Families take pride in gardens on this year’s tour
Brenda and Mark Cantrell spend hours every week in their yard caring for their English-style garden and tending to the Texas native perennials that line the green path winding around their Eldorado home.
“We both grew up in the country, so we’ve always been around gardens,” Mrs. Cantrell said. “I just love the whole process. I love designing and picking the color schemes.”
The Cantrell’s garden is one of seven that will be featured in the McKinney Garden Club’s annual fundraiser, the McKinney Home and Garden tour. Last year, the tour raised enough funds to donate $4,000 to help landscape the McKinney Performing Arts Center, $500 to benefit Chestnut Square’s schoolhouse landscape project and $500 for the McKinney SPCA’s landscape project.
Cantrell and the six other families on the tour will be given a sneak peak at each other’s homes the friday before the tour.
“I’m looking forward to seeing the different gardens around McKinney,” Mrs. Cantrell said. “It’s a good way for people to support the McKinney Garden Club.”
In addition to peeking behind their neighbor’s gates, those participating the tour also will view the inside of the different homes on the tour. Mrs. Cantrell intends to showcase her collection of antique, quirky roosters.
“I need a henhouse is what my husband says,” she said. But the unusual décor does match her home’s French country architecture, as does her vegetable garden, with its tomatoes, basil, hot peppers, cucumbers and cilantro.
Linda Richardson’s home and garden are stylistically much different from the Cantrell’s. The stone façade on her home complements her newly installed 19th-century Italian wooden doors. After moving to the home in July 2000, Richardson salvaged a stone waterfall in the front yard and redesigned the garden around an addition her husband, Chuck Richardson, built.
“It’s a complement,” to be asked to be a part of the tour, Mrs. Richardson said, “but it’s also a big responsibility. It’s a big job maintaining and planting. The heat really takes its toll on it.”
Upon moving in, the Richardsons used plants to create more privacy around their yard, added more colorful blooms and had a stone fireplace custom built to enhance their stone deck.
Their home has been featured in publications, including Plano Profile and Collin Quest.
“It’s good exercise, and there’s a serenity about being out in the yard,” Mrs. Richardson said. “It’s like any other hobby. I do it because it’s peaceful. I tell people it’s my Zen.”
G.R. and Carrie Morris are showcasing two homes side by side on their property. The garden in one of their yards is designed to replicate a tropical oasis, with a vanishing edge pool. The other is made to look like a mountain retreat, with a hard rock garden overlooking a stream.
“We are glad to participate in something like this that goes to a good cause,” Mr. Morris said. “The funds go to beautifying the City of McKinney, so we’re happy to help.”
Other homes to be featured in the tour will include the Burnett’s cottage-style home near Finch Park, decorated in Country Shabby Chic; Sonya and Peter Graf’s Eldorado home, which features a backyard living retreat with a large pond, an outdoor rock fireplace, a vegetable garden and a shade garden; Rob and Linda Duncan’s whimsical gardens surrounding their 1920s house in McKinney’s historic district, with a bridge crossing a pond and a greenhouse; and Rodric and Diane Carr’s outdoor kitchen and bar within their lush tropical paradise, which extends into a nearby creek.
www.coppellgazette.com
