Project GREEN garden tour highlights Lucas Farms neighborhood

Every winter, when she starts getting anxious for spring, Iowa City resident Linda Lockridge fends off her cabin fever by dreaming of her garden.

Surrounded by gardening books, Lockridge, a night clerk at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, spends cold days sketching and planning what she will plant in the spring.

'The later into February it gets, the fever gets worse and worse,” she said. 'But it helps to plan and think, what will I do to make my garden fun.”

Those planning sessions have paid off. A wide bed next to the street in her front yard boasts a riot of roses, several kinds of lilies, variegated irises, spiky allium globes, salvia, stone crop, asters, black-eyed Susans, candytuft, anemones topped with wispy white seeds and more.

'I like everything,” she said with a laugh.

Her garden and seven others in Iowa City's Lucas Farms neighborhood will be featured on Project GREEN's 2017 garden tour. Project GREEN - which stands for Grow to Reach Environmental Excellence Now - launched in 1968 as an all-volunteer nonprofit dedicated to beautifying public and private land through gardening and landscaping.

The nonprofit is focusing on bees and pollinator-friendly gardening this year, said co-president Cindy Parsons, and a bee expert will be present on the tour, along with informational handouts and seed packets of pollinator-friendly plants.

'We've always been about beautification and making our community a better, greener, more pleasant place to live,” Parsons said. 'If we lose our pollinators, we're going to lose a lot. It's just kind of scary to think about.”

On a sunny June morning, Lockridge's garden buzzed with bumblebees feeding on the small purple bell-shaped flowers of penstemons and other blooming plants - she rarely uses chemicals that could harm bees.

'The honey bees are having a rough time of it,” she said.

In garden beds next to her house, sedum and hen-and-chicks are tucked among hydrangeas and rose varieties with names like carefree beauty, golden unicorn and easy elegance. Continuing into the backyard, abundant shade provides a perfect environment for hostas and coral bells and coleus, scattered with bursts of bright colors from bleeding hearts, dianthus and indigenous columbines. A clothesline pole is pressed into service as a home for a climbing, fragrant chocolate vine, and in one corner yard, a bed of low-growing hostas is offset by an old wooden ladder festooned with hanging baskets filled with bright blooms.

Lockridge aims for a variety of textures, colors and heights in her garden. That said, she doesn't think there is any one right way to design a garden. When she bought the house in 1993, she planted 500 tulip bulbs the first year, which provided an explosion of spring color. Now, she aims for a mix of flowers so something is always blooming, from May until autumn.

Over time, she has honed her gardening craft from trial and error, voracious reading and consultations with friends and the expert gardeners at Project GREEN.

'What I like about gardening is, you're never bored. I'm always learning something,” she said. 'And I like getting my hands in the dirt. If you've got a lot of stress in your life, it's a good stress reliever.”

The Project GREEN tour coincides with the Lucas Farms Neighborhood Association's History Day festival, which includes a Tour de Farms bike ride from 1 to 4 p.m., beginning at Faith United Church of Christ, 1609 Deforest Ave., pony rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the corner of Highland Avenue and Keokuk Street and an art market with activities for children from 1 to 5 p.m. on Yewell Street.

Along with Lockridge's garden at 1507 Yewell St., gardens on the Project GREEN tour include Plum Grove Historic Home and Gardens, 1030 Carroll St., 1401 Keokuk St., 1425 Ridge St., 1411 Yewell St., 1203 Friendly Ave., 1133 Kirkwood Court, and 1402 Spruce St.

Project GREEN volunteers will be at each location, with street parking available at each house as well as at Mark Twain Elementary School, 1355 Deforest Ave., Faith United Church of Christ, Plum Grove and the Iowa City Marketplace, 1660 Sycamore St. Participants can start at any garden; tickets will be available to purchase at each house. The event will happen rain or shine.

If you go:

What: Project GREEN Lucas Farms neighborhood garden tour

When: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. June 25

Cost: $5 adults; under age 10 free

More information: projectgreen.org/gardentour.htm

l Comments: (319) 398-8434; alison.gowans@thegazette.com