Our “Family Reunion,” the annual Salt Lake Christmas Tour, always occurs in December when the gardens on Temple Sqare are not beautfiul-with-flowers. In all seasons the gardens are spectacular….. a book all about the gardens, the hows and whys of plant choice and design is available …. but we do love our winter views of these gardens, don’t we. (Did you realize that that white gauzy covering over so many of the beds when we visit in December is to keep the tender plants from drying out and to give them a head start for spring?)
Here’s some trivia-information for you regarding the gardens: There is a team of full-time gardeners who take care of all the many gardens with help from a large corps of volunteers. They care for all the gardens on the 35 acres comprising the church headquarters which include 250 flower beds, filled with more than 165,000 bedding plants of over 700 varietes of blooms. The gardens are redesigned every six months and replanted by hundreds of volunteers but only 10% of the design is changed every year to give us visitors a feeling of consistency. There are many, many stories regarding the gardens on Temple Square…. like about our favorite the Cedar of Lebanon which was brought back as a seedling from Israel in 1949 and is always decorated in red lights.
Thought you’d enjoy knowing “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey always said.
Donna, aka Mother Hen, until next week.