Nature’s art: Tour of Gardens puts outdoor artistry on full display

Irish writer and poet Thomas Moore once opined that a garden “reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided.”

It’s as good an explanation as any to explain the peace, the coziness, the pure joy that one often feels in a garden, whether you had a hand in its creation or not.

For the 24th year, Dubuque County Master Gardeners and Dubuque County Gardeners Inc. are hosting a tour of some of the area’s most beautiful gardens and landscapes. It is an opportunity to experience the magic of a garden — or six of them if you like — and take advantage of garden-related workshops at many of the stops along the way.

The gardens on this year’s tours include everything from majestic pines and waterfall features to yard art and walking paths.

“They’re different and varied every year,” said Sara Wagner, a master gardener and co-chair of the event for Dubuque County Master Gardeners. “Some years we have more vegetables and fruit. Some years we have more perennials or landscaping. It’s a really great way to meet people in the community who have a common interest.”

One of the gardens on the tour belongs to Lisa and Gary Wittman, who built their home on Wittman family land.

“My dad always told me ‘Don’t ever try to build there. It’s solid rock,’” Gary said. “Just 6 inches down, you hit solid rock, and it goes down for about 350 feet. We jackhammered for days when we built this house.”

That kind of terra firma would make most people decide a garden wasn’t worth the effort. But not the Wittmans.

Most of the rock featured in the Wittman’s garden are slabs excavated from their property. The only exception is the river rocks used to line the beds and banks of the two garden waterfalls.

The garden also features white pines, hydrangeas, jack pines, mugo pines, crab apple trees, willow trees, a number of perennials and annuals and a variety of textural ornamental grasses.

Gary installed a watering system he built that can be turned on with the flip of a switch. He keeps a raised bed where he is growing tomatoes, beans and wild onions.

“That’s really his thing, not mine,” Lisa said.

She prefers the grand flowers produced by the garden’s limelight hydrangeas and climbing clematis, and enjoys tending to the other trees and grasses in the garden.

“This is the fourth house we’ve built in our married life,” said Lisa, who recently received her Master Gardener certification. “We landscaped them all ourselves. We’ve never hired anyone. We just kept getting better at it.”

A firepit Gary built from stone on the property has gotten a lot of use in the 10 years the Wittmans have lived there.

“I used to be the cross-country and track coach at Senior (High School),” he said. “I’d bring the team out here and we’d choose captains and set team goals, and we’d talk around the campfire. Now we use it for the Fourth of July and just throughout the summer.”

A male American goldfinch, its bright yellow feathers a contrast against the river rocks, flits about one of the garden waterfalls, dipping its head for a drink and flipping its wings into the water.

The serene sound of the waterfall and the entertaining little bird does indeed make one think of spending the entire day surrounded by nature in a garden.

In addition to creating a peaceful space in their backyard, Lisa said one of the reasons she got her certification as a Master Gardener is to help create beautiful community spaces.

“I want to volunteer more at the Arboretum,” she said.

Wagner is happy to hear that.

“We put a lot of volunteer hours into places like Convivium (Urban Farmstead) , the (Dubuque) Arboretum and the River Museum,” she said. “We want to help make the community a more beautiful place.”

A new player in this year’s lineup is Wild Bull Flower Farm. It is the first time a producer has been part of the tour.

“We’ve never done anything like that,” Wagner said. “It will be interesting to see how people like it.”

If it proves popular, the organization might consider adding a similar stop to the tour each year.

“Putting a local grower into the line-up would be nice,” she said. “A CSA or a vineyard or an orchard. Wild Bull is a great place to start.”

On their fourth generation family farm on Schueller Heights Road, sisters Laura Hodge and Dena Voss have transformed a traditional Midwest farm into a stunning flower farm.

While Dale Decker still works the farm the same way his father and grandfather did, his daughters have taken the lead from their grandmother, Calista, who always kept parts of the farm impeccably landscaped. Their mother, Ann, is also an accomplished master gardener.

“We grew up out in Key West,” Hodge said. “Dad was out here every day because of the cows, so we would end up coming out here a lot and just hanging out and doing arts and crafts and running around. Grandma had it all landscaped, and it was like a little homestead when we were young.”

When their grandparents passed away in 2019, Voss, who was living in Iowa City, made the decision with her family to move into her grandparents’ house on the property and begin renovations.

“My dad will farm this land until the day he dies,” she said. “But he wasn’t living on the property, and (as our grandparents got older), it needed some work. I had this vision of doing something with it, I just didn’t know what. But I was like, ‘I have to move here.’”

The sisters hoped to bring that homestead feeling they remembered back to the 158-acre farm, and Hodge got the idea to start with dahlias.

“We thought we would just get it back to where it was (when my grandmother was alive),” she said. “It was just flowers and flowers and flowers. Pretty soon, we were spending a lot of money at Steve’s (Ace Hardware). I said, ‘We could probably start a flower farm,’ and it just hasn’t stopped.”

As far as infrastructure, Hodge and Voss have remodeled the machine shed, added a few new structures and restored a few others, including a new hoop building and the original chicken coop.

Wild Bull Flower Farm has more than an acre of cut flowers, 20 raised vegetable beds, hundreds of peonies and dahlias, fields of lavender and a couple of Mowing for Monarchs pollinator plots with close to 100 species of native plants. In addition, they’ve planted a small vineyard that yields grapes, cherries and a variety of berries, and have restored an orchard on the property that produces apples and pears.

Hodge and Voss usually have a cart filled with flowers for sale during the season at the entrance to the farm. They are selling for the first time this year at the Dubuque Farmers Market. They also create custom bouquets and centerpieces for weddings and other events.

“In all of the conversations about family and the farm (after our grandparents passed away), there was one thing that kept coming up in every conversation,” Hodge said. “We just wanted it to feel how it used to feel.”

Several of the tour stops will host workshops throughout the day, and complimentary garden tool sharpening will also be offered at one of the gardens. Workshop times are staggered so guests can plan their stops and workshop attendance.

“They’re mini workshops, so they’re only about half an hour,” Wagner said. “We try to stagger the times, offer them more than once and keep them short so people can plan their route and move through the gardens.”

The event will also be raffling off a custom painted garden bench courtesy of Painted Sky Designs, with proceeds going to the greenhouse program at the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium.

“(The garden tour) is the biggest fundraiser we have,” Wagner said. “It provides our operating expenses for the year. And it’s an opportunity to provide education to the community. We want to be visible to people and tell them about what we do, and also provide resources to anyone in the community. Outreach is a big thing for us.”