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Downtown

GreenFest will offer workshops on gardens

From rain barrels to birdhouses, orchids to small-scale gardens; if it's about gardens, GreenFest can help.

By AMY SCHERZER
Published April 1, 2005

Want the dirt on proper pruning, raising orchids and composting kitchen scraps? Then you'll dig GreenFest, the eighth annual gardening festival this weekend at the University of Tampa.

Hosted by Friends of Plant Park, the event offers amateur gardeners tips from green-thumbed pros. Shoppers can stroll the park to buy flowers, herbs, tools and accessories.

Master gardeners will give workshops ranging from how to build a rain barrel to raising orchids and crafting birdhouses. Visitors can bring tools - from kitchen shears to hedge clippers - to be sharpened.

More than 3,000 people are expected to attend, said GreenFest co-chairman Sherry Leffers. Workshops are free except for Martha Hall's demonstration on how to press flowers on note cards and stationery at 3 p.m. Saturday.

Orchid expert Al Latina will offer an hourlong workshop on the care and repotting of orchids at 1:30 p.m. Sunday. Buy an orchid that morning or bring your own for personalized instruction.

House & Garden magazine's garden editor, Charlotte Frieze, highlights Saturday's schedule with a 1 p.m. lecture on downsizing a garden from yard to porch or patio.

"How do you make a small area elegant?" Leffers asked. "How do you go from a big back yard to planting on a condominium porch or a city townhouse?"

A former landscape architect, Frieze wrote a series of books on zone gardening and planting for specific climates titled A Surefire Guide to Gardening in Zones 3, 4, and 5; Zones 5, 6 and 7; and Zones 8, 9 and 10. Tampa is a Zone 9.

Frieze, who lives in New York, teaches landscape architecture at the New York School of Interior Design. She has designed numerous gardens and judged many horticultural events.

At GreenFest, Frieze will show slides of gardens that she designed. Her "test' garden overlooks a beach at the home she and her photographer husband, Peter Jones, have rented for 20 years near Newport, R.I.

"I grow lettuce, herbs, vegetables and flowers for Peter to photograph," she said. "I love to entertain in the garden. The landlord gives me free rein."

She will also speak at a $75-per-person patrons' party tonight at the South Tampa home of Rosemary Henderson.

GreenFest is expected to raise more than $20,000 to help with restorations of historic Plant Park, Leffers said. The multiphased project includes adding signs for self-guided tours of the botanical park, restoring the park's Palm Walk and repositioning the Civil War cannons for a more historically accurate display.

Amy Scherzer can be reached at 226-3332 or scherzer@sptimes.com

GreenFest 2005 runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at Henry B. Plant Park at the University of Tampa. The event features workshops by gardening experts and 80 vendors selling plants, herbs, flowers, garden tools and accessories. Admission is free. Call 837-0131 or go to www.friendsofplantpark.org for a schedule of events.

[Last modified March 31, 2005, 08:54:10]