Putting the Garten Back in the Kinder

It is Thursday all day today! Here is an online link to this week's The List: Top Home & Garden Events on page 27 of today's print edition in the Washington Examiner.

Here is a cool link courtesy of the DC Green Infrastructure Collaborative. This is an interactive map of all the DC schools with gardens complete with description and photo where available. DC School Garden Week is coming up October 15-20 and I'm looking forward to personally visiting a numbrr of these gardens. Comes right in time for our Nov/Dec '07 "Gardening with Children" theme issue that I'm working on. Maybe now every Kindergarten will be an actual Children's Garden!

Last night I was invited to the monthly gathering of the Landscape Designers Group and thanks to an invite by local landscape designer Pat Howell. What great hosts they were! The first garden we visited featured a Faerie Garden. Sydney, the homeowner's daughter, gave me the grand tour and I must say I'm impressed with her knowledge of the plants and also of faerie lore. She correctly pointed out that I would not be able to see any ACTUAL faeries until Midnight, but that I could play with the pretend ones she had. She also named several favorite things growing around her yard including a blueberry bush which she claimed already yielded fruit during its first season in the garden. Sydney is picture here demonstrating the size of the Colocasia 'Black Magic' aka Elephant Ear.

Now I'm off to prep for my Channel 4 at 4pm appearance today - though it may be rescheduled due to the predicted storms. We need the rain desperately and I need the time to pack and get ready for my flight to GWA meeting in OKC, so if it gets postponed I will not be too upset.

UPDATE: The rain held off (will it ever come?!) and I just came back from doing the live segment on Channel 4. I felt like I sweated buckets out there in the current heat and humidity. They wrote it up in their News4@4 blog and put a nice link to us in their Online Extras section.