Gardening for love and glory
Preparing for the Tribune’s Glorious Gardens Contest is a lot like gardening: It never ends.
We might not be sitting in a darkened room year-round, looking at slide after slide after slide after . . . but, throughout the fall and winter, we, like you gardeners, are thinking about improvements we can make for the next growing season.
First we attack the rules. Every year we tweak them, trying to find the formula that will entice the most gardeners to enter. This year, for Glorious Gardens 2002, our 6th annual competition, we have decided to pick the best gardens from nine areas of the metropolitan region and one from elsewhere in the Midwest. We also will pick a Best Overall Garden.
This will simplify the process for those entering and ensure we show off gardens throughout the Chicago area.
So what next?
For you, get outside. Get dirty. Dig, divide. Read the contest rules. Take pictures. Enjoy.
For us, we will brace ourselves for the entries. With hundreds of entries, there are thousands of slides. But we will arrange them all in carousels, one by one, right side up, front side forward–we hope. (It helps enormously if “tops” and “fronts” are marked.)
Entrants are told to label each slide with their name and address. Some forget–and, sadly, every year gnomes separate some unlabeled slides from their cover sheets and then they can’t be considered.
We also eliminate entries that violate rules.
Then, back in the darkened room, we will examine each slide, looking for imagination, design sense and a command of plant choices. We will winnow the hundreds of entries down to a manageable number of finalists, then head for a last round of judging.
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That’s when there will be a lot of clicking back and forth through slides. Judges will make notes. They’ll point out design choices that are particularly good–or particularly unfortunate.
Finally, the moment will arrive. Winners will be chosen for each area. Then, the weary judges will rouse themselves to choose the overall winner, the most glorious of gardens.
There are no specific criteria. Judges simply vote for the best garden they have seen all day. This is always the most spirited discussion during the process. Yet at the end of the day, there is always a garden that emerges as the one.
Here’s hoping it’s yours. Heck, if it’s not, we hope you have as much fun out in your garden this year as we do looking at it.
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For contest rules and photography tips, see Page 8.