Getting creative with your yard

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By Alma Gaul | Friday, March 23, 2007 11:26 AM CDT | () comments

(Jeff Cook/QUAD-CITY TIMES) Quad-City Botanical Center gardener Dave Searl puts the final touches on a display for this weekend’s Flower and Garden Show at the QCCA Expo Center in Rock Island.

(Jeff Cook/QUAD-CITY TIMES) Signs of spring are everywhere at the QCCA Flower and Garden Show.

They could call it the Tumbled Concrete and Stone Show.

Yes, there are still lots of blooming flowers, but continuing a trend that came on strong last year, outdoor living spaces made of tumbled concrete or stone floors and walls dominate the displays at this year’s QCCA Flower and Garden Show.

The annual show begins today and continues through Sunday at the Expo Center in Rock Island.

These outdoor spaces are often topped with wood or vinyl pergolas, completing the feeling of enclosure, and several are furnished with fire and/or kitchen features such as granite-topped counters and grills.

Water features and plants, including flowers, ornamental grasses and conifers, complete the settings.

“The business has changed dramatically,” Rob Wolfe, of R.J. Wolfe & Sons, Davenport, said Thursday as he plugged an orange electrical cord into his display. “More and more hardscapes are going in.

“It used to be you had a patio, a piece of cement, then the deck. Now you have retaining walls and fire pits. The arbor is the final piece of the puzzle. You have a shelter outside.”

Anthony Eberhart, owner of Everlasting Landscape, DeWitt, Iowa, observed that water features still are popular, but getting “more creative.”

“They’re going low-maintenance without the fish or the plants,” he said while working to finish his display that features a tumbled concrete fireplace flanked by walls with water flowing over them into ponds.

“Now they (water features) are something you can dump bleach in and keep clean,” he said. “And there are lights in the bottom so you have something to look at in the evening.”

A marked variation of the outdoor living spaces trend is the display by Landscape Solutions, Bettendorf and Galesburg, Ill., that consists of a formal, rectangular reflecting pond and a domed, European-style gazebo. The round dome is covered with sheet metal painted to look like copper, and it’s held up by four round white pillars. For the show, five little ducks will paddle around the pool.

“If you come every year, you want to see something new,” Darvy Keppy said of her company’s decision to forgo an outdoor kitchen in their display.

In addition to landscape displays, the show includes performance art by California-based Sandscapes, whose artists are sculpting the storybook character Thumbleina, and dozens of vendor booths selling everything from kitchen cabinet refacing and Toro lawn mowers to variegated geraniums and heirloom vegetable seed.

Alma Gaul can be contacted at (563) 383-2324 or agaul@qctimes.com.

If you go

What: QCCA Flower and Garden Show, featuring about 20 gardens and 200 retail booths

When: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. today; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday

Where: QCCA Expo Center, 2621 4th Ave., Rock Island

How much: $6 at the door; $1 for children 6-15 years old, free for those 5 years and younger

Parking: Free at the show or in the city ramp at 17th Street and 3rd Avenue. Free MetroLink shuttle buses will run between the ramp and the Expo Center during show hours