Austin Pond Society Pagoda (Photo credit: caseymultimedia)

It appears that I wrote this piece and then never posted it. My bad. Apologies for a very late report.

Where are the blogs about the last two Pond Society meetings? You may well ask as along with the rest of the pond enthusiasts who were lucky enough to have their ponds on the Tour this year, I have spent most of the last month and a half putting the final touches to the garden and ponds prior to the big day. Consequently, I have fallen behind in other areas including keeping up with this blog.

As with most “older” people, my short-term memory is sometimes severely challenged so I try to write about my interests the day following any newsy” things that I think need to be reported. This is usually the case with the write ups for the Pond Meetings but as I previously pointed out, I have been a little remiss in that area. My apologies for those of you who are eager to read what I have to say and have had to wait all of this time (he said with tongue in cheek). With a little help from B.J. who as we all know, generally manages to get her way once she has made up her mind, I became the self-appointed blog man for the Pond Society and I just know that reading my blogs is really high on all of your priority lists…

Having come up with all of the excuses that I can find, let’s get down to the business in hand. Two meetings ago, not counting the General Meeting this evening, we held our annual Plant Swap. This is always a lot of fun and everybody and I mean everybody, walks away with some treasures for their pond or their yard. That is, if they have anymore room to plant stuff which unfortunately, I don’t so I concentrated on watching and taking notes.

There was some business that needed to be taken care of first and as usual it was preceded by feeding our faces on the wonderful healthy food supplied for us to consume followed by an extensive discussion led by Bill Brister on the merits of the Austin City Council wanting to take bids to have an outside contractor run the Zilker Gardens. As the Pond Society has a big interest because of our long ties with the Gardens with helping to manage and clean the Koi ponds plus using the meeting rooms on a regular basis, there was some real concern among the members. As this is an ongoing process, we are in the waiting stage to see how things develop.

With official business out-of-the-way we went back to the main purpose of the evenings meeting, the Plant Swap. I have to say to say that the swap was beautifully organized thanks to the wonderfully talented Judy Swartz and her trusty bunch of volunteer helpers who between them managed to have everything labeled for the various types of plants. Folding water containers were placed around the lawn on the side of Zilker Gardens next to the shop and the water plants were all placed according to type. Bog plants and such were arranged off to one side while the regular garden plants were all placed in neat little rows for the viewers to see.

For those of us who actually brought plants, we were issued tickets based on the numbers of contributions that each of us had made. Those allowed people to make a plant selection in some sort of order. After all the “good” stuff was gone, it became very apparent that there were more plants than people and the need to have an orderly progression of making the selections went quickly out of the window and it became a free for all, or at least it could have if there hadn’t been so many plants to choose from.

Finally, all of the plants were off to new homes and the lawn was cleaned up to the degree that it was impossible to tell that there had been 50 or so people milling around on it for the past couple of hours.

I think that everybody was really satisfied with the end result and a hearty thanks goes out to all of the people involved in organizing this affair. Hopefully, those with the new plants are as satisfied as those of us who donated them.

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