According to Emily Hatch, Lake of the Sky Garden Club president, nine of the 10 homes on last Saturday's Lake of the Sky Garden Club garden tour at Northstar were second homes. I'm assuming that most second home owners at Northstar are not gardeners. They go the lake to golf, ski or sail -- not to garden.
In the booklet that served as the ticket for the tour, every garden had a short description, and the designer for each garden was given credit, while many of those responsible for the maintenance were also given credit.
What I noticed was that most of the garden designers used many of the same plants. So the Grouse Ridge gardens were very similar. The same was true on Gray Wolf and Red Tail Court.
For ground cover, thimbleberry, not usually grown here in the foothills, is widely used at the lake. Other ground covers - creeping thyme, low-growing manzanita, sedum, snow-in-summer, speedwell and sweet woodruff, all used here in the foothills - appeared in numerous gardens.
Almost every garden had a stand of trees, either white alder or quaking aspen.
We saw lots of flowering perennials including Shasta daisy, rudbeckia, gaillardia and monarda.
We don't see lots of monarda, commonly called bee balm, used in the foothills. The scarlet flowers surrounded by reddish bracts stand out against the yellows and gold of other plants. This is an under utilized flowering perennial in our area.
Bleeding heart, columbine, coral bells, coreopsis, day lily, delphinium, geranium and peony appeared in many gardens.
I liked the shade gardens with different varieties of hostas. Ligularia stenocephala 'The Rocket,' with stunning flower spikes, was in bloom at the lake. My wife's deer-resistant 'The Rocket' is also in bloom in her garden.
For shrubs, barberry, lots of red twig dogwood, lilac, ninebark, sandcherry, viburnum and willow were used.
One shrub not widely seen here in the foothills was potentilla with small yellow flowers.
Sometimes on a garden tour, my wife finds a shrub that she does not know and that she immediately likes. This time it was Genista lydia. She only saw it in one garden.
According to Sunset, Genista lydia is a hardy dwarf broom that grows 12 inches high and 4 feet wide.
The profuse yellow flowers of Genista lydia completely smother the plant, making this small shrub a highlight of the spring garden. We did not see the shrub in bloom, but the plant has distinctive cascading evergreen stems that mold beautifully around boulders and drape gracefully over ledges. This is a shrub my wife might want to grow.
After the tour, we went to one of the local nurseries at the lake to try to find the plant. The nursery salesperson tried to sell us what she said was a Genista lydia, but it did not look like what we had seen in the ground. So my wife will keep looking.
My wife did buy a few monardas or bee balm based on what she saw on the garden tour. She also bought other plants.
After going on a garden tour, buying plants at the local nursery is not unusual for my wife.
Saul Wiseman can be reached at swiseman368@sbcglobal.net.