Cape Farm and Garden Tour to benefit food pantries June 5
The Cape Farm and Garden Tour 2021 will be held from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 1 to 4 p.m., Saturday, June 5, to raise money to fight local food insecurity by supporting food banks and pantries that serve the local region.
The tour includes three beautiful venues – Lavender Fields at Warrington Manor, a working herb farm with gardens; Mill Pond Garden, a small gem of a public botanic garden on Red Mill Pond; and the famous Shimizu Garden in old town Lewes with charming, sophisticated garden rooms around a 300-year-old house, rarely available to public access.
The tour will follow state COVID-19 safety guidelines, requiring face masks and social distancing, with timed tickets available at millpondgarden.com with a link to ticketing page choices millpondgarden.com/open-days. Tickets are $30 per person.
Staff at each site will check visitors in as they arrive at their scheduled time and be available to answer questions. At each site, visitors may enjoy self-guided tours. Restrooms are not available at the venues. The ticket scheduling allows enough time to thoroughly enjoy each site, including shopping, and to drive to the next site, about 10-20 minutes away, and arrive in good time. Keeping to the schedule as much as possible is important due to crowd-size limits and parking constraints at two of the sites. All three sites are at least partially accessible to wheelchairs with a pusher.
Lavender Fields at Warrington Manor LLC, at 18864 Cool Spring Road, Milton, is a five-acre lavender farm between Harbeson and Milton. It features a beautiful historic manor house dating to the 18th century and surrounded by delightful small gardens, a meadow and an impressive 11-circuit labyrinth encircled by large evergreens, making for a gorgeous contemplative experience.
Other delights include a small garden with delicate heirloom vegetables and flowers between twin silos and an intimate Zen garden with a small gurgling pond. The cottage shop features lavender-themed gifts, and specialty soaps and candles designed and handcrafted at the farm. The garden shed offers spring and summer vegetables and flowers for sale, grown on the farm.
Lavender Fields proprietor Marie Mayor retired from an education career at various county, state and federal agencies to bring her Acadian French heritage and love of farming, herbs and the good life to Delaware, where her success is widely appreciated. She has served as chair of the Southern Delaware Tourism board, among many other leadership roles in the community.
The Shimizu Garden at 431 Kings Highway, Lewes, is a treasure of sophisticated design and an exquisite collection of mostly perennial and woody plants. The handsome 300-year-old house is surrounded by garden rooms with fabulous fountains, sitting areas and several charming old outbuildings. Children of all ages will enjoy the tiny fairy garden. Gardeners will admire the diversity and beauty of cultivars, and the master artistic style pruning of shrubs and trees to bring out their best and give them expressive character, a schooling in taste worth the visit by itself. Even the pavings are amazing in materials and design, and planted in places with a diverse collection of perfect plants for between pavers. The custom wood fencing is a work of art in itself. This garden provides intense interest during all seasons.
This 5-year-old garden is the creation of owners Osamu and Holly Shimizu, both retired professional horticulturists. Holly is managing director emerita of Lewis Ginter Botanic Garden in Richmond, Va., and executive director of the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., among many other leading roles in American and world horticulture. Osamu, a highly esteemed master of gardening arts and design, studied in Japan and Europe, and has designed and installed private and public gardens in the mid-Atlantic.
Mill Pond Garden, the Cape Farm and Garden Tour hosting venue, is on Red Mill Pond at 31401 Melloy Court, Lewes. It is a small, holistic, nonprofit, public botanical garden, a National Wildlife Foundation Certified Wildlife Habitat, a member of the American Public Garden Association, and a USDA Sentinel Garden. The three-quarter-acre site of beautiful garden rooms is situated on Delaware’s largest freshwater pond, with abundant wildlife including nesting resident bald eagles, osprey, great blue and green herons, cormorants, many species of ducks and geese, an otter, a beaver, and numerous other birds, turtles, waterfowl and wildlife.
This is a walking garden designed for beauty, enjoyment, and education, displaying sustainable plants, most beautiful and wildlife beneficial, that thrive in the Cape Region. The garden features fountains, a stream, waterfalls, a Koi pond, a frog pond garden, woodland garden, fire pit, many arbors with ornamental vines, and collections of ephemerals, spirea, camellia, hellebores, rhododendrons, azaleas, roses, hollies, and much more. Visitors might even see a resident flying squirrel peeping out of its box hole. It has a lovely frontage with vistas onto beautiful Red Mill Pond. Every season is floriferous for year-round garden appeal, including abundant flowering in winter, spectacular spring bulb displays, and lush and lively annual and perennial summer displays. It is a garden for the senses and the spirit. Roses will be abundant for this tour date.
Mill Pond Garden was created by Michael Zajic, also founder of the Delaware Botanic Gardens, after a career as horticultural supervisor of two botanic gardens, Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Md., and McCrillis Gardens in Bethesda, Md., for the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Zajic has a long history in public horticulture, including design of some of the prime gardens in the Washington, D.C. area, design of two world-class light shows, a series on HGTV and Victory Garden, CBS Morning News garden presenter, as well as authorship of garden educational tracts and gardening articles for newspapers.
The 2021 Cape Farm and Garden Tour allows access to three of the most beautiful sites in the Cape Region at their peak, and to their knowledgeable creators.
