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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEVENTH ANNUAL TRADE SECRETS GEARING-UP FOR MAY GARDEN SALE AND GARDEN TOURS

CHARITY EVENT FOUNDED BY DESIGNER, BUNNY WILLIAMS, OFFERS GARDEN LOVERS THE CHANCE TO INDULGE THEIR NOT-SO-SECRET PASSIONS.

February 2007, Sharon, CT – For the past six years Trade Secrets has brought garden-lovers from around the world to the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut. Thanks to the incredible support from founder and renowned designer Bunny Williams Trade Secrets is heading into its seventh year bigger and better then ever.

Trade Secrets, the rare plant and garden-antiques show held yearly in Sharon, Connecticut, has become one of the country’s most talked about gardening events. This year’s event is scheduled for Saturday, May 19 at LionRock Farm from 10 am to 3 pm. As has become custom, for those early-birds there is early admittance with continental breakfast for an additional fee. Nearly 60 vendors and garden antiques dealers come from around the northeast region with their truckloads of wares — those kind of unique treasures that you might search a lifetime for, and they descend upon LionRock to offer garden lovers a day of pure treasure hunting! Shoppers can find rare plant specimens from specialized growers and some of the nation’s best known small nurseries, as well as furniture, antiques, cloches and garden statuary from the choicest purveyors of garden antiques, wrought-iron fencing, textiles from select antiques dealers, and so much more.

On Sunday, May 20, visitors can revel in a day of garden tours. At their leisure they can explore Bunny Williams’ fifteen-acre estate that includes a sunken garden, a year-round conservatory filled with tender plants, a meandering woodland garden trail, and an aviary with unusual chickens and fantail doves. They can indulge their green-thumb at noted garden author Carolyne Roehm’s Weatherstone. The home, which dates from 1765, is surrounded by formal gardens of boxwoods and white roses, an apple orchard with thousands of naturalizing daffodils, water canals, and cascading falls. As if that’s not enough, the Hyland/Wente garden in Millerton, New York, expounds “horticulture with a conscience.” This is a place where eco-friendly meets aesthetically pleasing. This picturesque landscape is both whimsical and futuristic and includes an ingeniously energy-efficient/owner-designed home that features water flowing off the roof into cisterns for irrigation, a pool, urns, obelisks, a water rill and so much more. All three gardens are in close proximity and they offer a great opportunity for visitors to find ideas for their own gardens.

Admission for Trade Secrets garden sale on Saturday, May 19, is $35 from 10 am to 3 pm, and for those wishing to come at 8 am and have continental breakfast the fee is $100. The fee for the garden tours on Sunday, May 20, is $50 in advance and $60 on the day of the tours. For more information or to purchase advance tickets please call 860/364-1080 or visit www.tradesecretsct.com.

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Women’s Support Services (WSS): Annually for the past seven years, the funds from Trade Secrets have gone directly to support the Women’s Support Services, a regional non-profit organization celebrating its 25th year in the northwest corner of Connecticut, and offering free and confidential services to victims of domestic violence. WSS offers a 24-hour Hotline, financial grants to clients for emergency needs, and sponsors violence prevention programs in the community.

TRADE SECRETS 2007 GARDEN TOURS

Bunny Williams
Point of Rocks Road
Falls Village, Connecticut

Interior designer and garden book author Bunny Williams’ intensively planted fifteen-acre estate has a sunken garden with twin perennial borders surrounding a fishpond, parterre garden, year-round conservatory filled with tender plants, large vegetable garden with flowers and herbs, and woodland garden with meandering paths and a pond with a waterfall. There are also a working greenhouse and an aviary with unusual chickens and fantail doves. Recent additions include an apple orchard with mature trees, a rustic Greek Revival pool house folly, and a swimming pool with eighteenth-century French coping.

Jack Hyland & Larry Wente
Hyland/Wente Garden
Millerton, New York

Horticulture with a conscience, Jack Hyland and Larry Wente’s garden is where eco-friendly meets aesthetically pleasing. This forty-one-acre futuristic landscape is both outward-looking and inwardly conscientious. A formal garden immediately surrounding the ingenious energy-efficient/owner-designed house is generously infused with whimsy and personality as well as an allée of solar panels strutting side-by-side with rows of nepeta and ornamental grasses, producing an excess of electricity fed back into the power company. Meanwhile, water flowing off the roof of the house is collected into cisterns to save for irrigation, stone walls incorporate radiant heat, and hot air flows up a tower in summer to preclude the need for air conditioning. Cleverly, patio plants are watered via tubes running from the front door canopy.

Designed on a grid calibrated to reduce building waste, the garden features a water rill, a pool, arborvitae exclamation points and 22nd Century-istic reflecting orbs balanced on tall tuteurs. Throughout, obelisks and urns furnish emphasis. Color-themed beds bounce hues back and forth between ornamental grasses and perennials, plants range from natives to exotics, with alliums, coreopsis and tradescantia making bold statements in time for our May visit. Everything in the garden relates to the flow of nature farther afield. And everywhere, there are vistas surveying the meadows and spectacular views that this mountaintop property commands.

Carolyne Roehm’s
Weatherstone

Carolyne Roehm’s famed Weatherstone, built in 1765, is the base for her many books and listed in the Historic Registry. Surrounding the house, formal gardens are a confection of boxwoods, lindens, a hornbeam all’e, and a voluptuous cutting garden outlined by red brick paths and accented by tuteurs. A pool is buffeted by hundreds of white roses — both free-form and planted in the ground, as well as trained into standard form and contained in blue and white ornamental Chinese pots. Further delights lie farther afield, where an orchard under-planted with an ocean of naturalized daffodils resides, and an avant-garde series of water canals and cascading falls trip the landscape and direct the flow. This is a magical place, punctuated by a seriously productive potager but also a delicious secreted rose garden hidden within hemlocks.

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