The 2013 Garden Tour “Earth on Her Hands”

Hazel O’Brien’s garden. Visit it during the Garden Club Tour June 29-30

Saturday and Sunday, June 29 and 30, from  11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

By Jan Jacobsen

The five wonderful gardens on the “Earth on Her Hands” Tour were created by women with a passion for plants and year-round engagement with the earth. Each garden uniquely expresses the aesthetic and horticultural interests of the gardener.

 Hazel O’Brien’s garden, located at the base of Buck Mountain, is an arboretum of both familiar and unfamiliar trees and shrubs. She also keeps an orchard with graftings by islander Ed Suij.

On North Beach Road, Millie Vaccarella’s (formerly Robin Woodward’s) garden is a small jewel of design and variety arranged around a small cottage and garden house.

Margaret Payne’s garden, at the northwest corner of Eastsound Village, is a cottage garden of several rooms, filled with flowers, fruit, herbs, vegetables, and salvaged “garden” art.

Jack and Jan Helsell’s Turtlehead Farm is magnificent for its pastoral setting of field and forest. The log house and outbuildings, built from trees harvested and milled on the property, feature sod roofs maintained by wind and birds.  Jan’s and her daughter Ellen’s large garden of flowers and edibles overlooks Ellen’s horses grazing near the pond.

The highlight of Nancy Jones terraced garden off White Beach Road, which she describes as a lab for her business, All Seasons Gardening, is a 170-foot-long “cutting” garden of flowering perennials, including delphiniums, peonies, lilies, and asters, arranged as a color wheel.

This year’s Garden Club Garden Tour is ready to excite and delight you on Saturday and Sunday, June 29 and 30.  The tour is 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The following merchants in Eastsound have tickets for sale:  Driftwood Nursery, Darvil’s Bookstore, Crow Valley Pottery Eastsound and Crow Valley, Smith & Speed.   Tickets are also available from Brown Paper Tickets on line at BrownPaperTickets.com and at the gardens on the day of the tour.