The Search for the Perfect Garden

I am always on a search for a more perfect garden. 
I love the creative process of designing the gardens, choosing the most impressive plants and visiting places that inspire my creativity in the garden. 

While I can not enter Walmart through the main doors, always opting for the garden center doors so I can browse the newest selections, I have grown tired of the old selections only occasionally finding a true gem of a new plant there.  There are plenty of the tried and true plants in various colors and sizes and a variety of different textures and my gardens are full of those plants, also.  But I am left still searching for something different.

On trips into San Antonio I can not leave town without stopping off at the garden center in a Lowe's or Home Depot finding a wider selection of  plants including some new varieties I have never seen before occassionally.  Last time I found a variety of Black-eyes Susan I had never seen and even though I dislike Black-eyed Susans this was not a typical variety.  Not only was the flower twice the size of the typical wild variety,  the color was a rich golden yellow, the center was yellow with a lime green ring around the edge instead of the dark brown protruding center, the petals did not hang down but rather straight out.  It was so perfect  looking I thought it looked more like a good quality artifical flower than a Black-eyed Susan.  I could not leave the garden center without a specimen of the plant.  That and a Queens Palm tree. 

Having come by this love of gardening honestly from our mother, Linda and I  decided to treat our mother to a day out, visiting an impressive garden nursery.  We found  the Antique Rose Emporium.  the nursery of choice for the day. Beautiful Fairy rose shrubs line the entrance  and around the parking area.  Instead of rushing into the center we lingered looking and smelling the fragrances of the roses.  One of the wonderful aspects of the nursery is that you can grab a little red wagon and wander on gravel pathways throughout the center's perennial gardens planted all around the grounds and see the plants in their mature stages while deciding on the look you like. Garden structures are everywhere:arbors, pergolas, outdoor rooms and pathways wander throughout the gardens.   We arrived early and wandered the gardens until the heat began to slow us down but not before we each had a wagon load of beautiful plants.  I came home with a shrub rose bush in a sweet pink color, "Gabrielle Privet" that will bloom all summer long, a Lady Baltimore Hibiscus that has deep red flowers the size of a large dinner plate (or bigger), several purple coneflowers to add to my windmill garden bed, a small bay tree and the inspiration to get out and get my hands dirty.  Each of us had rose bushes and the ride home in the car loaded with the plants reminded me of the sweet smelling southern Magnolias, Gardenias and all those fragent plants you find blooming in the Southern states.