BELFAST — Two Belfast gardens, one new and one old, will close this year’s Open Garden Days sponsored by the Belfast Garden Club. On Saturday, Aug. 17, from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., visitors are invited to meander through two gardens on adjoining properties: Betty’s Cottage-Style Garden at 12 Lincolnville Avenue and next door, at 18 Lincolnville Avenue, where An Artist’s Garden awaits.

A $5 admission fee, which gets you into both gardens, helps support the Club’s public service projects throughout the year. The event will be held rain or shine. 

“I’m in love with flowers and I love watching my garden grow,” said Betty, in a Garden Club news release.

An editor who works remotely, she began gardening seriously during the pandemic.

“I just love how the garden fills out every year,” she said. “I do have trouble thinning the garden; I’m reluctant to remove the many volunteers that never fail to sprout up—so there’s always an overabundance of everything. Each year I get super excited about a "new" flower—calendula, cleome, cosmos, cut-leaf coneflower, foxglove, sneezeweed, tobacco flowers, zinnias. . . . Last year I grew some amazing Black Knight scabiosa.”

Betty’s garden comes in two parts, upper and lower. The Upper Garden, which is about five years old, features a rocky xeric garden at one end, with lavender, prickly pear cactus, herbs, and sedum. The Lower Garden begins the growing season in full sun but turns shady as two large oaks leaf out. She tends a thriving shade garden there, with ferns, astilbes, and hostas. Along with fruit trees in sunnier spots, there's a lot of untamed habitat for birds and small animals.

Next door, artist Paula Carter has been gardening for 30 years in the same place. With a long, narrow lot facing a busy street, she focuses on “giving passersby nice flowers to look at,” including orange daylilies and a huge Dutchman’s Pipe vine trained across the front porch. Both were in residence when she bought the house, along with an unpaved driveway she now uses for a “two-and-a-half-foot-deep hügelkultur garden, to take advantage of the sun.” The stone path she built by hand leads to a porch where “flower boxes and bowls on the porch rails make a raised layer of color against the gray backdrop of the house walls.”

As nearby trees grew taller over the years, she found that her vegetable gardens had to move out of the backyard to follow the sun. She recalls that years ago, “a beautiful bull moose with a huge rack of antlers ran through my garden, shearing off the top of a kale plant with his sharp hoof. It looked like it had been cut by a razor.” She adds, “I’ve always wanted more sun and more land, and am unlikely to get either.”

Open Garden Days are an annual summer program of the Belfast Garden Club. For more information, visit belfastgardenclub.org. Proceeds support the Garden Club’s school programs, camp scholarships, library donations, and the 13 public gardens in Belfast that are maintained by club volunteers.