Monroe County Master Gardener Association

Battle Creek Tour
A very enjoyable outing in good company; the trip to Leila Arboretum in Battle Creek on Saturday attended by 22 Master Gardeners, new Horticulture club members and family! We carpooled to the park and gardens practically downtown, and met our docent for the planned tour of their “Kaleidoscope” children’s garden area. She was very well-informed, a dedicated volunteer worker in those gardens, which were obviously way understaffed. It was a good lesson for the Monroe volunteers, how a public garden can become too large and ambitious for the number of interested persons to maintain it. Still, we saw some great plants and ideas. We were there at the perfect time to enjoy the way a cloud of purple smoketree shrubs fit below the full-sized, tethered hot-air balloon, and to enjoy perfect spires of self-seeded straw foxglove scattered among shade and sunny flower gardens. Most of us did not know this plant and debated whether it was a small foxglove or tall penstemon. (A knowledgeable gentleman explains on this web page the difference between it and the more common yellow perennial foxglove which also grew in those gardens, and which, he says, are both related to penstemons. http://www.robsplants.com/plants/digitalis.php)

Besides a large display of very imaginative sculptures made by chainsaw from ash trees killed since 2002 by the Emerald Ash Borer, several whimsical garden benches were similarly carved. There were other delightful plants and creative garden layouts, some disappointingly overgrown.

Sprinkles threatening showers limited our explorations of the larger arboretum after the tour with some opting to visit the Kingman Natural History Museum on the site, while others got dampened in the native wildflower garden and the labyrinth. There, in absence of labels, we taught each other to recognize Leadplant and Rattlesnake Master, among others, saving some puzzles to be solved from cell-phone photos later. Many of us had read about Black Swallowwort, the invasive vine in the milkweed family that is poisonous to monarch caterpillars but no one in the group recognized it until we researched it later from Gail’s good photos.

Then we all had great lunches at Clara’s on the river, which is a super restoration of a classic train depot with many historic items going back to the years when the Post and Kellogg cereal families were very notable in the town.
https://www.michigan.gov/invasives/0,5664,7-324-68002_71240_73852-379609–,00.html

Anyone know if this is purple moor grass?

We were told this was ribbon grass but it’s more likely Variegated Giant Reed grass

Pergola

Raised beds