Road Trips and Trial Plants

This week Kristin was in Atlanta with Raymond Evison, the king of clematis. Raymond hosted a tea for garden writers, appeared on the morning weather and ran a workshop on building clematis bell towers. Last week, Joanie was in Des Moines with Jessie Atchison from Ball having a blast. We wish Doug the very best.

Anyway, Kristin and I met Dynamite marketing guru Jared Belsky and the inventor of the zoned release blend, Harman Gilbert, down in Birmingham to visit with our friends at Southern Living. We had a lovely dinner with John Floyd and the garden gang and then a lovely morning at the Southern Living campus. What a complex. We had a lively discussion and then toured the grounds. Charlie has done a magical job with his new culinary garden. It is a photographer’s paradise – lush and colorful.

Here we are last year on our summer road trip having dinner with Steve Bender, Charlie Thigpen, Lauren Swezey of Sunset, (me), Joanie, Rebecca Reed, Stacey, (Gene Bussell), along with Steve Hutton of Conard-Pyle. What a trip, only to be topped by our visit last week to B’ham.

As Spring keeps teasing us along with warm weather tucked in with these cold, drizzly days, I just got a great present. A deliver of a huge bag of Organic Mechanic potting soil from cute Mark Highland. He’s just been interviewed by Reuters for a syndicated story on composting, and with Green Profit. He’s a great guy and has a wonderfully, nutritious all-purpose, peat-free, organic potting mix full of different types of compost, coconut husk fiber, perlite, and pure worm castings.

Stay tuned. My Simply Beautiful and Wave trial plants arrived this week. Can’t wait to get them in containers.

Suzi