Here's a suggestion. No, make that a heads-up, circle-the-date-on-your-calendar, sync-your-iPhone fount of advice: don't make any conflicting plans for Sunday, May 20. You'll want to have the day clear for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society's Annual Gardeners' Fair at Elm Bank in Wellesley.

The Gardeners' Fair - the worthy and greatly expanded successor to the venerable Society Row Plant Sale - is your opportunity to find rare and unusual perennials, trees and shrubs; ready-to-plant herbs and vegetables; and tomato varieties by the dozens. It's also a chance to hear talks by an expert, find unique garden tools, garden ornaments and accessories as well as a few other gardening necessities such as hand-made chocolates.

White Flower Farm's tomatoes will be here again with the Great Tomato Celebration.

White Flower Farm will be back. They're bringing 'The Great Tomato Celebration', which features over 80 tomato varieties ranging from heirlooms and popular hybrids. If you're confused by all the choices, they'll have experts on hand to offer advice on flavor, yield, disease resistance and planting instructions. White Flower Farm will also have a large selection of herbs and vegetable seedlings, plus planting implements.

The heart of the Gardeners' Fair is the plant societies. New Englanders take their gardens seriously and the most passionate gardeners - whether of the indoor or outdoor persuasion - join a plant society dedicated to the pleasure and pursuit of growing a particular genus. At plant society meetings, plants are swapped, exchanged and bartered. At the Gardeners' Fair, they're sold to discerning visitors who are looking for the great addition to their garden.

The Gardener's Fair will offer lots of opportunities to purchase unusual plants.

Best of all, with every plant society purchase comes a wealth of advice on care and propagation. There will be representatives from the American Begonia Society, American Rhododendron Society, Gesneriad Society and Hosta Society, among others.

Come prepared to learn. Barbara Pierson, Nursery Manager at White Flower Farm in Litchfield, Connecticut, will talk several times over the course of the day on containers and raised-bed gardening. She'll provide tips on bed preparation and season-long care. She's a lively, knowledgeable speaker who knows her subjects and takes all questions seriously.

What else do you need for your garden? Do you have a problem with deer? Talk with the experts from Deer Defeat. Looking for gardening ornamentation? See the displays at Stone Muse Studio, Greystone Gardens, Iron arts and Arunshard Pottery. Are you a fan of botanical prints? Visit Lynne Puhalla Studios. Want a hypertufa container? Looks for the folks from MyHouseLeeks. How about gloves, hats and other accessories? Find the booth for Foxgloves.

Oh, and for that most necessary of gardening rewards (other than the satisfaction of seeing your work appreciated), make a stop at vianne chocolat or Warren Farm & Sugarhouse.

The Gardeners' Fair opens at 8 a.m. for Massachusetts Horticultural Society members, 9 a.m. for the general public, and closes at 3:30 p.m. There is a $5 suggested donation that includes entry, parking, lectures, and visits to Elm Bank's many gardens.

The entrance to Elm Bank is located at 900 Washington Street (Route 16) on the Wellesley/Natick line.

Each year the Massachusetts Arborists Association (MAA) celebrates Arbor Day with service projects throughout the Commonwealth. This year 26 arborists spent the day at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society pruning shrubs and trees for safety and ornamental purposes. Volunteers included tree professionals from Cedar Lawn Tree; Cleaves Company, Inc; Bartlett Tree Experts; Lueders Tree and Landscape; Maltby & Co. Inc; and Stoner Trees & Shrubs.

Stumpy's Tree Service helps at Elm Bank on Arbor Day.

Crews arrived at 7:30 a.m. and stopped only for a short coffee break and lunch. In a single day, they felled and chipped dead trees, trimmed and re-shaped ornamentals, and cleared unwanted interlopers across Mass Hort’s 36 acres.

Earlier this spring, Bartlett Tree Experts spent a week pruning the beech hedge enclosing the Italianate garden at the Manor House. This dramatic burgundy colored hedge is a highlight of the formal landscape at Elm Bank, surrounding an Italianate garden designed by the Olmsted Brothers.

The Massachusetts Arborists Association and the Massachusetts Certified Arborists (MCA) program are the cornerstones of the state's professional tree care industry. Through education, awareness and advocacy, their members are building stronger businesses, training more qualified arborists, and creating a lasting arboriculture industry.

We're all itching to get out in the garden, but why not become a smarter gardener, too? The Massachusetts Horticultural Society has just the thing to help you brush up your skills and add new ones.

Every Thursday evening from now through November, Mass Hort offers a talk on a different subject by an authoritative professional who is also a great communicator. This month, you can take a walk through the Bressingham Garden led by one of the people who helped create it, learn why soil and dirt are very different things, and get great information on herbs.

Presentations begin at 7 p.m. unless otherwise noted and go until all questions are answered. The classes are priced at $12 for members and $15 for non-members. There is no need to pre-register.

Here's the lineup for the rest of May and the first week of June:

The Dirt on Dirt
May 10 - Kathi Gariepy - Massachusetts Master Gardener Association

Aren't dirt and soil the same thing? How can you turn that stuff in your garden into a great growing medium for flowers, vegetables and shrubs? Once you've got great soil, how do you keep it healthy?

Kathi Gariepy has answers to all those questions, plus a wealth of other information to help make your garden more productive.

Designing a Dramatic Perennial Garden -
May 17 - Laura D. Eisener - Laura D. Eisener Landscape Design
Once limited to a handful of tried-and-true choices, gardeners today can choose from an abundance of cultivars when creating a perennial garden. Creating that dramatic garden is a matter of both choosing the right plants and knowing how to combine them to best effect.

Based in Saugus, MA, Landscape Designer Laura Eisener also teaches at the Arnold Arboretum Landscape Design Institute of Harvard University.

All About Herbs
May 24 - Rita Wollmering - The Herb FARMacy

An herb garden is more than just a few plants to augment your kitchen needs. Come learn everything about the wonderful world of herbs - organic growing conditions (sunlight, soil, fertilizer, and water), harvesting techniques and preserving your herbal bounty (vinegars, oils, honeys, cleaning products and so much more).

Rita Wollmering is the founder, manager, and grower of the Herb FARMacy in Salisbury, Massachusetts.

A Walk Through the Bressingham Garden
May 31 7:00 p.m. - Paul Miskovsky - Miskovsky Landscaping, Inc.
This presentation will be a talk and walk through the Bressingham Garden, which Paul helped to build and continues to oversee. Paul's discussion will focus on using the plants of Bressingham in the home landscape. Learn some key points in artful garden creation by choosing plants that complement and contrast each other in structure, texture, color and season.

Paul Miskovsky is the owner and driving creativity behind Miskovsky Landscaping. Paul is also a Trustee of Mass Hort, and the overseer of the Bressingham Garden at Elm Bank.

The Basics of Rose Growing
June 7 - Irwin Ehrenreich - The Rose Man Nursery
We don't usually think of New England as a great rose growing region, but there's no reason why you can't have a picture-perfect rose garden. All it takes is the right choices and the proper care. Irwin Ehrenreich, owner of The Rose Man, a rose care service on Cape Cod, will take you through the year in the rose garden from spring pruning to winter protection. His talk is illustrated with a gallery of some of Irwin's rose gardens.

Irwin is an American Rose Society Consulting Rosarian, Yankee District coordinator for Roses in Review, past president of The Seaside Rosarians, and Lower Cape Rose Society, as well as a Master Gardener.

“Mighty oaks from little acorns grow” is a proverb that dates back to at least the 14^th century. And here’s proof that it’s at least as true today as it was in Chaucer’s time. Last summer, a young man named Adrian Macdonald spent a few weeks working at Elm Bank. Adrian thoroughly enjoyed himself and, when he returned to Lowell, he spoke glowingly of his experience to his co-workers at AmeriCorps.

AmeriCorps, in turn, brought Elm Bank to the attention of United Teen Equality Center, a Lowell-based organization with the mission to “ignite and nurture the ambition of Lowell's most disconnected young people to trade violence and poverty for social and economic success.”

On April 20, Adrian Macdonald’s all-too-brief glimpse of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society turned into 65 hours of spring cleanup help as 26 young adults volunteered at Elm Bank as part of programming at the Lowell Boys and Girls Club and UTEC. The Lowell teenagers spent the entire day at Mass Hort with a handful of AmeriCorps volunteers. They spread mulch and wood chips in the picnic grove, enjoyed a cookout lunch, toured the gardens and played on the sports fields. They came together as a team to make an important impact on the spring gardening efforts at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

“I want to go back and do it again,” said Anthony DeContreras, a member of the Workforce Development Program. “It was quiet and relaxing. It was great to be outside and it smelled good to be in the woods.”

The event was put together by AmeriCorps, a national network of programs that engages more than 70,000 Americans each year in intensive service to meet critical needs in communities throughout the nation. UTEC was represented by several of their programs including Enrichment, Organizing, Education and Workforce Development.

“The ultimate goal of the program is to help youth develop a pathway to a long-term career and expose them to post-secondary educational opportunities that would otherwise be unattainable, “said Derek Mitchell, UTEC’s Director of Workforce Development. Events like the one at Elm Bank provide those real-world skills-building experiences.”

To learn more about United Teen Equality Center, visit http://utec-lowell.org.

Breaking news from 1829: the Massachusetts Horticultural Society has been formed to improve the quality of fruits and vegetables available to the people of the state. Breaking news from 2012: Mass Hort is again helping to bring high-quality seasonal produce to the region, this time to Wellesley.

It may have been a cool, cloudy day, but it didn't dampen the smiles on people's faces as the Wellesley Farmers Market opened for business on May 3. Every Thursday from now until the end of autumn, the market will offer colorful, local, seasonal bounty. The hours are 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Buying flowers at the Wellesley Farmers Market.

Beginning May 14th, the Caterpillar Club will make its return with a 25-week engagement on Monday mornings at 10 a.m. Intended for kids from pre-kindergarten through second grade, sessions will be held in the stone circle at Weezie’s Garden. If it is raining, the Club will meet in the Education Building.

Leading the Caterpillar Club will be Kathi Gariepy, who created the program in 2003. Kathi is a former pre-K and kindergarten teacher and a Lifetime Master Gardener.

Sessions will include material on flowers, insects, trees and butterflies, which will be explored through reading, demonstrations and crafts. Below is a week-by-week list of topics.

The Caterpillar Club is free for children visiting the Gardens at Elm Bank.

It's May and your garden is calling you. You've been thinking about perennials, trees, shrubs, vegetables, lawn care products and all the other things that need to get done outdoors. You get in your car, drive to your favorite nursery, load up a cart and go to the checkout desk. What do you do next?

If you're smart, you take out your Massachusetts Horticultural Society membership card. Why? Because there's a very good chance that it will earn you a 10% discount on your purchases.

Today, there are nearly a hundred nurseries, garden centers and specialty landscape services that offer a discount to Mass Hort members. They range from the region's best known names, such as Mahoney's, Weston Nurseries and Russell's Garden Center, to specialty nurseries like Avant Gardens in North Dartmouth and Bemis Farms Nursery in Spencer.


The worth of that membership card has also grown far beyond the immediate Boston area. In Great Barrington, Ward's Nursery accepts the card. In Hollis, NH, Mixed Border Nursery welcomes you. On the Cape, Cape Coastal Nursery in South Dennis, All Points Home and Garden in West Dennis, and Soares Flower Garden in Falmouth honors your membership card (and that's just a partial list).

In Connecticut, nurseries in Fairfield, Eastford, Danielson and Hamden have out a welcome sign for Mass Hort members. Headed up to Maine? Stop at Fieldstone Gardens in Vassalboro and ask for your discount. There's a complete list at http://www.masshort.org/Nurseries-and-Garden-Center-Discounts .

And, it isn't just garden centers and nurseries that offer member discounts. Landscaping firms like Green Care in Rehoboth, Churchill Gardens in Pittsfield, Country Gardens in Rowley, and Sarah LaValley Garden Design all offer that ten percent discount to Mass Hort members.

We hope you're a Mass Hort member because you support the educational mission and want to help that mission succeed and grow. But isn't it nice to also get a tangible reward? We hope you'll patronize our 'green partners'. You'll be in exceptional company.

Volante Farms is now a "green partner" of Mass Hort and offers members a 10% discount on purchases of plants or food.

One of the newest additions is Volante Farms in Needham, a venerable (since 1917) and trusted source for homegrown produce and locally grown plants. Over the past two years, Volante's farm stand has been completely rebuilt to incorporate a farm kitchen, deli, bakery and ice cream shop. And, yes, your Mass Hort membership card is good even for ice cream.

By Bridget Macdonald

Massachusetts Horticultural Society is asking its membership and their friends to help with a citizen project called Outsmart Invasive Species.

As a member of Mass Hort, you already know how important it is to cultivate and nurture a diversity of plant life. Now we need your help to stop the spread of harmful invasive plants and insects that threaten our natural ecosystems. If you have a smartphone or a digital camera, you can take part in a new citizen-science project, using hand-held technology to identify and report invasive species.

The Outsmart Invasive Species project - a collaboration between UMass Amherst and the Department of Conservation and Recreation - is looking for people like you to help outsmart invasive species throughout the state. All you need is an iPhone, an Android, or a digital camera, and an interest in spending time outdoors - whether it's gardening, hiking, or just walking the dog. If your job takes you out into the field, you can even be on the lookout while you're working.

Here's why:

Protect native habitat: Invasive species threaten the environment, the economy and public health by out-competing native species, changing soil and water chemistry, introducing pathogens and allergens, and damaging crops and vegetation.

Contribute to science: With more people in the field using their own handheld devices to report and map species, we can cover more ground, collect better data, and prevent destructive outbreaks.

Learn about the environment: You can develop skills to identify plants and insects, and learn about native habitat as you contribute to its protection.

Enjoy the challenge: Think of it as a scavenger hunt for invasive species! Your observations will be displayed online through the Early Detection & Distribution Mapping System (EDDMaps), so you can keep track of what you've found. The more observations you make, the better our understanding of the distribution of these harmful invasive species.

You can make a big difference. It's free, fun, and educational, and there's no formal time commitment.

Here's how:

1) If you have an iPhone or Android phone: Download the free Outsmart Invasive Species application through iTunes or Google Play, and you'll be prepared to report invasive species anytime.

If you have a digital camera : Register to submit data using the free Early Detection and Distribution Mapping System (EDDMaps). Just go to Outsmart on EDDMaps to sign up.

2) The Outsmart Invasives application will provide a list of target invasive plants and insects to look for in the area. Each species on the list is accompanied by images and text to help with identification.

3) When you think you have identified an invasive species from the list, just click the "observation" icon. An observation form will open, allowing you to take photographs tagged with GPS coordinates, and enter the number of species you see.

If you are using a digital camera, take a few close up photographs of the species, and make note of your location.

4) When you have uploaded your observations - either in the field or when you're back at home - the data will be reviewed by expert biologists.

5) You can keep track of your contributions by logging into the EDDMaps website to see your data displayed on Google maps.

For the latest on the project:

1) Visit our Facebook page: Outsmart Invasive Species.

2) Follow us on Twitter @outsmartapp.

3) For regular updates, sign up for the Outsmart e-mail listserv.

4) You can also e-mail the Project team directly for more information: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . (This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Outsmart Invasives is a project of UMass Amherst, UMass Extension, and UMass Department of Environmental Conservation in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, the University of George Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health, the Center for Public Policy and Administration, and the National Center for Digital Government.

This work was funded through a grant (11-DG-11420004-294) awarded by the Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry, U. S. Forest Service.

Visit web site: http://masswoods.net/outsmart

by Betty Sanders
BettyonGardening.com

You can be forgiven if you read the headline of this article and thought, 'what drought?' Your grass is green and your spring bulbs bloomed beautifully. But as the chart nearby attests, the dry winter and drier spring have had a cumulative effect, leaving the top layer of soil in which we garden without sufficient moisture.

May 1 Drought Monitor.

Nasturtiums thrive even when the weather is dry.

Container gardens provide splashes of color while minimizing watering needs.

Rain barrels are an ecologically friendly solution to watering restrictions.

Mulching your vegetable gardens reduces watering needs, and weeds, too.

Kenneth Helphand, a noted landscape architect and professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon, Eugene, has come up with an amazing theme. He had seen a photograph of soldiers in the first world war standing next to a garden they had made at the front. The image stuck in his mind and led him to a series of researches culminating in this book.

Soldiers confined to the hellish trenches of the first world war, Jews confined to the even more hellish Polish ghettos in the second world war, Allied prisoners of war in Germany and Asia, and Japanese Nisei interned in the United states all made gardens which he has designated “defiant”. Helphand even considers the substitute “gardens” made by American soldiers in the first Gulf War, covering the sand outside their tents with green tarpaulin.

This extraordinary book combines standard garden theory with striking quotations from primary sources which have survived. The illustrations are archival photographs taken by many different observers. Gardens have a lot of philosophical significance which Helphand elaborates on at some length.

As anyone who has ever attempted to do it knows, creating and maintaining a garden in normal circumstances needs a lot of resources. Once I had recovered from astonishment at the existence of gardens in these situations, my immediate thought was, where did they find seeds in the Warsaw ghetto. My next one was how did they find cameras and film to record their work. During the second world war in England we were very short of almost everything, especially photographic film, yet our deprivations were as nothing to those in Poland’s ghettos.

Time is one of the first issues in creating a garden. One does not start to do it if the future is totally unpredictable. The residents of the ghettos had not conceived of the possibility that they were to be erased from the earth and they applied their usual systems of community organization to deal with being locked in the ghetto. Planting vegetable seeds in any available piece of ground would at least provide some food. Unlike the soldiers and prisoners of war, the Jews in the ghetto were completely on their own, abandoned by the entire world. Nothing came from the outside, yet the scraps and fragments of their diaries all say how much the sight of something green in the ground elevated their spirits.

Soldiers sent to fight in a war do not expect to be in a foreign land for years on end. Gardens made sense out of a chaotic world. Workingmen who had grown prize marrows and marigolds in allotments quickly got busy and re-constructed patches of “home”. They were assisted in varying degrees by local farmers, family and friends and even in the end by the War Office in London.

The making of gardens was not limited to the Allies. The Germans also did it, some of them even more grandiose and complex than the English ones. British prisoners of war at Ruhleben founded their own horticultural society and affiliated it with the Royal Horticultural Society in London.

For a variety of reasons, Japanese immigrants to the United States had largely been confined to farming and landscaping. When they were forced into internment camps in 1944 they had the skill and experience needed to improve the dreadful conditions. After the war ended and they were allowed to return to their former homes, one of them, Yasusuke Kogita, dismantled the garden he had built at Minidoka and moved it back to Seattle so that it would never be forgotten.

While the topic of this book is very unusual, it is not unprecedented. In 1955 Enid Bagnold wrote a remarkable play, “The Chalk Garden”, later to become a successful film, in which an enigmatic governess constructs a garden on unpromising chalk soil. Only at the end is it revealed that she learned this skill while in prison for murder.

Prison authorities in many countries use gardening as a form of rehabilitation. The doyenne of English gardeners, Rosemary Verey, led such a movement in England. Prisoners at Ledhill Prison entered their garden in the Chelsea Flower Show one year and won the top prize. The distinction between these formally sanctioned activities and the ones chronicled in this book is that the impulse sprang from within the victims themselves.

The soldiers, prisoners and internees suffered many losses before going home but the Jews in the ghettos were annihilated intentionally. Somehow their gardens seem the most poignant of all.

Copyright © Judith M. Taylor MD

Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime
Kenneth L Helphand
San Antonio Texas, Trinity Press - 2006

Review by Judith M. Taylor, M. D.
www.horthistoria.com
The San Francisco Garden Club
Member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society

by Betty Sanders
Lifetime Master Gardener

Patience is a virtue in the garden. First, it was hot and dry, now it's cold and wet. If you planted seeds for peas, lettuce, Swiss chard, leeks, beets, cabbage crops or onions, they are fine, enjoying the rain. If you pushed the season and planted green beans or corn or (oh dear!) tomatoes, the cold soil will yield nothing for your efforts. Don't be fooled by what is for sale in the stores. Corn, cucumbers, squash, melons, peppers, eggplants and tomatoes need warm soil. You can hurry things along a little by covering the soil with black plastic to warm it before planting, but warm weather vegetables need warm days and nights. Planting 'warm weather' crops before the soil temperature is a reliable 60 degrees an exercise in frustration.

Osteospermum like this Soprano Purple cultivar can be planted now.

Take your soil's temperature before planting warm-weather vegetables.

And the same goes for flowers. Pansies, snapdragons and osteospermum are happy outside now, but wait for the weather to become reliably warm before you put out most of our summer time annuals. Marigolds, geraniums, coleus, begonias, fuschias, impatiens and many, many more need the same warm days and nights favored by tomatoes. A single cool night can stunt plants and affect the growth in your garden beds or containers throughout the summer.

Water, water, not enough here. It's raining as this is written and that's good, but not good enough. A dry winter and drier spring mean the water levels are low in many areas. Water bans may well pop up earlier, and in more places, than usual. Plan ahead by setting drip hoses into gardens with precious perennials, newly planted trees and shrubs, and thirsty vegetables. By skipping the overhead sprinklers and using less water, you will keep your plants healthy without wasting any of our precious water resources.

Mulch holds water in the ground, but not more than three inches deep.

Mulch, Mulch, mulch - As soon as the three-inch-plus rain stopped last week, I ordered mulch, and immediately spread it on wet ground, helping to seal the moisture in and preventing evaporation. Many of us mulch because we like the way it looks, but remember that mulch will hold the water in the ground and help plants better tolerate a dry summer. Mulch further reduces your work by preventing weeds from popping up. Whether you are spreading mulch by yourself or having it done, remember the mantra: not less than two (inches), not more than three. And never, never, never place mulch up against the bark of trees or shrubs. It keeps the bark that should be dry, moist, allowing disease and insects entry into the heart of your plants, ultimately killing them.

Deadhead spring bulbs now, prune spring-flowering shrubs when their blooms are spent.

Spring bulbs and lilacs that have passed should be deadheaded now. Removing the old flower forces the plants energy back into the bulb, instead of trying to set seeds. Leave the foliage for all bulbs to mature naturally. Do not cut bulb foliage back until its work is finished and it has yellowed and collapsed. Later in the season, follow the same routine should for late spring and summer bulbs like allium and lilies. Also, the best time to prune spring flowering trees and shrubs is when their blooms are spent. By doing it just after the flowers have died, you ensure that you will not be removing any of the buds for next year's flowers.

You can explore more of Betty Sanders’ gardening thoughts at www.BettyonGardening.com.

by Neal Sanders
Leaflet Contributor

Just as the swallows come back to Capistrano and the Swan Boats re-appear in the Public Garden, so there comes a spring day when our garden ornaments emerge from their basement winter quarters.

Like beauty, garden ornaments are in the eye of the beholder. They can be almost anything you want them to be. Our neighbors tend toward gazing balls. Some people have cherubim. There is a house on a main road a few miles from me with literally hundreds of garden gnomes and fairies out for all to see. I've never quite comprehended gnomes, except as things to steal and send on trips around the world, taking photos along the way; but I accept that, for a certain subset of gardeners, gnomes are gotta-have items.

Our own stash of ornaments ranges from the expected to the highly eclectic. There are four bird baths, surely a staple of any respectable garden. But there are also at least three frogs in our collection, one of them so plug-ugly that it stops visitors in their tracks. There is a large terra-cotta fish that is supposed to grace a Japanese home, but instead 'swims' in our garden.

Berkeley the snail in Shade bed.

A chipped nose on the Winterthur turtle made it a treasured bargain.

We have a large and heavy (20 pounds or so) metal snail named Berkeley, acquired in London and brought back in the overhead bin of an airplane back before such things would have been considered weapons. There is also a stone turtle which lacks a name but has a provenance just as memorable as that of our snail. The turtle was acquired at Winterthur for the sum of just five dollars after we pointed out the chip on its nose. My wife considers it one of the great bargains of her garden travels. Of course, we also have a stone cat that we found abandoned after a flower show. It, too, has a chip, but is less noteworthy because no offer or counter-offer was required for its acquisition.

There is a frog with a permanent site because, one summer, he was topped with a live red frog who seemed to like the vantage point. We hope for a recurrence.

This black frog, visible now, will disappear as the astilbe foliage grows.

Most of our garden ornaments are intended to be seen and admired. But a few, especially the smaller ones, are deliberately placed in locations where they can only be seen from certain angles. Their serendipitous discovery delights visitors, but the practice also has its downside: we forget where we put them and find them only in November and December when the foliage that obscured them dies back. This annual recovery process is made more difficult because, except for a few ornaments such as the bird baths, there are no permanent positions reserved for members of our growing collection.

Several ceramic and terra cotta containers have passed from bearing annuals and perennials to the status of garden ornaments. These tend to be very large ones that, were they filled with plants, would each take a jumbo-size bag of potting mix. Instead, they grace perennial beds and rock gardens, providing focal points for visual interest.

The silver sphere awaits a home.

Our newest ornament came into our possession following the World Association of Flower Arrangers' triennial meeting in Boston last June. It's an open sphere comprised of aluminum bands; one of 20 fabricated for that show. I found it last October in a warehouse in Northborough where it was packaged up with staging destined for a landfill. I brought it home on a whim, and Betty literally jumped up and down with excitement upon seeing it.

Our 'silver sphere', as we call it, has yet to find a permanent spot. It will likely spend several weeks migrating from bed to bed where it will 'try out' for a season-long gig. At our little house, there's always room for one more - garden ornament, that is.

Neal Sanders is a frequent contributor to the Leaflet. Neal's newest mystery, A Murder in the Garden Club , was published in March and you can learn more about it here . That book, plus his three other mysteries, can be ordered through Amazon.com .