Road gardens

It’s hard to leave the garden in summer. It really is, and I know a lot of Northern and Midwestern gardeners who take their vacations at other times because they just can’t do it.

But I love the beach and the salt water and the waves and the margaritas and the company. Some things—dare it be said—are just as important if not more than gardening.


When one travels, however, it is possible to make gardens part of the experience—really easy, actually. This year, we stopped at a lovely park with an arboretum and a rose garden: Tanglewood Manor (top and above).


This was a pretty and carefully tended public garden, but when you’re a gardener, travel becomes more interesting. You notice every shrubbery at every roadside rest stop, every plant in every restaurant. But most of all I have been appreciating the dune plantings on a barrier island where we stay each summer. As everyone knows, these dunes are suffering from gradual erosion; planting grasses helps in a small way to maintain their slight hold. It’s clear that the owners of this property have taken care to keep up the vegetation on their dunes—I have met gardeners planting grasses where we have been staying here.

When you travel you don’t often think about gardening and the work of gardening but the impact of what is planted, what is just growing, and how all this is maintained has greater reverberations than we can imagine.