Information for Garden Clubs

In This Section:

• Tours
• Presentations
• Group Orders

 

(Last updated March 2011)

contact me at < lsmit@eastlink.ca >

Tours:

Garden Club visits are welcome by pre-arrangement, both during or outside of my normal business hours (but the nursery will not be closed to regular customers during my regular hours).

Due to physical constraints of the parking area, groups of more than 20 may have to park some of their vehicles on the highway shoulder or run a shuttle to alternate parking about 1 km away. In addition, there is only one of me now so I find groups of more than ten or so to be a real strain, and guided tours are pretty much out of the question for much larger than that.

Presentations:

After a few years of having taken myself out of circulation, so to speak (or actually so as not to speak), I'm once again prepared to give presentations to garden clubs. In particular, I now have more first-hand knowledge about and experience with the species Peonies. And a good crop of photos. These are mostly rather excellent plants, very much under-utilized and virtually unknown. So I would welcome the opportunity to speak about them. Basically, the round of talks I gave on this subject several years ago was more based on book research and conjecture than on personal observation; now is a good time for an update.

Group Orders:

I regret that due my downgrading from van to car I can no longer do local deliveries for group orders. Garden clubs interested in placing a group order for a single pick-up will recieve a discount.

There was good success last year with a garden club ordering a number of the Garden Peonies I've grown from seed. Rather than try to deal with the headache of orders by several individual members wanting the same peony, the executive ordered a number of them which they thought were attractive, and then sold them to the members at a meeting after taking delivery; and priced them so that the club would get some revenue over the actual cost (I packaged each root individually, with a conspicuous tag showing it's ID number, and e-mailed photos for them to print and attach to each packet so people would know what they were getting). Over 90% of the roots sold, and the leftovers went into a community planting that the club maintains. It's too early to have feedback from the membership about how the roots have done in their gardens, but I'm confident that they will be happy with them.