Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Open Days on Knollwood and South Boulevard

This is my last post of the Houston Open Days tour. I hope this warms some of you northern gardeners up a bit.

The Knollwood Street gardens were quite impressive with large sweeps of lush green lawn surrounded by layered plantings and a large number of container grown citrus trees.IMG_2139
hornbeamsThey referred to this shaded area as a “bosque of hornbeams”. The garden is patterned after one the owners saw in France, but I wonder why they referred to it this way. I know that bosque is Spanish for forest, but there must be more to it than that. I googled it, and I did find a hornbeam bosque in London. Hmm, does anyone know if there is more to this reference than a simple translation?


Parties at this house must be fantastic.IMG_2140
The view from the back porch, I bet in the summer it’s enough to trick you into believing it is a cool day outside.
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The final garden of the day was South Boulevard. These gardens had a more formal feel about them than some of the others. The grounds had four separate buildings with gardens intertwined between them.IMG_2166
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I love the purple and white combo in this group of containers.container planting

The path leads to a building for entertaining. It has a big dining table and couches around a big screen tv. That’s a Chinese Fringe tree near the building.
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mock orange
Mock Orange growing on a fence
azalea
The requisite azaleas
That’s all for my recap of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Garden Tour in Houston. Stay tuned for future Houston Garden Tours. The Quail Valley Tour is April 30th and the Westbury (my neighborhood) and Sugarland Garden Tour are on May 7th.

2 comments:

  1. Wow! What beautiful houses and lovely gardens. I like that 'bosque', and love the pergola!!! The South Boulevard garden is also beautiful. I would love to see these gardens in person. Thanks for showing us the tour.

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  2. Nice post! I wasn't able to go to the tour due to family matters.
    I was eager to see the bosque and now I have.
    I think they are using the word as a fancy way of denoting a number of the same type of tree.
    A covey of quail, a flock of geese, a bosque of hornbeams? Just a guess. Right now, if I don't pull them up, I'll have a bosque of redbuds in my front flower bed! LOL
    David/ Tropical Texana

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