One of the gardens you'll visit on the Minneapolis Fling this July is located on Summit Avenue, a street F. Scott Fitzgerald once described as the Twin Cities' "avenue of dreams." This is a historic neighborhood of impressive homes, and the garden owner, Marge Hols, lives just down the block from the Minnesota Governor's Residence.
Marge was, for about 10 years, the gardening columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and she also writes for Northern Gardener. Her garden has a relaxed, charming style, but she incorporates formal elements too.
Beautiful color combinations abound in her summer garden.
Stay tuned for more sneak peeks in coming weeks, and remember, registration for the Minneapolis Fling opens on Monday, February 15!
Text and photos courtesy of Mary Schier, Minneapolis Fling planning committee member
Garden bloggers, it's the announcement you've been waiting for! On February 15th, registration will open for the 2016 Garden Bloggers Fling
in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The registration fee will be $258 (U.S. dollars). While we are still hammering out the details,
Fling registration will cover bus transportation to and from the
gardens, garden admission fees, lunches, and an official Fling dinner. As always, the Fling is a
not-for-profit event organized by volunteers.
When is the Minneapolis Fling? The Fling will take place July
14-17, 2016. We'll kick off with a welcome event
Thursday evening, July 14th, and end Sunday evening, July 17th.
How to register? Registration will be available on 2/15 through a link posted on this website and on our Facebook page. If you're on our email list, you'll receive an email notification as well (if not, fill out the form below to subscribe to our mailing list!). Payment will be accepted through PayPal only.
Don't yet have a PayPal
account? Why not open one today? It's free and makes things easier for our organizers.
Registration is limited. While we wish we could accommodate every garden blogger who'd like to attend, there's only so much room in the gardens and on the
buses – literally – and only so many people our volunteer organizers
can juggle. We'll have approximately 80 spots, including organizers, and we encourage you to sign up (and make your payment) ASAP in order to hold your spot.
Only active garden bloggers may attend the Fling. Please visit this link outlining how to qualify
for this limited-registration event.
Where will we stay? Look for our hotel announcement very soon! We'll have a group rate available for registered attendees, and you'll be responsible for making your own reservations. Feel free to start a roommate thread on our Facebook page if you'd like to share a room in order to reduce expenses.
We look forward to showing you the best gardens in Minneapolis! Come Fling with us!
--Amy Andrychowicz, Get Busy Gardening, Lead planner for the Minneapolis Fling
Update: As announced earlier today, general registration for the Minneapolis
Fling will open on Feb. 15. Yesterday, a few people received an
invitation for advance registration, and there's been some confusion
about that, which I'd like to clear up.
Advance registration is
offered to the organizers of past Flings and to current advisory
committee members as a thank-you for their service. This is a small
group, and it's a small perk for the many volunteer hours they've
dedicated to the Fling. We should have
made it clear, to those who received the email, why they were offered
the opportunity for early registration, and it was not our intention for
anyone to feel slighted for not receiving that invitation. Be assured
that plenty of spots will be available when general registration opens,
and Amy's
Minneapolis team looks forward to getting you signed up. Please keep in
mind that space is limited, though, and we encourage you to register as
soon as you can when it opens. Stay tuned for more reminders as we get
closer to the 15th!
We now have an official Garden Blogger's Fling logo...
The annual Fling city logos are a great way to show your support for specific Flings (like the upcoming Minneapolis fling logo over in the right hand sidebar) - but now thanks to the creativity and design talent of Scott Weber we've got a logo for the Fling in general (isn't it fabulous!?). You should be able to save the image above and add it to your blog, just like you have other Fling logos. Thanks Scott!
After I posted the badge for the Minneapolis Fling, someone asked me what the spoon and cherry meant. That's an excellent question, so I thought I'd answer it with a blog post (because, I'm a blogger... and that's what bloggers do, right?). Here's a real life photo of the spoon and cherry...
The Spoon and Cherry
The spoon and cherry is a famous (or, maybe not-so-famous) sculpture at the Walk Art Center downtown Minneapolis. You can read more about the artist and the history of the sculpture here... Minneapolis spoon and cherry sculpture
The sculpture is one of the main focal points of the sculpture garden at the Walker Art Center. The sculpture garden at the Walker is one of the potential places on our list for the Fling - but we're not sure yet if we'll be able to fit it into our busy schedule. We will definitely let you know! But if we aren't able to visit the Walker sculpture garden during the Minneapolis Fling, I highly recommend you visit on your own while you're here. It's not too far from where we'll be staying.
Just wanted to let everyone know that the blog badge for the 2016 Minneapolis Fling is ready!! If you're planning on attending the Minneapolis Fling, or if you simply want to show your support for the Fling, please add the badge to your website. Here's the badge, we hope you like it...
You can add this badge to your site by right clicking on the badge image on our sidebar and selecting "Save Image As..."to save it to your computer. Then you can upload the image to your blog. Or you can choose "Copy Image" and paste it into a post or sidebar widget of your blog rather than uploading the image to your site.
Don't forget to make that image a link too, so that people can easily find the information about the Minneapolis Fling when they click on your image. You can use this url when creating your link...
Or, if you prefer, you can copy the code below and paste it into the code editor of your blog...
<a href="http://gardenbloggersfling.blogspot.com/p/2016.html" target="_blank">
<img width="196" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFZj93WEri59A7TdC-o9OpSrQN1cB6IIhVKvL-exTOczH_A1g6HAA-5z0ktltkEj2RWK0s6mL6CZs1cCXAaLUhGxLk-Q9TWsyzkHjyxyC8t284o16G2MNd7SzgdmbMC8J3GPugj-llLwQ/s196/badge.jpg" id="Image46_img" alt="Fling with us in Minneapolis July 14-17, 2016" style="visibility: visible;"></a>
