but I knew they wouldn't make it without water soon. I can't wait to see how they do!

Cathi