Apartment Garden Blues (Blog): Taking a Home and Garden Tour
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- Published on Saturday, April 26 2014 16:12
- Written by Alexandra Martin
Every spring affluent communities around the United States open up select homes for home and garden tours. Home owners, working with their home owners associations, organize events that allow locals and tourists to enter their homes and gardens. We small-space gardeners, who generally live in tiny apartments or condos, can greatly appreciate the large homes and gardens in our midst! This time of year is a great time to visit your neighbors and get some home and garden inspiration!
This weekend I attended the 22nd Annual Floral Park Home & Garden Tour. Floral Park, Santa Ana, is located in central Orange County, Calif. It's hard to imagine charming historic neighborhoods within the bustling city of Santa Ana, but they are there! The neighborhood of Floral Park has many charming and unique homes from the 1920s and '30s that have been placed on the city's historical register, and this year six Floral Park homes and two gardens were open to the public. This year's booklet (which also serves as your map and your ticket into the homes) says, "We are proud of our heritage and endeavor to maintain historic correctness in the process of refurbishing, remodeling and upgrading our classic homes."
In addition to the homes and their gardens, there were many booths with antiques and crafts that could be purchased, food trucks with many delicious options, and a car show. A Floral Park visitor could be entertained all day!
I will definitely attend more home and garden tours in the future. Floral Park's emphasis is on the homes and their history, more than the gardens, but other tours have an emphasis on the gardens. Garden Walk Buffalo, for example, has many fantastic private gardens that are open to the public every year.
So get out to a local home and garden tour and see how your neighbors' backyards look! And when walking through their gardens, ask yourself, "What would I do with this garden space?"
See more photos from the 22nd Annual Floral Park Home & Garden Tour below.
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Alexandra is a professional writer from Southern California who grows vegetables, herbs, lots of aloe vera and one giant Boston fern in her balcony garden. She also grows dracaena, pothos and English ivy indoors. She loves traveling and birdwatching in addition to gardening.
