Annual ‘Willow Garden Club Gala and Tour’ is Saturday

WILLOW — Cindy Forsyth comes from a long line of gardeners — her grandmother and sister grew flowers, and her mother grew vegetables.

“My mother, if you couldn’t eat it, she didn’t grow it,” she said.

It’s the flowers included in Forsyth’s Mary Louise Garden that are featured in the 28th annual Willow Garden Club Gala and Tour from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., July 27.

Every growing season is unique for gardeners, and this year’s transition from winter to spring and summer was so late it nearly canceled the tour, said Forsyth, who also co-chairs the garden club with Marsha Van Abel.

Each year is different. This winter killed many plants and some that did come back are about a third their previous size.

“We all lost certain plants,” Forsyth said. “It’s been a hard year. When the worms started falling out of the trees, I was about ready to give up.”

She said they moved to Anchorage from Idaho in the 1980s after they were laid off work. She began teaching in 1986. The couple wanted a place out of town and soon answered an ad about an old Willow homestead for sale with a falling down cabin.

The cabin is still there at the edge of the lake — the Forsyths lived there for about three years while they building their new home. Financing their dream home meant selling their Anchorage residence and living in a condo in Anchorage until the Willow house was complete.

Forsyth said she started gardening right away and adds new plants to her garden beds every year. But the addition of the new greenhouse is the portal to possibilities, she said. “If you can grow seeds, you can get what you want.”

Forsyth’s new wood-frame greenhouse includes several windows and niceties like a ceiling fan, potting table and a deep work sink. It also includes livable touches like a small kitchen table and chairs and a coffee pot that seem to say this gardening space also is meant for living. That theme is repeated around the Forsyth’s home, where benches and chairs are sprinkled throughout the gardens, waiting for guests to sit and drink in the beauty of each carefully crafted space.

Her gardens are organized according to the type of light available; on the east are semi-shade plants and on the west she plants flowers like peonies and delphiniums that enjoy the heat.

“I made a lot of mistakes,” Forsyth said. “I had a delphinium on the east side because some lady said, ‘Oh, yeah. They’ll take that.’”

A Master Gardner, Forsyth offers two tips for would-be gardeners:

• Fit the flowers to the light.

• Stick with families.

She said that sometimes, beginning gardeners buy flowers that please their eyes without considering whether the plant will grow well in Alaska, or the kind of light, heat or what else it needs.

Instead, she suggests people plan each garden plot based on the light and soil conditions.

“I start with families and then I just add the relatives,” Forsyth said. “I find it really fun to encourage each environment to be what fits it.”

The tour is the club’s annual fundraiser and it shares proceeds with the Georgeson Botanical Garden in Fairbanks, which was created at the Agriculture Experimental Station research farm in 1906 to conduct Subarctic Alaska horticultural research.

Van Abel said the club’s donations during the last three years have helped to fund creation of a new perennial garden designed by Fairbanks gardener Suzie Zimmerman.

Also on this year’s tour are the gardens of Dorothea Taylor and George Murphy; Renee and Ann Gonzales; Kay Daily; and Les Brake’s Coyote Garden. Note that while Coyote Garden is part of the tour on Saturday, tours of Brake’s renowned garden also will be offered on Sunday, too.

Brake’s garden has been featured in books, magazines and on television programs, and traces its roots to two humble flowerbeds that were part of the Willow Garden Club’s first tour in 1986.

As a child growing up in west Texas, he said his mother had a flower and vegetable garden. Though he dabbled in gardening in Texas and later \ in lived in Colorado, Brake said his first long, cold, dark, nearly colorless Alaska winter drove him to dig in the dirt.

“I knew if you wanted a garden, you could do it anywhere,” he said prior to the 2011 tour.

Bring a sack lunch Saturday and meet at 9:45 a.m. at the Willow Community Center, Mile 69.8, Parks Highway, to pick up maps, directions and descriptions of gardens on the tour. Tour participants will eat their sack lunches at Anne and Rene Gonzalez’s home at the old marina on Nancy Lake. Tour tickets are $7 and include raffle tickets for drawings during lunch. Note that the Willow Garden Tour is Saturday only.

Coyote Garden is open for tours Saturday and Sunday — from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., July 27, and noon p.m. to 5 p.m., July 28.

Suggested donation is $7 and proceeds support the Georgeson Botanical Garden at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Willow Garden Club. For more information about the Willow Garden Club tour, call 495-2080, or email willowgardenclub@hotmail.com.

Directions to Coyote Garden: Mile 71 Parks Highway; turn right on Willow-Fishhook Road. Drive 7.5 miles up Willow-Fishhook Road. Signs will be posted. For more information about Coyote Garden Tour, call 495-6525.

Contact managing editor Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.