Dispatch garden contest winners reflect passion for projects
Kristy Gallo’s “prairie paradise” garden was beautiful enough to win Best-of-show in this year’s Dispatch Backyard Garden Awards.
But the Gahanna woman has no plans to repeat. Creating the garden last year helped inspire Gallo to take her love of nature to a bigger stage. She and her wife, Ali Gallo, are moving to Pennsylvania to pursue gardening on at least 10 acres.
“Like a lot of people in the past year or so, what’s really come center stage is what’s important,” Gallo said. “For us, that’s connecting with nature, and giving back to it . ... Being in the midst of creating this garden in the long run really did cement that priority, and an awareness of how much joy this brings me.”
Other entries in the fourth annual Dispatch garden contest may not have been as life-changing, but all demonstrated a deep love and commitment to the outdoors.
“It’s obvious how much the garden means to them.
Whether it’s in a container or a vegetable garden, or a natural landscape, the gardeners really have their heart and soul in it,” said Carol Mcglone, a Franklin County master gardener who oversaw the judging of the show with fellow master gardeners Susan Benedetti and Rita Brown.
This year’s contest drew 252 entries in six categories: community, container, landscape, natives, perennials and vegetable. Winners were announced in all categories, along with Best-of-show and People’s Choice, on Sept. 11 at the Fall Dispatch Home & Garden Show at the Ohio Expo Center.
Oakland Nurseries sponsors the contest with the help of Agpro and master gardener volunteers.
“All the gardens were very beautiful, very detailed,” said Arica Leonard, event operations manager for the Columbus Dispatch/usa Today Network Ventures. “You could tell people put so much time and effort into them.”
As a biology major in college, Gallo has long had an interest in nature. But she didn’t start her award-winning garden until after she moved into her Gahanna
home in 2015. Starting with an organic garden in in 2016, Gallo added a 40-by-10-foot prairie garden the following year.
Then she started planning big. In late 2019, she mapped out what she calls her “prairie paradise” on a roughly 50by-75-foot old asphalt basketball court.
In March 2020, she removed the court, added a pond and got to work creating a native Ohio ecosystem, with about 25 species of native prairie grasses, flowers and sedge, along with native elderberry, silky dogwood, spice bush, red osier dogwood and downy service
berry.
Tucked into the flora are habitats for bees, butterflies, frogs, birds and bats.
“I’m not really a good friend to monoculture — green-turf plants that strip away things from the environment,” she said. “I wanted something that adds natural shelter and food sources back into the environment, to restore natural areas.”
Gallo jokes that some of her love of native plants and landscapes stems from their low maintenance.
“I’m lazy and they don’t require care,” she said. “I don’t want to water, I don’t want to prune, I want plants to do exactly what native plants do.”
Melanie Mcclure knows the feeling.
“I don’t like to mow, I don’t like grass,” said the
South Side woman who took home two awards this year: second place in the vegetable category and first place in the
People’s Choice contest.
Mcclure and her wife, Kristi Mcclure, built six raised beds for vegetables, along with a greenhouse to start seeds and hold Mcclure’s succulents.
The couple also maintain a large inground bed that includes corn, sunflowers and one unusual item — luffa plants.
“Most people don’t know it comes from an actual vegetable,” Mcclure said. “I don’t buy kitchen sponges anymore; we use these.”
For Mcclure, who also entered last year, the Dispatch contest provides feedback from folks who understand what a successful garden requires.
“It’s that recognition and appreciation from other gardeners; it makes a difference,” she said.
But, especially during the pandemic, working outdoors has provided something else for gardeners.
“Creating this garden continues to be everything for me, a place of my physical workout, my gym, and one of meditation, my sanctuary and a place to connect with nature and not think of anything else in the world,” Gallo said.
“It’s an outlet for my two biggest passions — nature and art,” she added. “I’ve found this new coupled relationship, where the soil is my canvas.” jweiker@dispatch.com @Jimweiker
“Creating this garden continues to be everything for me, a place of my physical workout, my gym, and one of meditation, my sanctuary ...”
Kristy Gallo, Best of Show