Perennial Plant Association: the garden tours (part 2)

Looking through these photos, it's hard to believe it has already been more than two months since the Perennial Plant Association's annual symposium in Baltimore.  I've already written one long blog post about the symposium (see Five days of plant geek pleasure), and another with photos from the Wednesday garden tours (see Perennial Plant Association: the garden tours (part 1)).  As promised, here's part 2, with photos from the Friday tours.

Perennial Plant Association: the garden tours (part 1)

 I would be terrified to let these people see my garden.

This horde was one of the tour groups for the Perennial Plant Association's national symposium in late July, a gathering of "green industry" professionals that included wholesale growers, garden center retailers, landscape architects, garden designers, garden writers, and garden bloggers like me.  The gardens below were part of Wednesday's design/landscape tour, featuring five different private gardens that differed greatly in size, character, and style.  The photos below represent only a small fraction of the several hundred I took; for the rest, check out my Perennial Plant Association album on Flickr.  I'll do a separate blog post about the Friday tours, which were great in an entirely different way.

Five days of plant geek pleasure

For five days in late July, I convinced myself and everybody around me that I was (a) a morning person and (b) an extrovert, neither of which is remotely true.  It takes a pretty special event to pull off a stunt like that, and that was the Perennial Plant Association's 2015 national symposium in Baltimore.  Every time I think about distilling five very busy, very intense, and overwhelmingly pleasurable days into one blog post, I get slightly dizzy.  Instead, I've broken it into two blog posts. In this one I'll give my general impressions of the event, and I'll follow up in a few days with the gardens we saw on the tours.

Big Begonia grandis

Begonia grandis in a private garden near Baltimore, Maryland

I'm just back from attending the Perennial Plant Association (PPA) national symposium in Baltimore, Maryland.  I've only recently joined this organization, having been talked into it by my friend Janet Draper.  And I'm so glad she did!  I just spent an amazing, exhausting, energizing 5 days of talks, garden tours, trade show, and best of all, spending time with several hundred fellow plant geeks, including at least a dozen people I already knew from Facebook but had never before met in person.  I took over 500 photos, and it's going to take a while to get them processed and uploaded to my Flickr account.  For now I'll just quickly share some photos of the first plant (of many!) that blew me away: Begonia grandis, a.k.a. "hardy begonia".