How Does Your Garden Grow?

Northern Indiana’s Amish Country always boasts pastoral allure: The sight of women in bonnets and men in horse-drawn carriages sets a picturesque scene that proves irresistible to tourists.

The area’s first Quilt Gardens Tour adds to that appeal. Through first frost, the landscape throughout Elkhart County is abloom with traditional and contemporary Amish quilt patterns and artistically rendered murals depicted in vast, floral displays. The 12 gardens — some of which are so large they require hand-watering twice a day — and 11 murals create a patchwork of living heritage on the state’s meandering, 90-mile Heritage Trail.

Many of the large-scale flower gardens, planted in seven communities, present a colorful mosaic of traditional, Amish quilt themes: from the star-within-a-star pattern overlooking Elkhart’s RiverWalk Commons, to the whimsical, pretty-in-petunias design featured on the grounds of Amish Acres Historic Farm and Heritage Resort in Nappanee.

Even the smallest gardens yield an artistic sensibility that leaves green thumbs inspired. The 900-square-foot Ruthmere Quilt Garden — designed to reflect the size of the game room inside Elkhart’s Ruthmere Beaux Arts House Museum — features a 2,000-bloom, zinnia-and-marigold-studded design, while the 1,250-square-foot Menno-Hof Quilt Garden offers a sudden burst of color in tiny Shipshewana with 2,700 crimson-and-ivory begonias.

The most complicated garden to plant was the one at The Old Bag Factory, a marketplace for artisans in Goshen. Its pattern was an original one created by a noted fiber artist; it featured so many curves and points that the artist had to enlarge it with a projector before the patterns were placed on the ground, allowing volunteers to accurately pinpoint where to place a wealth of posies.