An evening for garden visits...

Once high summer rolls around there are a few Monday evening open gardens through the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon. I love taking advantage of these later visiting hours, after all a warm summer evening is my favorite time to relax in my garden, it's nice to see what other people's gardens are like in that "magical hour." Of course on the downside the lighting in photographs can be funky, especially on a tree lined street like the one this home is on...

The side yard was a little sunnier. Natually I wanted to kick back in one of those chairs and hope someone would bring me a cocktail.

Such happy healthy plants!

I'm no good with the artful empty pot thing. I'll always end up sticking a plant in there!

I assume this is a blooming Veratrum nigrum...

Mine hasn't bloomed yet, it was nice to get a preview.

A cleverly hidden work area is behind that art glass...

This seating area (starting with that container above) is in what must have been a driveway in it's former life. You'd never know it now.

This water feature was very stylish in "real-life" I'm afraid my photo isn't doing it justice.

Orange, everyone loves orange (or so it seems)...

I should have asked someone to stand next to that astelia, it was the largest one I've ever seen. No way that has just been in the ground a couple of years so it must have lived through the the PKW's (phormium (and astelia) killing winters). I should have asked the garden/home owner but there was another visitor bending her ear.

Any guesses on the tree? An Albizia julibrissin and there wasn't a speck of bloom litter underneath (that I saw)...

So in this shot I'm leaving the garden we just visited and heading next door. These were side-by-side open gardens, how wonderful to have a neighbor who takes gardening as seriously as you do!

In front of the second garden, looking backwards down the path towards the first...

Huge podophyllum, I really need to move mine.

Yes it was as soft as it looks. Anyone know what it is?

Those translucent panels did an excelletn job of obscuring the "other" neighbors front yard as I swung around the house on the path towards the back garden.

Looks like the leaves on her Rhododendron sinogrande suffered a little scorching like mine did. It's tough on plants to go from cloudy, rainy and 70 degrees to sunny and 97 in just a couple of days time!

The light was making it hard to photograph (plus there were several people in the garden) but there are small bits of colored glass mixed in with the gravel here...

I rarely see the green Castor Bean, everyone seems to prefer the purple leafed plants.

I imagine youthful visitors to this garden enjoy playing with this mosaic.

That's a Schefflera delavayi in the middle, recently planted in the ground but having survived a brutal winter or two in a container.

This is the magnificent "gate" between the two back yards (the previous one with the huge astelia and the Albizia julibrissin and this one). I like how friendly, yet also private, it is.

Hey what's that in the container? Yep a Pseudopanax x 'Sabre'...

Nice!

This covered seating area came off the back of the house...

And there was a second seating area off another part of the house. This character was hanging out on an end table.

Back out front ready to leave I snapped a shot of the seating area on top of the garage. No space wasted!

En-route home I stopped at one other garden and was happy to see this Twisty Baby Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia 'Lace Lady'). It's a favorite of mine ever since I first spotted it at the Seattle Garden Bloggers Fling in 2011.