Modestans open their elaborate yards, homes for Spring Garden Tour

Hidden garden treasures will be revealed during this year’s Spring Garden Tour, with unique and eclectic homes on display to benefit the Modesto Garden Club.

Seven landscapes will make up the tour, with gardens often influenced by the style of their homes, including an English cottage, a Cape Cod and even a storybook cottage.

“This is going to be one of our better years, I really believe that,” said tour chairwoman Gerry Yockey, who has helmed the annual event for five years. Patrons will tour front yards, backyards and in some cases even home interiors.

Four of the houses are in the Graceada Park area and were built between 1919 and 1939. The others feature more modern gardens and are located to the north and east of that neighborhood; all are within a 10- to 15-minute drive of one another.

Some of the highlights for ticket holders will be outdoor kitchens, a bocce ball court, tropical plantings, shade gardens, man caves, vegetable and fruit gardens and more.

Yockey said it wasn’t hard to find houses for this year’s tour – a notable difference from past years when garden club members have had to knock on doors asking homeowners to participate. This year, in many cases, the homeowners were the ones seeking out the garden club.

“The homes are really beautiful,” she said. “I think (the homeowners) have gone on the tour (in the past) and said to themselves, ‘You know something, my place could be on the Spring Garden Tour because it’s beautiful and it has all the different elements they’re looking for,’ ” Yockey said of those who contacted the club.

“I went out and saw their homes and I’m telling you, I was so pleasantly surprised, I could have kissed them,” she said.

All of the homeowners are hands-on when it comes to their gardens, according to Yockey, from designing to planting to ongoing maintenance.

The English cottage features a mix of textures, colors and variety with garden art and fruit and vegetable plantings. The storybook house includes plants with lower water use and results of experimentation as the homeowners searched for the perfect plants.

The Cape Cod offers a front yard fruit garden with a patio and backyard plantings that include oak leaf hydrangeas, a Podocarpus tree and creative privet bush pruning. A neoclassical home features espaliered fig, pear and apple trees, plus limestone accents that complement the house’s architecture.

The more modern homes feature fire pits, man caves, outdoor kitchens, manufactured rocks for seating, a putting green and that aforementioned bocce ball court.

Also part of the tour is the Modesto Garden Club office at 622 14th St. in downtown, a remodeled bungalow with several demonstration gardens. The club, founded in 1924, currently boasts 580 members.

The club also will serve refreshments at one house on the tour, on Magnolia Avenue.

The annual garden tour helps the club fund six $1,500 countywide horticultural scholarships each year. Money raised also goes toward plants and maintenance of the club’s civic beautification and education projects, including the downtown flower clock, 115 large downtown flower pots, the Virginia Corridor Memorial Rose Garden, the Senior Citizen Center on Bodem Street, several school gardens and therapeutic gardens at assisted living facilities.

Tickets, $20 general, $10 under age 10 are available at local nurseries in Modesto, Riverbank, Escalon, Ripon, Turlock and Newman. See modestogardenclub.org for ticket locations or online purchases. Day-of tickets also will be available at those locations.

This story was originally published April 14, 2017 at 3:12 PM with the headline "Modestans open their elaborate yards, homes for Spring Garden Tour."