The West Chicago Garden Club

The Historical Society is busy readying the Museum House for the 2017 touring season.  The featured display this year is Cookie Jars.  Do you have any old cookie jar that you would like to add to the display?  Contact Tom. He can get that arranged and the HS would appreciate it.  Can you imagine how much work it is to get all the precious doodads that the house contains dusted, and shelves and floors cleaned, and cobwebs swept each Spring?  Guess that embodies the term “spring cleaning”! The Kruse Museum House opens for tours in May…every Saturday 11 am to 3 pm.  Here is a bit of information from the Kruse House web site.  Note that the house is 100 years old this year!

“The Kruse House is a 1917 four-square home depicting the Fred Kruse family life style. Fred was a Collector for the Chicago and North Western Railroad. The house is furnished with period furnishings and collections including china, quilts, jewelry, toys, cut glass, and Chicago and North Western railroad history. You are invited to tour the period gardens which have been restored and are being maintained by the West Chicago Garden Club.”

Kruse House Gardens:

It’s Spring!  We better hurry!  And Scurry!  There’s so much to do!

Well, the Kruse House Gardeners are seasoned hands and it will take more than the beginning of a new year in the garden to rile us.  This isn’t our first rodeo and we know it will all get done in good time.  However, don’t interpret that to mean we don’t need every minute of help we can get.  Many hands = light(er) work.  And yes, we do have a sense of urgency about our Spring work.  It’s just that we’re getting too old to be too crazy!  Come work in the garden with us on Wednesday mornings officially starting in May.  It’s a fabulous way to get to know each other! 

We are looking forward to delightful garden displays like these from previous years.      -Billie 

From a distance the Kruse House Garden looks rather bleak.  If you walk about and look closely you will still see a bit of color and interesting textures.

All the leaves have fallen from the trilobum viburnum, but brillant red berries remain. A new infestation, the Viburnum  Leaf Beetle (VLB) has hit our area.  Might those little bugs show up at the Kruse Garden?  Cornell University has a top of the line search engine. Go to gardening.cornell.edu/homegardening,  type in viburnum and you will see the link to the VLB and also a terrific article ”Which viburnum is it?” There are more than 150 varieties of viburnum world wide.

The Northern White Cedar has pretty varigated green foliage and clusters of cones.  Seeds are dispersed from the tiny cones in September.  These trees are typical of limestone soils.

We cut back all of the Annabelle hydrangeas in the fall. The Snow Storm hydrangea was left standing and some of its flowers weathered the snow and wind. Although the color has faded it’s still lovely.  -Kerry

The Kruse House Garden in January: Vestiges of the Season Past, Thoughts of the Season to Come

Looking at the Kruse House garden in mid-winter is like looking upon the ruins of an ancient civilization.  Pressed against the recent memory of June’s lushness, the bareness of January startles and shocks. Gone are the myriad zinnias, moonflowers, and other annuals that once populated the vistas, flattened into unrecognizable detritus by the successive snows. Stalks of yarrow and hydrangeas protrude here and there, like the columns of ancient temples, shorn of color, but their seared blooms still possessing the power to evoke the glory of what was. Only the dusty millers in front yard, eerily decked yet in their summery silver-gray, like figures on an ancient frieze, vibrantly dance a ghostly dance of the season past.

But January also offers a time to reflect and plan. Uncluttered, the garden’s essence is visible as never before, making what yet can be done perhaps never so apparent.  Unburdened by daily gardening chores, the vision of what should be and the resolve to realize it come easily–“yes, those roses will definitely go, this trellis will be moved!”

And so Kruse in January, like the Roman god for whom the month is named, looks back to what was, and forward to what will be. – Keith