Welcome to Oklahoma Gardening.

Get ready for inspiration as we head over to Tulsa for the annual Tulsa Garden Club's garden tour.

Today we're going to feature four of the seven gardens that will be on this year's tour.

It's a show full of garden inspiration that you won't want to miss.

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It's our favorite time of the year, it's garden tour season, and joining me today is Jimmy Black with the Tulsa Garden Club, and you're co-chair of the garden tour this year?

Yes.

So you've been doing this for a long time as far as the whole tour.

Yes, and this year we are celebrating our 75th year.

Amazing.

We are headed south.

This year is our first tour to be in what I call the foothills of South Tulsa, all approximately around 111th and Sheridan-Yale area.

All the homes are within two miles of each other.

Okay, so how many homes do we have on the tour?

Well, this is a special treat this year.

This is the most homes we've had ever.

We have seven homes.

One is the Home Builders Association's designer showcase home in Midtown, so then you'll take a look at that and head south.

We have six homes, six amazingly different homes.

We have a contemporary landscaping, very minimalist type landscaping.

We have a woodland wonderland.

We have a home with three koi ponds that have purebred koi.

Wow, okay.

We have a pollinator and Japanese garden that is amazing.

So something for everyone, really.

Absolutely.

Every type of plant material, water gardens, traditional.

People get something from every garden and they are all different from each other.

Okay, so seven homes but close together.

So what is the date and the hours of the tour?

Yes, the date and the hours are May 9th from 10 to 4, and they are all approximately within two miles of each other, approximately around 111th and Sheridan-Yale area.

That's awesome.

So fantastic day.

And where can people get their tickets and how much are the tickets?

The tickets are $25.

They can get them on Eventbrite or TulsaGardenClub.com or Facebook or from the Tulsa Garden Center till Friday at about three o'clock is the cutoff.

Okay, but they can pick them up at the addresses too?

Absolutely, yes.

Come straight to the addresses, which you can find on our website and Facebook.

Well, Jimmy, I know it's always a fun day and you get to see so many other fellow gardeners on the tour.

And today we're getting a sneak peek of just four of those seven homes, right?

Yes, four of the seven.

I can't wait.

Let's go take a look.

Okay, let's do.

It's very calming for the nerves, I'll tell you that.

If you have a hectic day, it's great to come out and work in the garden and plant things and see things grow and see birds and everything else.

So I enjoy my garden.

When we go to the front, you'll see the front garden, which is very southern, very layered, very formal.

I have a side garden, which I call my rose garden, which is all roses.

The backyard is a little bit of formal with the boxwoods and all that.

And then behind it, I have iceberg roses, I have hydrangeas, I have peonies.

A lot of the larger plants are deciduous, which I kind of took from my grandmother and my mother.

Yeah, you got some of the kind of old school, but really hardy plants with bridal, reese, spirea, forsythia.

Yeah, and that's a burning bush, and of course, oak leaf hydrangea.

Yeah, and I like your Boston ivy that you've got covered in different places too.

Yeah, I got ivy on the fence.

I love the Boston ivy.

And of course, these are day lilies and your creeping phlox.

And these are hillary holly that are really light.

It kind of reminds you of a dwarf yaupon.

It does, yeah.

But they're indestructible.

In the front, I like to do evergreen.

At first, the first layer is evergreen, and then the second layer is deciduous.

So that way, in the wintertime, I have something always green.

So I like to do that as my design theme.

I love teak benches, and these are the Chimpendale English ones, and they'll last for 40 years or more.

So I really do like them a lot.

The interior is very equestrian, very English.

Almost all the furniture is English.

A lot of equestrian prints of horses, and of course, there's dogs, kind of Ralph Lauren looking, a lot of his fabrics and stuff like that.

And I kind of like the lawn area, so I can do bocce ball, you can play croquet, you can throw a football, whatever, and the dog has plenty of room, and you still have a nice garden on the edge.

Absolutely.

It's just beautiful out here.

Of all the plants in the garden, I like all of them, but I believe my Katrina rose behind me is my favorite.

It really shows up, and it's only four years old, so it's a great rose, has no thorns.

It really does put on a great show.

You can see here where I did the round boxwood balls, and then the hedge, and then behind it, I have the knockout roses, and these are white ones.

And then, of course, I do flowers in between to give a layered look.

I come out in the morning, have my coffee, play with my dog, go pull weeds.

It's very good to work out here.

I enjoy it very much.

Just like anything in gardening, you follow the topography, you follow the light, you follow the situation you're in.

You don't want to force yourself onto the place, but the opposite.

You want to serve it, in a way.

And I've been gardening since I owned my first home in London, England, in the 1990s.

I realized gardening is the most incredible thing you can ever do, besides maybe having a family.

And so I've been doing this for most of my life, really.

Well, I come from a family of garden enthusiasts who take their gardens very seriously.

So my parents had a garden that I now own in Austria that they built over decades, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, that really has influenced my gardening style.

It's basically native plants that came from the woods, came from the fields.

We found this lovely house in a lovely neighborhood here in Bigsby, South Tulsa area.

And the backyard was basically oak forest with English ivy.

And that was it.

And the garden was a forest, basically.

And so I started taking this more seriously when I started landscaping with Jane Fanning and bringing home plants from clients, rejects, pretty much every night.

I would come home at six or seven at night with a trailer load full of plants that had to go in the ground.

So that was sort of the bones, that was the beginning of this garden.

This terrain here in Bigsby, close to the river, is very sandy.

And so that is one of the reasons why it makes sense to terrace a slope.

And when I first tried just to put a sod down, it would always wash down.

So it made sense to start terracing it.

And by that, of course, also creating different sort of spaces and different rooms in the garden.

It was the beginning of something I didn't even imagine.

Well, making rooms in the garden makes sense because you obviously have different areas in the garden, but you also want to define them as they offer themselves to you, maybe in a way.

If you walk into a garden and you see everything at once, there's nothing to discover.

I love a natural garden.

I want people to feel abundance, to feel like it just has to be like that, it's natural.

But at the same time, I like formality.

I do like the old French and English gardens.

So I researched for more than a year to find the right greenhouse, but also to figure out how to put it on a stem wall, which was traditional in Victorian times.

And I couldn't find anyone in the region who had this, like this, or at least who I knew.

And so I sort of slowly figured it out and found the old coffee mill bricks.

Yeah, I love the Oklahoma bricks you put out.

Of course, of course.

Here you've created it as a destination to travel to.

It's just beautiful.

You need a reason to go out in your yard.

It's either you're gardening, you're working, or you want to go on a walk or go and see something.

I have a bunch of hick's hues that are now seven feet high that I love.

They're like, even in the winter, there is evergreens.

It's like big old men, like giants that stand in the garden.

And then I have a lot of boxwoods.

None of my boxwoods are in a straight row.

And it's partly because they all came in different sizes to start with.

But it's also, I think boxwoods in a straight row, almost any plant in a straight row is really boring.

It is really a matter of how you arrange them and how you place them and what you put with them.

The longer I've, the more time I've spent here in Oklahoma, the more I've started diving into what actually grows here, what's naturalized and what is native here and what works easily.

Everybody who has irrigation knows how difficult it is to get the irrigation right.

And then the irrigation breaks again and so on.

So I realized, let's try and find things that just want to be here.

And one of the many things that do is columbine.

I want my plants to find their spots.

Again, this is sort of a coexistence, I would say.

My mom used to always say there should be room for every animal in her paradise.

And I am trying to make my garden a space for people, for plants, and also for animals, because it is really, really important to have healthy ecosystems.

On one side of the driveway is our daughter Viviana's space that she's called Springtime.

So the name of the place is actually Springtime.

And she plays there with her neighbor friends and she builds stuff and she cooks there with herbs, cooks there with herbs.

And again, I'm trying to make this a place that's beautiful and I don't want people to destroy it, but I want the children to play here and to pick flowers and play with them and hide in the bushes and do their thing.

Because it's not just about beautiful, it's about building a relationship with a place.

I want to inspire my friends and my clients and people that see my garden to garden.

I want people to realize how beautiful it is and how you don't have to be rich to have a nice garden.

It just takes patience and dedication.

And I think that's really an important thing, because gardening is a hobby that anybody could pick up.

And for many people who do it, it's more than a hobby, it's a passion.

I just think it's very peaceful.

I have a, I'd say, you know, kind of a more stressful job.

And so it's a great place for me to come and just being in nature feeds me.

For me, I like putting different textures and colors together.

And I like watching how things change over time.

I like that the garden looks totally different, even from yesterday to today, as a matter of fact.

I became interested in gardening probably about 10 years ago and have just slowly added flower beds and vegetable garden and transformed it to the space that I like being in.

The garden bed looks complete if you have green, yellow, red, and blue.

And so I've really embraced the yellow part of that.

And it just makes me happy to see all of the bright yellows and chartreuses kind of popped around throughout the yard.

It just kind of brings a nice ray of sunshine, I guess, to those spots and brightens up a lot of the shady areas that I have.

Outside of the chartreuse that I love, the type of plants I'm always drawn to, whether it be indoor plants or outdoor plants, is anything variegated, especially a creamy white and light green.

Anything in that variegated really draws my eye and I want to collect it in my garden.

So I have a few plants that fall into that category that I just really adore, such as the ivory halo dogwood and variegated Solomon's seal.

And I have some variegated Japanese maples as well that I just really love.

Yeah, so you can ring the bell and herald our entrance into the Japanese garden.

It's beautiful.

Thank you.

So tell me a little bit, you said that this was one for the moon gate, but also because you had sort of a problem over in this side of the garden.

Right, so this is kind of a low-lying part of the garden and rain water would collect there.

And so we put in a rain garden here to help with the drainage problem.

And so the Japanese garden just kind of grew naturally out of that toward this way.

Absolutely.

I really wanted a moon gate.

I just thought that was such a cool idea.

So we added a moon gate and added in some bamboo fencing to sort of make it just a little bit of a separate, more peaceful place.

I could go and sit and listen to the waterfall that we added.

I work in health care and, you know, eating healthy vegetables is really part of what we teach our patients to do.

So I try to embrace that.

Initially, I had just raised like wooden garden beds, vegetable beds in the very, very back by the fence.

It is the sunniest part of the yard.

So I thought, well, that seems like the best place to put it.

But it's pretty far away from the house.

And so I didn't tend to it as much as I should.

And it got overgrown and the wood kind of broke down and I kind of abandoned that project.

And also now I'm a little bit older.

And so I appreciate having higher beds that I don't have to bend over and weed or fight with the bunnies for the produce.

So it's quite a bit closer to the kitchen.

So my husband does all the cooking now.

So he likes to come out and I like to do the planting of vegetables and he likes to do the picking and harvesting of the herbs for dinner.

The pollinator garden and the monarch way station are fairly new and I've been adding more native plants to that to try to support the monarch population and pollinators in general.

It's definitely a relaxing oasis that you've created here.

Yeah, thanks.

So this is the front garden area that started off as just an andina hedge.

And this is where I got my first taste of falling in love with all the different plants and have a little seating area here and like to watch my birds take a bath or have a snack.

Well, it seems like the plant choices also will create a lot of interest year round as well.

I try to do a mixture of bulbs and spring flowering shrubs and then put in some annuals as the season goes on.

Right, right.

And with the nice ground covers that you have between the adjuga and the chartreuse.

I've got to have my pop of chartreuse.

You don't have to worry about too many weeds then.

No, they hide it very well.

I think it's a good place to start with containers.

And then you can play with different combinations of plants and colors and textures and see kind of what draws your eye and what makes you happy to look at.

I still have lots of containers scattered throughout my gardens.

I like the height that they provide and the ability to change things out or plant things out into the landscape that have overgrown the container and reuse plants that way.

I would say just pay attention to what colors you like and start shopping.

Gardening is actually one of the known hobbies that is linked to longevity.

And it's probably some of it is physical where it's an active hobby.

You're hauling mulch, you're hauling soil, you're up and weeding and bending and getting up off the ground.

So I love that about it because I'm really passionate about health and promoting health as part of my job as a physician.

And I also think it also just incorporates hope.

You have to wait for the next season.

And you're also always learning, which has a lot of cognitive benefits.

So originally the home had pretty basic, very narrow beds that we expanded just in front of the house.

And then we expanded them a little bit more so I could get a little bit more depth.

Then we added this walkway up to the street, which I think adds a lot of charm.

And then I decided shade plants really aren't that, they don't have that much pizzazz.

I don't have much fun.

They're not as much fun as sun plants.

So I wanted to incorporate all of my full sun plants.

So we expanded our gardens out front and poured a cute little pathway just so I could have more sun friendly plants up there.

And then we, this just kind of exploded back here in various stages over the past five years.

We love our evergreens because that gives us year round interest.

And then we also just really love our hydrangeas.

And so we've expanded our hydrangea hedge with a lot of Incredibles and several standard hydrangeas.

I really love ferns.

I really love boxwoods.

I do love Japanese maples.

I mean, who wouldn't?

They're just so beautiful.

Sometimes if something's not doing well, I just move it somewhere else to see if it likes it there better.

And then I also have learned the hard way to try to group plants together that either like to be dry or like to be wet.

We spend a lot of time around the water feature, of course, and he would have it very heavy with like dragons and things like that.

So I have to scale him, rein him in a little bit because I like my bird fountains and my bird bird bath.

The koi fish itself represents strength and perseverance.

There's the great story of the koi that swims up the waterfall and then turns into the dragon.

And it's built into the Japanese culture.

It's been about a three or four year journey.

Initially, I just got regular domestic fish, but then I started learning about it.

And so this pond currently has 120 fish.

There are 80 different color combinations of koi, and I have collected 50 of the unique color combinations.

And I have duplicates of the ones I really like.

Kohaku is the great one of the red and white.

There's a Showa with a multicolored one.

There's the high Utsuri, which is my favorite, the black and orange, which is pistol.

So I actually love that fish.

I probably have a half dozen.

The color is such a unique, lovely orange.

We find things to love about each other's favorite part of the garden.

She has set a high bar to catch up with.

And my husband, Frank, who loves koi, would love to be a resource for anyone because he's very passionate about that hobby.

Joining us next is Jane Crawford, who is the president of the Tulsa Garden Club.

And Jane, you guys have knocked it out of the park yet again on this tour.

It's just fabulous.

Oh, thank you.

So tell us a little bit about what this tour means to the Garden Club.

This tour is very important to us.

It's our single biggest fundraiser of the year, and it allows us to fund really important groups, our empowerment groups.

We have Up With Trees, New Leaf, and Global Gardens, amongst others.

Yeah, you guys are out in the community helping so many different other horticulture entities in that community also.

Let's talk a little bit about the club also.

It's open to anybody, correct?

It is open to anybody.

We welcome anyone to come and attend.

We meet October to June, with the exception of January, in the auditorium here at the Garden Center.

And it's free to attend.

And we, you know, love for people to join us and learn.

Well, in addition to having fun activities like the tour and many other activities you do throughout the year or events, you also have an educational program each month, right?

We do.

We have a speaker every month that brings us something new, and that alone is worth attending.

We also do flower shows and horticulture shows, which is very beneficial to our members.

And that's another way we try to educate the public.

I was going to say, and not only, you know, sharing the information among each other, you guys are so proficient in so many different entities within horticulture, right?

You have people that like roses and people that like irises and different things that you're all sharing that in a very social way.

Yes.

The Garden Center has 16 different plant societies, and we'd like to do our best to work with those societies.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Well, tell us again, remind us of the date and the time of the garden tour, if you don't mind.

May 9th?

May the 9th, from 10 to 4.

Okay.

And people can get their tickets either here at the Tulsa Garden Center or on your website?

On our website, Eventbrite, or on the day.

Just look up.

Find the addresses on your website and walk up to them.

Awesome.

Thank you, Jane.

And I would encourage all of our viewers to visit the Tulsa Garden Club Garden Tour this year on May 9th.

Just a reminder, we'd love to hear your feedback.

Scan the QR code to give us your thoughts, ideas, or suggestions.

And as always, if you have any questions about today's show, please reach out to your local county OSU Extension office, or feel free to leave us a comment on our social media.

There are a lot of great horticulture activities this time of year.

Be sure and consider some of these events in the weeks ahead.

Join us next week as we're celebrating Mother's Day by taking a closer look at the cut flower industry, right here on Oklahoma Gardening.

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Tune in to our OK Gardening Classics YouTube channel to watch segments from previous hosts.

Oklahoma Gardening is produced by the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service as part of the Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University.

The Botanic Garden at OSU is home to our studio gardens, and we encourage you to come visit this beautiful Stillwater gem.

We would like to thank our generous underwriters, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry, and Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust.

Additional support is also provided by the Tulsa Garden Club, Greenleaf Nursery and the Garden Debut Plants, the Tulsa Garden Center, the Oklahoma Horticultural Society, and the Tulsa Herb Society.