12 August 2009

Munchkinland Garden on the Way to Cape Cod

The Boston Globe recently profiled Erwin Ehrenreich, who co-owns the Rose Man Nursery & Emporium in Carver and Barnstable, Massachusetts. One feature of that enterprise is a garden designed on an Oz theme, based on the 1939 MGM movie:

he’s envisioning crowds of visitors walking through his strange mingling of Munchkinland and mulch, where the lollipop swirl of bricks is punctuated by flower stakes topped with statues of the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow, where there are rose bushes named the Judy Garland floribunda, the Yellow Brick Road shrub, and the Over the Rainbow miniature, and, where, of course, there’s Toto, too, in the form of a small statue in the center with a little white marker that reads, “Toto - Cairn Terrier.”
I also found an article in the local Carver Reporter:
Erwin and Cindy have transformed this space into a trip through Oz. Visitors can follow a winding yellow brick road through dozens of rose bushes in shades of yellow that seem too brilliant to be real. Others are soft pastel yellow; all are stunning. To carry the Oz theme, the Ehrenreichs have placed a scarecrow, a witch and even “Toto” in this garden.
Ehrenreich came by the vocation (or should that be "field"?) of gardening in a particularly Baumian way: he lost some fingers in a saw accident. About a dozen Baum characters in all sorts of books have lost a limb or more. 

L. Frank Baum himself won some awards for growing roses while he lived in Hollywood in the last decade of his life, and would probably have been tickled pink to visit the Ehrenreichs' garden.

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