For 15 years, Clark County residents have enjoyed the chance to look inside other people’s private gardens during the Natural Garden Tour. This year, you can peer into 15 gardens without leaving your own home.
Those whose gardens are on display have achieved verdant, exceptionally beautiful results by using all-natural gardening methods with a healthy dash of sustainability. There aren’t any environmentally harmful pesticides or fertilizers used in these gardens, which often showcase native or low-maintenance plants that don’t require excess watering or plants that thrive in the Northwest climate.
Many gardens on the tour incorporate animal or insect helpers like bees (excellent for pollinating fruit, berries and vegetables) and chickens (wonderful for pest control and fertilizer). Some gardens also amuse visitors with whimsical or artful elements, such as gnome houses or statuary.
Last year, 830 people took self-guided tours of 12 household gardens on the last Sunday in July, when the Natural Garden Tour is normally held. This year, however, the pandemic makes being in each other’s spaces a risky prospect, so the organizers — Clark County’s Green Neighbors program — decided, for everyone’s safety, to make the event virtual, incorporating video and photo tours into a story map.
“The story map will allow virtual visitors to view features such as lawn alternatives, organic produce or pollinator habitat as interactive map layers between this year’s 15 selected gardens,” said tour organizer and Green Neighbors AmeriCorps member Jacob Ahrens-Balwit in an email.
Beginning Monday, anyone looking for a little green inspiration can visit www.clarkgreenneighbors.com/gardentour and take a high-quality, two- or three-minute video tour of each garden, including interviews with the host gardeners, pro tips and local natural gardening resources. Tour-takers will also come away with a wheelbarrow full of ideas for how to make their own gardens more environmentally friendly and sustainable, as well as just plain fun.
This year’s gardens, for example, include a 450-foot “pollinator hedgerow” of 1,500 native plants that bees use to make honey, as well as a 1-acre vintage-themed garden featuring recycled material as garden art and repurposed functional pieces.
Although a virtual garden tour can never be quite as good as an actual stroll through an inspiring natural space, there are some benefits to the virtual format.
“Since selected gardens are located across Clark County, this online format will allow virtual tour participants to visit more gardens without long travel times between the sites and cut down on the environmental impact by keeping cars off of the road,” Ahrens-Balwit said.
There’s another advantage to this year’s tour: After completing the tours, online visitors can take a brief quiz about natural gardening and be entered to win prizes.
The 2020 Natural Garden Tour will be accessible online through next year, so people can “visit” Clark County’s most inspiring gardens as many times as they wish.
