Volunteers

As discouraged as I may be about all the vandalism that has been happening at the Gardens, the one thing that really encourages me is our volunteers. They show up every week and keep working to keep the Gardens look good. Yesterday was no exception. More plants got planted, it was a perfect day for it as cool and wet as it was. The Children's Garden has some color in it. The poor ravaged front bed has some nice additions to it and the new native plant garden has a lot less weeds than it did.

Speaking of the new garden we finally have a name for it! Drum roll please.

Shozan-en is the name. It is Japanese, obviously, since that is the origination of the entire garden, and it means "Mountain becomes visable by sunlight -garden". Kind of awkward in English but very beautiful and fitting for the garden in Japanese.

Remember to mark your calendar for Friday June 5th 5 to 7 for the Grand Opening Celebration. There will be artists, music, people talking about native plants and one cool garden to hang out in. Start your First Friday off at the Gardens and then continue downtown to the galleries and on to the Art Center for the opening of the Abstract show.

Butterfly House

Rich and Jeff did a fantastic job of finishing up the butterfly netting on Saturday. As much as a pain in the neck that project turned out to be the end result is great. You hardly notice it is even there.

The butterfly release was cool even though it was cloudy and the butterflies were not really interested in flying. We'll be doing one more release this Saturday. If you've missed the other releases you should come down this Saturday. It is a really neat thing to see the butterflies in action.

Beyond Cussing

We had the most beautiful iris display. Yes, note the past tense, had. I came in at 7am Saturday morning to get Rich going on the butterfly netting project and I notice something is missing. Someone came in and cut almost every single iris bloom that we had in our front garden. Whoever did it knew what they were doing. The blooms were not randomly torn off. The edges of the cuts weren't jagged as though they were cut by a knife. Someone came in with their pruners and took almost every blooming iris that was growing in the front bed. It pains me to think a fellow gardener would do something so heinous. We work so hard to make the Gardens look good that when something like this happens it is such a shock.

At least the police are finally taking all my reports seriously. We've had a terrible time with vandalism at the Gardens over the last couple of years, especially this year. Now we are a special project. The police are increasing patrols and will be coming down to do an evaluation and will be donating some resources. I'm fairly certain that whoever has been vandalizing the Gardens isn't going to be caught but hopefully steps can be taken so it doesn't happen again in the future.

Church Ladies

Do you know why I love church ladies? They come from a generation that knows how to cook. Peggy's church ladies had their meeting here in the library yesterday which included a pot luck lunch and invited Shirley, Diana and me to join them. Yum. They fed us well. Real baked beans, green bean salad, two kinds of apple salad, two kinds of deviled eggs, mashed potato salad, fried chicken, chocolate cake. I'm sure there were other things I'm forgetting because my poor little paper plate was groaning under the weight of my lunch. It was wonderful. Afterward I had to go down to the pump house for a little nap, I mean to check the netafim filter and make sure everything was running ok.

New Comer's All Comers

The New Comer's stopped by the Gardens for a visit. I hadn't given a tour in a while. I had a blast. It has been a while since I've wandered through the gardens and enjoyed all the really cool plants that we have. Lately it has just been crisis, crisis, crisis. I think I'm not quite done with crisis, crisis, crisis, although it might just be crisis, crisis now.

I'm pleased the pump is still pumping and the pond is still filling. There is water in the amphitheater and even though the elusive zone 7 has been located, isn't functioning. Electrical issues. I swear one of these days I will get the chance to enroll at Mesa for an intro to electricity class. What I need to know just isn't that sophisticated. You'd think I'd have picked it up by now.

We have three new employees starting in the next couple of weeks. No, one isn't the Executive Director so all of you who have your hearts set on that job don't despair, send in your resumes. We'll have a new employee in the Gift Store, a new Volunteer Coordinator (YAY!) and an person who will be taking care of all our facility rentals. It is exciting to see how far the organization has grown in just one year.

Cuss. Cuss. Cuss. Cuss. Cuss!

Those of you who know me know that on occaision a curse word may slip through my lips. The fact that some (expletive deleted) stole $150 worth of our beautiful, amazing and unusual plants from the Color and Harmony Garden Sunday night makes me want to tear off cussing a blue streak that would make the most raunchy roughneck blush a delicte pink to the tips of his ears.

First of all, no real gardener would steal. Gardeners are the most generous people I know. They are always inviting you into their gardens, wanting you to taste lovely things they've grown, and giving you starts of cool and interesting things for your own garden. Second of all we are a non-profit. Stealing is never cool but stealing from a non-profit is especially heinous. We don't have a lot of resources to begin with so the loss hits us hard. Thirdly a lot of people have put in a lot of time in our gardens and it is incredibly disrespectful to all the hard work and care that they have invested.

So, no more Miss Nice Gal. If I find out who you are I'm going to kick your (expletive deleted).

Friday

I love my grubby knuckles. Don't look at me like that. The grubby knuckles are the Friday volunteers and they hold the Gardens together on days I can't. Like Friday. I left a huge list of things to do and they got it all done. Everything looks great. And I didn't even have to use the persuader. Darn. Now, where is the fun in that?