Detroit Garden Works | Deborah Silver & Co.

Detroit Garden Works 2016 Spring Fair

Detroit Garden Works will be hosting its annual spring fair tomorrow and Sunday. We are particularly fond of that time when winter is just about over, and a new gardening season is about to begin. Spring is the puppy season of the garden. Once the landscape and garden plants break dormancy, everything grows grows so fast is difficult to keep up with it all. The trees and shrubs are leafing out, the spring flowering bulbs leap out of the ground, the hellebores come in to their own-and there are weeds everywhere. The garden wakes up one moment, and is in high gear the next. One barely knows what to look at first. Some spring moments are as brief as they are beautiful, and gardeners do not want to miss any of it. In anticipation of the spring garden on the way, we invite a diverse group of people who make a career of some aspect of gardening to bring their plants and wares to our fair. The idea is to put a group of green industry people in the same place as lots of interested gardeners, offer a little something to eat and drink, and let the fun begin.

Our building is just about 10,000 square feet, and it is chock full of new pots, tools, garden ornaments, and best of all, the first of many interesting specialty plants we carry throughout the garden season. April weather can be very uncooperative. We’ve had quite a run of cold days and very cold nights recently. There is snow on the ground this morning, for pete’s sake. We plan to launch the spring 2016 season in spite of it. We have 10,000 square feet of warm space. Our fair space in the warehouse in the back of our building has lots of new lighting, and a new all glass garage door. If you have a mind to come, we will valet park your car at no charge, and load your purchases for you. You will be shoulder to shoulder with other passionate gardeners who are keen for perennials, cut flowers and bulbs that show themselves early in the spring.

Our bunches of fresh cut pussy willow are the best I have ever seen. I wonder if the mild winter had something to do with this. Though our fall grown and cold wintered pansies are shrugging off the inclement weather, every one is covered with frost cloth for the night. Our hellebores are big and well grown plants. Our topiary plants can be enjoyed indoors until the night temperatures are warmer, and then moved outdoors for the summer.

The shop is especially beautiful this spring. This is our 20th year in business, and the pride we feel in that is evident. You’ll see. But for all of you who are too far away to visit this weekend, to follow is a collection of pictures that will help give you a sense of what we look like right now.

It has taken quite a few months to get to this moment. The shop walls got repainted. We have a fresh floor painting. We have new lighting. Every room is clean-sparkly. Every day we have something new coming in. In the distance, you can see how much light we have in the back now, courtesy of our glass overhead door.

We have big and little ideas, and appropriate the materials to go with, for gardeners of every persuasion. This sentence is pretty short. Our effort to help gardeners of every persuasion is long lived, and serious. That aside, what we have in store for the weekend is all about the pleasure that a garden can provide.

I promise there is enchantment in the air.

Even Howard has come out from under my desk to take part in what is going on.

In anticipation of our spring fair, we had two truck loads of topiary plants delivered. Our greenhouse space is packed with plants. This is my favorite part-the plants.

Green

Lemon cypress, myrtle, boxwood honeysuckle and rosemary topiaries. Under the bench- hardy Chicago figs.

Myrtle topiaries

The view in to the greenhouse

plants for spring

spring under glass

If you are ready, we are ready too.

Posted on: April 8, 2016 28 Comments

Filed Under: Parties and Events, Detroit Garden Works, Spring Tagged With: rosemary topiary, myrtle topiaries, spring fair, topiary, topiary plants

The Hellebore Festival

Hellebores are the mainstay of the early spring garden in my zone. The plants themselves feature leathery foliage that may persist throughout a mild winter. The flowers come first, on leafless stalks that emerge from the ground in late March and early April. Once the flowers have matured, the new leaves sprout. They range in height from 15″ to 20″, and appreciate a semi shady location in humus rich and friable soil.

I grow one group of hellebores in full sun, but I make sure they have sufficient water. Some clumps are going on 15 years old, and show no signs of any loss of vigor. The summer foliage is lush and glossy. Deer don’t touch them. What appears to be the petals are actually modified leaves. The small tubular lime green structures surrounding the center in the above picture are the actual flowers. Those modified leaves will persist on the plant long into the summer. This give the impression of a very long bloom time.

Most hellebores are very willing to set seed. I see many seedlings surrounding my large plants this spring. Given 3 or 4 years, they will grow on to blooming size. Some of the newer varieties of hellebores feature up or side facing flowers. Older cultivars of helleborus orientalis feature nodding flowers. Planting them at the top of a slope or wall will provide a better look at the flowers. If you choose to cut them, do sear the bottom of the stem in boiling water before you condition them. They will last an amazingly long time floating in a bowl of water.

New to us this year is helleborus lividus “Pink Marble”. The hellebore is shorter and more compact than most. It grows about a foot tall, and 18″ wide. The leaves have delicate white veins. As this hellebore is a little more tender than most, I would plant it with some protection from winds. A layer of leaves after the ground freezes will help protect it.

Frilly Kitty features pink fully double flowers. Hellebore breeding has produced flowers in an astonishing range of colors and shapes. It remains to be seem which will survive the test of time. Hellebores grown from seed will all be different. A hellebore selected for its flower color or vigor will be reproduced via tissue culture, which insures that all of the characteristics of the parent is repeated in the progeny.

Helleborus Spring Promise “Conny” is a white flowered hellebore with maroon spots. The flowers are stunning. I am sure this accounts for the fact that we are already sold out of this cultivar. It seems to be a fairly strong grower in my garden. One clump that is year years old has a number of blooms this year.

Sally is another member of the Spring Promise series. Spring Promise is a helleborus orientalis type, and bloom from late February into April. They come in a wide range of forms and colors. Sally has lovely greenish yellow flowers atop a very strong growing plant.

Helleborus Icebreaker is a personal favorite. The white flowers mature to a most beautiful shade of green. Interested further in the green flowered types? I wrote about them here: green flowered hellebores If you are not able to get by the shop today, don’t worry. We have a great supply of many different cultivars. The best part of this year’s festival? Mild March weather is making it possible to plant them in the ground straight away.

Posted on: March 20, 2016 9 Comments

Filed Under: flowers, Detroit Garden Works, Spring Tagged With: hardy hellebores, helleborus hybrids, hellebores

Opening Day

It was the middle of January that we began repairing and repainting Detroit Garden Works. It was a long process which got finished just two weeks ago. The building dates back to 1940, so with age comes some maintenance. We had issues with the roof, and some deteriorated sections of our concrete block wall that needed repair. We repainted the entire shop, one room at a time. This meant that every room had to be cleared, the loose paint scraped, and the new paint applied-all by hand. The walls are now a warm white, and the trim is a pale blue gray that reminds me of galvanized metal. This day, Owen and LaBelle were rehanging the strings of lights attached to the steel beam that holds the glass roof aloft in our greenhouse. Those pale gray roof rafters look so good against the sky.

Many weeks later, the room is filled with racks full of Danish designed terra cotta pots manufactured in Italy that Rob ordered last fall. Buck’s group from Branch came to reinforce a pair of large vintage wood shelving units that Rob bought in Atlanta, so they could handle the weight of over 500 of these great looking pots. Once the pots were in place, Owen and LaBelle hung a collection of Plant Belles topiary forms from the roof rafters. We began repopulating the shop for spring.

Looking through these vintage wirework cloches, you can see that our greenhouse space is filling up. The empty tables will see service in just a few weeks. The weekend of March 20th is our annual hellebore festival. This greenhouse will be filled will hellebores, topiaries, and other spring plants in just a few weeks. What any gardener wants to see the most as winter comes to a close is plants, and lots of them. We agree.

We potted up lots of heirloom daffodils this past fall. Detroit Garden Works will be celebrating their 20th year in business the end of March. We have the idea that this space will be beautiful, filled with daffodils blooming for our 20th. We just brought all of the pots and baskets out of our unheated garage for a warm up to 50 degrees.

Our 20th year in business is a big occasion for all of us. First and foremost it speaks to Rob’s collections that have kept every shop season for 20 years fresh and captivating. His talent and passion for the garden is truly extraordinary. Every object that has a home in our 10,000 square feet of space, both on the ground, in the air, and on the walls was an ornament or tool for the garden chosen by him.

The shop has an incredible collection of ornament for the garden. Pots we have. Antique, vintage, modern, contemporary-the range is wide. Rob favors the handmade, the unusual, and most of all, beautiful pots. Homes for plants as in baskets, urns, vases and buckets – made of terra cotta, galvanized metal, wood, stone – even paper. What we have available is much wider in range and depth than this list.

Our tool room features an extensive collection of handmade Dutch tools. They are beautifully made, and sharp as blazes. Rob’s choice of handmade corn brooms and whisks with cherry wood handles are handsome indeed.

Sunne and I displayed a lot of our new Dutch hand tools in glass cubes. Why so? These tools are very sharp. They will make quick work of any small digging project. We thought to make the view of every tool easy. The glass will inspire caution to anyone who wants to pick one up and look it over.

This past fall, Detroit Garden Works had a group of Italian made washable paper bags in stock. I thought to load up the bags with daffodils and miniature bulbs. The zip lock bags made a perfect liner for the paper jardinieres. Though it was convenient that the bulbs did not need any water over the course of the winter, I was worried that plastic would keep the soil too wet. Not so. The roots look healthy, and I see no signs of rot.

Once they had been moved into greenhouse, we cut down the top of the plastic so it was no longer visible. It only took 2 days exposure to natural light for the leaves to green up.

The room with the painted floor is just about ready for company. The most dramatic feature of the space is how Rob did the lighting. He took every light down, and redid them in such a way that features that floor, the collection of Italian terracotta that just arrived, and of course the galvanized buckets and baskets that are his idea of a gardening staple.

The Italian pots are all simple in shape, and have no decoration but for a rolled rim at the top. They would look as beautiful in contemporary gardens as they would in traditional ones. I have so many requests from readers far away to post pictures of the inside of the shop, so what is to follow should give you a good idea of the big picture.

the daisy lawn room

from back to front

in the window

vintage steel desk and wall hung cubby

looking towards the front door

from south to north

Belgian bowl pots

pair of fire escape wall wall mounted plant stands

This was always our darkest space. The new paint, and the white French glazed terracotta has made the room so much more inviting. Inviting-that’s what we want to be, this opening day.

Posted on: March 2, 2016 29 Comments

Filed Under: Detroit Garden Works Tagged With: spring 2016, Detroit Garden Works

Some Details On The Floor

The first order of business is to thank each and every one of you who took the time to write a comment on my post about the finish of the floor. It was an extravaganza of a day for me! I had no idea so many of your comments were forthcoming, but how I loved them. All that good will was rocket fuel for my day. Again, thank you. All of your energy and enthusiasm was the talk of my entire staff. I did want to address some of the questions posed in some of the comments.

As for the possibility of painting this rug on canvas – I would not have considered that. This space may not look very big, but it is. I am guessing at least 25 by 40 feet. No canvas comes this size; it would have to be pieced, and sewn together. This room is the Detroit Garden Works railway station. It is our most highly trafficked space. People bring wet plants and bags of soil with holes in the bags to the counter. Carts get wheeled through here. Sometimes we need a pallet jack in this room. Kids drop the remains of their ice cream cones on the floor. The dogs drag in everything from outside. On a rainy day, everyone coming in has a mix of mud and gravel on the bottoms of their shoes. A canvas rug in a retail setting is a trip worry, if the edges do not lay perfectly flat. This is not a good place for a floor canvas. This floor painting is firmly glued down, and can be washed.

All of the daisies have a yellow center. I think our track lighting washed out the yellow in my pictures. I did paint the rug with semi gloss finish, as it is so durable. We do have a glare coming off the floor both from those lights, and the paint. The yellow reads loud and clear, if you are in the room. The yellow was an essential element. Bellis have yellow centers.

It is a pleasure that this painted rug will get a lot of use. I like things for the garden that go on to last long enough to look worn. If this painting wears to the point of no return, it just means I will have a chance to paint a floor another time. This is the 3rd painting in 20 years. I wonder how I might repaint this floor when I am 72. Maybe when I am 70, I will simply be ready for a change. I was in a commercial building last week whose lobby was filled with potted poinsettias. Though they had had perfect care, and looked wonderful, their time had passed. I will not put a sealer coat over the painting. It will just have to endure, as best it can. Should it ever need replacing, I will paint again. I am not thinking of the future now. What is there now is enough.

What Rob has placed on the painted floor tells me he likes it. No big things sit flat on the floor, obscuring the paint. Everything sitting on the floor in this room has legs.

Painting this floor was 9 days well spent. February is a bleak month in Michigan. I scarcely thought about the cold and gray.

This room is starting to come together. MCat, that dark blob in the back center of this picture, has walked across this floor as many times as all the rest of us have the past few days. It will be great fun next week to have people come in and see it in person.

Again, my thanks to all of you for taking the time to write. And I promise, no more posts about this floor.

Posted on: February 27, 2016 24 Comments

Filed Under: Spring, Detroit Garden Works, Picture This Tagged With: Detroit Garden Works

Detroit Garden Works 2016 Spring Fair

The Hellebore Festival

Opening Day

Some Details On The Floor

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