Willow Garden Tour set for July 27-28

WILLOW — Round up your friends and mark your calendars for the dates of the 28th annual Willow Garden Club tour. The event is paired with Les Brake’s annual Coyote Garden Tour.

This year the Willow Garden Tour is from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., July 27 and includes Brake’s renowned Coyote Garden. Tour participants will meet at the Willow Community Center, Mile 69, Parks Highway, to pick up maps, directions and descriptions of gardens to be visited. Bring a sack lunch.

Coyote Garden’s will be open for tours July 27, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and July 28, from noon to 5 p.m. Note that the Willow Garden Tour takes place Saturday only.

Tour organizer Marsha Van Abel said the garden club tried to present a full spectrum of gardens on the tour so people are sure to come away with new ideas for their own gardens.

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 when 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.

Still, the location of his garden, 7.5 miles up Willow-Fishhook Road in the Talkeetna Mountain Range, is part of what has turned the heads of national and international magazines — like Horticulture, Gardens Illustrated, Country Gardens, Sunset and New Zealand Gardener — and TV shows — like HGTV, which featured the garden in two series and two segments for the PBS show “Smart Gardening.”

“It’s territory that had never been covered before,” he said.

Suggested donation is $7 and proceeds go to the support the Georgeson Botanical Garden at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Willow Garden Club. For more information, call 495-6525 or email willowgardenclub@hotmail.com.

Contact managing editor Heather A. Resz

at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.