A perennial favorite pastime

The gardens aren't secret anymore.

The Lyme Garden Club, the Massena Valley Garden Club and Hospice of Jefferson County are sponsoring garden tours this month and in July. Garden aficionados in Chaumont, Henderson Harbor, Massena and Brushton will open their yards and, in some case, houses to visitors.

LYME GARDEN CLUB TOUR

The Lyme Garden Club will hold a self-guided garden tour in Chaumont Saturday. Some participants will not only show off their master landscaping, but also their historic abodes and the art inside them.

The Lyme club will use funds raised from the tour to beautify the town of Lyme and maintain public floral displays.

This garden tour features a light lunch and a garden shop at Copley House, Chaumont.Lunch will be served between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. Two planters will be raffled off during the day.

Chaumont Wine and Spirits will offer a wine-tasting from noon to 4 p.m. The Gothic-style building that houses the store dates back to 1872 when it served as an office building for the Copley lumber and limestone business.

Although it looks like a chapel or a mausoleum, the structure was "built as a full-scale sample box," said the store's manager, Michelle Oswald. It was used "as a showroom to show people architecturally what they could build with limestone" from the Copley quarry.

Mrs. Oswald is an avid gardener and has surrounded the building with potted plants and gardens.

The wine-tasting will feature "wines from the garden," which means that all of them have a fruit base, the aroma of flowers or are organic.

Artists included on the tour will be Sue Farrell and Barbara Henning of Point Salubrious. Wool spinners Joan Kimmis and Connie Cummings will also be featured. Ronald J. McGregor's pottery, and Donna Williams's iris folding will be on display at Copley House

Brian Lister, Point Salubrious, paints in oil and acrylic, as well as using pen and ink in his artwork. He will display his works in his studio and gallery, a one-room schoolhouse that dates to before 1869.

On Point Salubrious Road, Suzanne Seiffert will display her miniature houses, which are a lot like decorated dollhouses, inside her home. Her gardens will be part of the tour.

"There's really a variety of things," said Marian Valentine, Dexter, a member of the Lyme Garden Club and co-chairwoman of this year's tour.

Judy and Seth Tyndall, Main Street, Chaumont, will show off their residential garden with a deck in the backyard and several container plants.

Also on view on Main Street will be Debbie and Brian Cuppernell's backyard pool, perennial beds and vegetable garden. Their garden features impressive boulders beautifully decorated with a variety of sedum.

A small garden surrounds the house of Christine and Bernard Bach, Oleo Acres Lane, with a colorful perennial bed in front. Mrs. Bach decorates her gardens with birdhouses, pottery fountains and other ornaments.

"It's very small," said Kathleen Carr, former garden club president and founder of the tour, in describing the Bachs' garden. "But I think it's very nice for people to see small gardens so they can get ideas for their own spaces."

Her yard has perennial gardens and a vegetable garden.

The garden of Mildred A. "Mim" Higgins, Three Mile Point Road, will welcome visitors with its cottage coziness and colorful flower beds.

Mrs. Higgins's son, Jamie Hubbard, assisted with the landscaping. He also contributed many of the decorative items, most of which he found at rummage sales or made himself.

Poppies, purple lupines, roses, lilies and begonias surround the house, the deck and the small beach in front.

"Every bed is filled to the brim with color," said Mrs. Carr. "If people had only one to see, this is the one. Every area is filled with trees, shrubs, annuals and perennials."

Milk-glass lanterns flank the entrance to the garden, and various styles of birdhouses, each made by Mr. Hubbard, stand among the flower beds.

Duck-shaped planters, wooden tropical fish, draped fishnets, wind chimes, washboards and wagon wheels are some of the other decorations placed throughout the garden.

"My favorite is the brick patio," said Mr. Hubbard. It sits in full sunlight and is constructed of bricks from the Court Street bridge in Watertown.

Another feature is the guest house, a stand-alone, one-room building in the corner of the gardens. It was originally an outhouse, but Mrs. Higgins and Mr. Hubbard renovated the interior and converted the building to a guest bedroom. A stained-glass door, found by Mr. Hubbard at a garage sale, opens to the small, cozy cottage.

HOSPICE GARDEN TOUR

The seventh annual Jefferson County Hospice garden tour, set for Sunday, July 13, in Henderson Harbor, will consist of six sites and include lunch. The tour provides transportation by bus to each of the sites. Guides on the buses will discuss the history and attractions of each property. Tickets for this tour cover lunch, a gift bag and a tour catalogue.

Participants should meet at the Mark Hopkins Hotel parking lot, Harbor Road, 15 minutes before the tour starts. The morning tour will start at 9 and conclude with lunch at the Henderson Harbor Yacht Club; the afternoon tour will start at 1 and begin with lunch. Each tour will last around three hours.

LUNCH HIGHLIGHT

Lunch at the Henderson Harbor Yacht Club will be among the highlights of this year's tour. It will have a nautical theme and include salads and other dishes presented with a Caribbean or Mediterranean flair. For dessert, Janet Evert and her volunteers will prepare cupcakes, each decorated with a large icing flower on top.

"It's something that you might have on a cruise ship," said Karen West, chairwoman of the tour's lunch committee.

With its view of the harbor and the moored sailboats, Ms. West said, the Henderson Harbor Yacht Club is the perfect venue to enhance the seaside ambiance.

Proceeds from the garden tour in Henderson Harbor will benefit Hospice of Jefferson County.

"That's one of the awesome things about this event — people working together for something that's a little bigger than themselves," said Ms. West.

"It's a real community thing," said Madeline Moore, director of the tour's public relations committee. "All the people have pitched in and volunteered to make this a really great event."

Raffle tickets will also be sold during the tour.

The event will include waterfront homes and gardens, all of them new to the tour.

"They're all on the water," said Ms. West. "But all the homes have a totally different flavor."

The home of Nancy and David Denny, Clark's Point Road, has an interesting architectural design with extensive stonework and terracing. The yard includes multiple gardens and views of limestone ledges on the lakeshore.

Amy Bartholomew lives in one of the village's original stone houses. She furnished it inside with antiques and outside with a pool and gardens.

The guest house of David and Lori Chase, Bayshore Drive, was built in the 1920s and, when they bought it 15 years ago, it looked more like a hut than a house. With the help of a master craftsman, they renovated the cottage. The two-bedroom structure features a different kind of wood paneling for every room.

Bonnie and Michael Yonkovig, also on Bayshore Drive, have a contemporary home with an enormous wall of windows providing a panoramic view of the Lake Ontario.

Jean and Doug Kenna, Harbor Road, have a fairly contemporary home set back from the road. Visitors will tour the house as well as the gardens, which have numerous fountains and ponds.

CASTLE ADDED

Due to popular demand, said Dana Keefer, the tour's organizer, the Harbor Castle has been added to this year's tour.

This historic stone structure, complete with towers and turrets, sits atop a steep hill overlooking the harbor.

Visitors will begin their castle tour by entering through a stone gate and climbing stone steps up the slope alongside a waterfall. A large pond, complete with fish and lily pads, will greet climbers at the top of the stairs.

There was a concrete pond in the gardens when his family acquired the property, said Ryan K. Schafer, the castle's owner.

"I like the pond idea," said Mr. Schafer, "but it didn't really flow with nature at all."

He constructed the new pond with stones. Soon, he found it difficult to stop reconstructing the grounds.

"I wanted to overhaul the pond and then I wanted to landscape around it," he said. "That eventually led to the waterfall, and then I had to landscape around that. Now I've worked my way to several gardens and landscaped areas on the property."

From the pond, visitors will follow a path through a yard, to the pool and finally to the castle door.

The tour will focus on the castle grounds, but Mr. Schafer will also invite participants into one of the rooms. From this sitting room, visitors can enjoy the view of the harbor, observe the newly renovated castle interior and learn about the history of the structure.

The original owner, Dr. Roy M. Philo, spent 25 years building the castle. Mr. Schafer will have a record of the entire construction history. He plans to transfer the information to a DVD that he will present in the sitting room during the tour.

MASSENA GARDEN CLUB TOUR

On Saturday, July 19, the Massena Valley Garden Club will sponsor a garden tour in Massena and Brushton. Proceeds will go to the garden club, which is dedicated to beautifying the village of Massena.

"The garden club ladies have been doing a lot of work all over town," said Odile G. LaComb, former garden club president. "They go around Massena to beautify and maintain several little park areas. That's the purpose of the garden club and that's why we hold these tours"

Ms. LaComb initiated the tours in 2002 as part of Massena's bicentennial celebration.

This year's tour will consist of six homes and gardens. Four of the six sites were on the 2002 tour, but feature additions and renovations.

Ms. LaComb and James E. Carvill, Grove Street, Massena, have added a circular shade garden "room," or a space set aside in the garden with benches. Their garden also includes new endless-summer hydrangeas, roses, lilies, bee balm, 15 varieties of hosta, Shasta daisies and cedar.

William and Elizabeth Sommerfield, Elm Street, Massena, have a shady garden with a gazebo.

Susan and Dominic Violi, Wolverine Point, Massena, have a water garden they have made larger and deeper since the bicentennial. Their pond has tropical fish and white, yellow, and pink water lilies. Hollyhocks, phlox and potted plants surround the pond.

James C. and Viola R. Murphy, Town Line Road, Massena, have a solar room with specialty plants, mostly tropical. They even have a prickly pear cactus in their backyard.

Two houses are new on the tour.

One, owned by Richard Rounds and Genie Flanders, Martin Street, Massena, includes a notable vegetable garden. His backyard is small, but Mr. Rounds has a big harvest of tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, green beans and red, white, and green peppers.

The second house new to the tour, owned by Joel J. and Anna Avery, is in Brushton.

The Avery property extends for more than three acres and includes five distinct garden areas. A pond is in one of the gardens and a gazebo is featured in another. The Averys also have a small rose garden and an area with stone walkways that lead to the Little Salmon River. The fifth garden has terracing and a three-tier pond and waterfall with goldfish.

"We've been at it a long time," said Mr. Avery about his garden. "We had a lot of rocks in our lawn and we couldn't mow the lawn, so everywhere there was a rock we put a garden in."

The gardens eventually grew to include ponds, waterfalls, hundreds of perennials and 700 annual plants.

"We got a little obsessed," said Mr. Avery. "There are so many flowers, I wouldn't be able to name them."

Ms. LaComb said that the Averys have wanted to be part of the tour for a long time, but she thought that people might not want to make the long trip. Brushton is a little less than 30 miles southeast of Massena.

However, said Ms. LaComb, the garden is "very much worth the drive."