Plant Haul at the Bloom’N Garden Expo in Franklin Tennessee

Yesterday we attended the Bloom’N Garden Expo at the Williamson County Agricultural Exposition. Center. It was fun to go to an event with so many garden related vendors. I spoke to the people at our local garden club, we visited a booth that was sponsored by a wildlife rescue group, and saw many many plants and other displays at the expo.

They had displays of all sorts of water features. Here is a natural bubbling fountain reminiscent of a natural spring.

I thought this water feature was cool. The water flows into a holding area below the stones and gets pumped up through the vase. I like how the water just trickles down the sides. They had a second one that was blue.

Here’s another fountain that we liked. It has a stronger pump to produce a mini-geyser effect.

Many of the plants at the various vendors were the same or very similar. One of the vendors, Growild in Fairview, specializes in native plant varieties like ‘Flame Azalea’ and many others. I would have loved to have bought the flame azalea but it was a little pricey.

We did make a few smaller purchases to go in our shady corner garden. Of course those plants must wait patiently in the garage until the warm weather is here to stay!

Here are a few of the plants we picked

I’ve always wanted a couple Japanese Painted Ferns. The coloration on the foliage is very unique.

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We found some nice Heucheras (Coral Bells). I’ll put these with our ‘Palace Purple’ Heucheras. The lime coloration should blend well with the darker purple colors of the ‘Palace Purple’.

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Here is a picture of the two hostas we bought along with a nice sedum. You can never have enough sedum right? The hostas are a variety called Hosta sieboldii ‘Ginko Craig’.

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Here they are all together. Everything except the sedum will go with our existing shade corner garden. The sedum will go in our sedum bed that is under construction.

I took this picture for Joy at GardenJoy4Me (Unfortunately her blog is no longer active so I removed the link). She has a gnome named Dave who may need a home like this to make it through next winter! Actually this is a great example of a green roof. It’s covered with sedums and ground cover plants. The purpose of a green roof is to reduce rainwater runoff and reduce harmful chemicals that may come from asphalt shingles from enter our watersheds. It’s also more energy efficient than a traditional roof since the plants absorb the sunlight. It’s a pretty cool idea and like in the picture below you could even put a small rooftop garden on top of your doghouse or even a shed!

I’ll save the pictures of the Red-tailed hawk and the screech owl for tomorrow. Be sure to come back and take a look!