Friday's garden tours happened under cloudy skies, with drizzle and actual rain falling at times. This fountain and it's dramatic borders are in the Griffin and Eastman garden in North Portland. The foliage was all glittery with drizzle.
Later that afternoon we enjoyed the cooling effect of the Willamette River as it passed along below the Sheng garden.
I don't know how much gardening I would get done when I could just chill and watch the river pass on by.
On Sunday things were warmer, 90 was the high (Monday was even warmer at 94, a bit too warm to comfortably tour gardens), but my friends and I saved the Quirk and Neill garden—with it's meandering creek—for last that day.
A beautiful setting to stop for a moment and relax, after all the excitement the weekend had to offer.
That is until one in our group spotted something odd in the water. What the heck?
Most of the pebbly tubes were in the creek, but there were a few on the rocks where we were sitting.
Cropped close-ups...
So what are they? The larvae cases of the caddisfly; caddisflies (order Trichoptera) are a group of insects with aquatic larvae and terrestrial adults. "As larvae, caddisflies live underwater. Caddisfly larvae can be divided into two groups: cased and caseless. Cased caddis larvae use a silk secretion to build a portable structure around themselves, made of materials such as sand, shells, stones and leaves." (source)
In this horrible photo you can (kind of) see their black legs, but wait, it gets better!
By Saturday afternoon things were warming up as we toured gardens under a sunny sky. The walk up the driveway to the Connall garden—with it's stately eucalyptus and wide swaths of lavender—had us feeling like we were touring a garden in a Mediterranean setting, rather than suburban Portland.
The French artist Hubert Duprat collaborated with a group of caddis fly larvae to produce cases incorporating gold, opal, turquoise and other precious stones.
Photo via imgur, read more about it here. Crazy right? After all the creative gardens we saw during Study Weekend (lots of photos to come) this was an excellent reminder that mother nature is the ultimate creative force.
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