My dear, and long time friend Panayoti Kelaidis and his partner Jan came over to tour the gardens this July. Panayoti is the Senior curator and Director of Outreach at the Denver Botanical Gardens. I’ve known him for 25 years, from way back in my Landmark Education days. I did the Forum https://www.landmarkworldwide.com/ with his then wife, Gwen Moore, in 1993. They were instrumental in guiding me through my early years of gardening at my house in Aurora. Over the years Panayoti has brought me many botanical presents, all of which are growing in my Brighton garden, Wellyssa’s Womb.
OMG! I was soo nervous and desperate to impress! But they both said they thoroughly enjoyed the garden, and being the good friend, and kind man that he is, Panayoti heaped praises on the garden. The garden was very happy.
(sorry for the blurry pictures, I think I finally figured out which setting to use on my camera that isn’t too big for download, and won’t come out blurry for the future.) I’m a gardener, not a photographer! Hearing the voice of Dr. McCoy in the back of my mind . . .
What we didn’t grow in our own garden (Mom did all the planting), we gleened from the fields after the harvesters went through. I remember going through the fields to pick potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, peas, onions, carrots . . . Then we would go to the LDS storehouse and unload fruit off the trucks. I especially remember the apricots we helped to process one year. They would get poured out of boxes from the trucks and spilled onto the end of a conveyor system. We were all spread out from the beginning of the conveyor to the end. Some of us picking out rotten apricots, some of us splitting them in halves, others pulling out the pits, and then finally others turning them all cut side up and sweeping them into a box where they would go into the warehouse and magically come out in Deseret Industries cans of “Canned Apricot Halves.”
