I spent most of yesterday touring three pretty great gardens in the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Program (I know, I know — someone has to do it). Wow, what an incredible spring day — almost 80 degrees.

Photographer Mark Vergari and I started at Shobha Vanchiswar’s cute little garden on a 1/4-acre suburban plot in Chappaqua (open to the public on Sunday, May 4) and then spent an hour or so at Henriette Suhr’s wonderful 8-acre garden in Chappaqua (also May 4).

Then I met up with photographer Liz Orozco to wander around the 45-acre White Garden in Lewisboro with its hundreds of thousands of daffodils in peak bloom (open Sunday, April 27).

I’ll post photos when Mark and Liz have finished editing them.

Meanwhile, I had an article in the paper yesterday on the first two Westchester gardens on the Open Days tour: the White Garden and Joanna Friedman’s 1-acre shady garden in Larchmont. Here’s a link to the article, which has all the info on what’s in the gardens, when to visit, directions etc.

Photographer Carucha Meuse and I visited Joanna’s garden last week. Here are some of Carucha’s shots of Joanna and her garden.

It’s hard to believe she’s right in the center of the Larchmont Woods neighborhood.

Joanna has lots of shade-friendly woodland flowers. Here’s Jeffersonia dubia.

Joanna with some of the 40-year-old climbing hydrangea vines that reach way up into her old oak trees.

How she got that shot (my photos from here on):

More of the climbing hydrangeas:

Much of the garden is underlain with a carpet of blue glory-of-the-snow bulbs.

An early-blooming rhododendron (R. mucronulatum):

Blue anemones:

Most of the garden was planted by renowned horticulturalist Harold Epstein, who bought the property in 1938. Here’s a huge metasequoia glyptostroboides tree he brought from China in 1949 or 1950. Joanna says it’s the oldest one in the country.

(Henriette Suhr has dozens of these trees, btw, also known as dawn redwoods. It’s a conifer that drops its leaves in winter, loves wet spots, very fast growing, deer-proof.)

The house was built in the 1930s as a cottage for the Dupont family.

Pink and white magnolias.

The hundreds of epimediums are just coming into flower.

Very old Pieris japonica (andromeda) by the front door.

A little closer, to show the graceful blooms.

Joanna has moss everywhere, including this spot by the back door with a boxwood with really small leaves.

The whole backyard was filled with the sweet fragrance from this yellow mahonia shrub.