Mother's Day Garden Tour II - Much Belated

Boy, oh boy, have I been slacking off.  Way back in May I posted some pictures from the Annual Mother's Day Garden Tour that supports an elementary school in East Sacramento.  I promised a follow-up and just never delivered.

What can I say?  Life has been busy both at my day job and after hours.  I've always thought that the cruel irony of garden blogging is that when you are doing the most gardening and would have the most to blog about you happen to have the least amount of time to blog.  

Since it's been nearly two months since I went on this tour, I'm just going to post these pictures and make a few comments.  I won't go into a great deal of depth and I trust that's okay.  I suspect most people just look at pictures on blogs anyway.  

With the delay in this post, I should have PhotoShopped this picture to read "Welcome Back to East Sacramento".

This shady garden was a gem.  I suspect the above chairs were planted just for the tour though.

My daughter is seen here in the red coat.  I gave her a small point and shoot
 camera and she took hundreds of pictures in the gardens.  

I have these same pots at home.  I totally know where they bought these.  I admire it when people can stick to one type of container.  I can't seem to achieve that level of restraint.  

If you hate mulch, you probably hate this garden.  I can't imagine the upkeep once the leaves fall.  But on this day, everything looked clean and crisp.

A Strawberry Tree was growing in the dappled shade.  I took this picture of the trunk because of the bark and also to remind myself of the lighting conditions.  After seeing this, it occurred to me that the three strawberry trees I have planted were all in full sun.  Two of them are dead now and one is at our old house.  It never seemed to take off for me though. 

More mulch and crisp lines.

Isn't this beautiful?  No?  Well, one of the things I like about garden tours is seeing the ways other people address problems.  On this tour I saw how people hung cafe lights and how they brought water to veggie beds (above) among other things.

Artwork done by the kids at the school

More artwork.

A simple brick pathway - easy and timeless.