Gypsy Garden Festival

Gypsy Garden Festival - September 15th & 16th

"....pay heed to the gypsy in your soul."

Join us for a fun filled celebration of abandoning Summer and welcoming the Fall Season. Gypsy life brings images of campfires, music, laughter and being free to travel where the breezes take us.

Put on your favorite gypsy attire and enjoy live music, meeting our featured artists, browse through the treasures we have created especially for this event, and enjoy an afternoon sharing this festival with family and friends.

Gardenology will be sponsoring the Turner House Children's Clinic http://thcckc.org/ during this event. We will be selling raffle tickets for $1.00 each over the course of the festival and at the end will draw the name of a winner of one of our custom potting benches ($279.00 value). All proceeds from this raffle will be donated to Turner House. Please visit the Turner House website see how you might get involved in this very worthwhile effort. This is an excellent opportunity to assist in a grassroots effort to provide health care to children under the age of 20 that might otherwise be left untreated.

Once upon a time, there was a quiet little village in the French countryside, whose people believed in Tranquility. If you lived in this village, you understood what was expected of you. You knew your place in the scheme of things. And if you happened to forget, someone would help remind you. In this village, if you saw something you weren't supposed to see, you learned to look the other way. If perchance your hopes had been disappointed, you learned never to ask for more. So through good times and bad, famine and feast, the villagers held fast to their traditions. Until one Winter day, a sly wind blew in from the North.....

If this sounds familiar, it is because you have seen the movie or read the book - Chocolat.

Who could forget the character of Vianne & Roux?

Vianne Rocher and her young daughter are drifters who are met with skepticism and resistance when they move to a conservative town in rural France and open a chocolate shop during Lent. As Vianne begins to work her magic and help those around her, the townspeople are soon won-over by her exuberance and her delicious chocolates - except for the mayor, who is determined to shut her down. When a group of river drifters (gypsies) visit the town, Vianne teaches the townspeople something about acceptance, and finds love for herself along the way.

"Lastly I wanted to write about magic. Not the popular view, but about the magic of everyday things and the way something quite ordinary can, given the right circumstances, take on extraordinary properties. Vianne's belief in the supernatural seems dangerous, even sinister, to Reynaud (the mayor). And yet it is her very human qualities - her understanding and her kindness to others - which make her what she is. She does nothing which could not be achieved by purely ordinary means. Her magic, working as it does through simple pleasures, is accessible to everyone. If she is a witch, as Reynaud believes, then so is anyone else with similar values. We live in a world which is becoming increasingly complicated around us; we are bombarded with mixed messages and impossible targets from the media; like Reynaud we have learned to demonize pleasure and to be afraid of our feelings. Chocolat was my reaction against that; a plea for tolerance of others but also of ourselves, a reminder that to be fallible is both natural and allowed; that self-indulgence isn't always bad; that testing people to destruction isn't the way to make them better people." - Joanne Harris, author Chocolat.

If you haven't read the book or seen the movie you are in for a treat. Buy some decadent chocolate, pop in the movie and prepare to be swept away with this small French village and it's inhabitants.

Then put the Gardenology Gypsy Garden Festival on your calendar and relive the joy of endulging yourself once again....