PINEDALE — As you enter Lainey and Craig Wright’s long driveway near Pinedale, one has no idea of the beautiful paradise that lies ahead. The Wrights’ careful planning and hard work definitely earned them the Sage and Snow Garden of Beauty award. Delphiniums, penstemon, yarrow, peonies, salvia, Russian sage, campanula, bee balm, geum, wallflower, painted daisy, lupine, gaillardia, coneflower and Oriental poppies frame the pond and house. The deck is lined with colorful containers of annual flowers including zinnias, spikes, dahlias, lobelia, snapdragon, impatiens, begonias, geraniums, nasturtiums and pinks. 
The Wrights are diverse gardeners. They have a fenced garden bed filled with cabbage, carrots, beets, bush beans and potatoes. An old greenhouse frame makes the perfect onion bed. Rhubarb grows in a couple of places. Thriving plants fill a greenhouse with strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, kale, cucumber, peas Brussels sprouts, rosemary, oregano, parsley, thyme and mint, along with nasturtiums, sunflowers, and marigolds for pollinators. 
Their son, Brian, started many of the plants indoors in winter for transplanting to the greenhouse in spring. Craig Wright found an old military camouflage net that serves as the perfect shade cloth for the greenhouse, and he installed an automated drip irrigation system in it. 

We asked Lainey Wright what her best secret to success was, and she shared that she fertilizes all the plants, including vegetables and flowers, with a very potent fish emulsion every two weeks. 
Throughout our travels searching for special gardens, we find that gardeners have diverse reasons for gardening. For Lainey Wright, it has to be the pure joy of nurturing and watching plants as they grow and flourish. She smiles as she shares all the beauty. 

Garden Club tour

Despite the weekend’s stormy weather, plenty of local gardeners attended the Sage and Snow Garden Club’s annual tour of some of the finest gardens in Sublette County on Saturday, August 10. The tour started at Cassy and Tom Johnston’s home, where participants enjoyed learning about the three hoop houses for growing warm-season crops and the large outdoor in-bed garden overflowing with vegetables. On the second stop of the tour, attendees visited Andrea and Jim Ennis’s gardens and learned about their drip irrigation system. During the third stop at Marianna and Mark Mrak’s home, fellow gardeners admired lean-to-hot houses, corrugated metal raised beds, lick tubs and wooden raised beds filled with foliage. The tour concluded at Dorothy and Wayne Fornstrom’s flower gardens, where attendees were delighted by Dorothy’s unconventional flower pots in old logs, and tubs of vegetables. Among the Fornstrom’s gardens, folks enjoyed a pulled pork dinner, desserts and conversation about gardening in Sublette County’s challenging environment. 

For more information about the Sage and Snow Garden Club, visit https://www.sageandsnowgardenclub.org/.