Your garden in October can be as beautiful as it is in April. “Fall Guy” Arty Schronce will present “Creating a Garden for Autumn Beauty” to the Fayette Master Gardeners Association on Tuesday, October 15.
The public is invited to attend this free lecture, which will be held at the Bridge Community Center, 125 Willow Bend Road, Peachtree City at 10 a.m. Social hour begins at 9:30 a.m.
Fall is one of the best times to be outdoors in Georgia, and fall-blooming flowers are often overlooked when people are shopping for garden plants. Fall also offers colorful foliage and fruits to brighten the landscape. Arty’s talk will point out a few of the many options Georgia gardeners have to make autumn a highlight in the garden year.
Arty Schronce’s horticultural career began in 1971 when he started selling English boxwoods that he rooted. The business expanded to a nursery and greenhouse selling shrubs, trees, vegetables and bedding plants and continued until he went to college. Arty is a graduate of North Carolina State University where he studied under J.C. Raulston. For seven years, he wrote a weekly gardening column for the university that was carried in 30 newspapers in North Carolina and Virginia.
Arty has worked for a major agricultural biotechnology company and served as senior horticulturist for Hastings Seed Company and Garden Center. His garden column in the Farmers and Consumers Market Bulletin was the newspaper’s most popular feature. An article he wrote about his father’s black-skinned peanuts led seed companies to preserve and offer ‘Schronce’s Deep Black’ peanuts. As a freelancer, his articles and photographs have appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and books including Gardens of the World, the companion book to the PBS series, and The Garden in Autumn by Allen Lacy.
As an amateur plant breeder, Arty has created hybrids between Chinese wax shrub and our native sweet-bubby bush and hybrids between tuberose and Manfreda virginica. Making gardens more ecologically friendly and biologically diverse is of special interest to him. Arty’s garden in the Cabbagetown neighborhood near downtown Atlanta is an oasis for wildlife including birds, butterflies, moths, snakes, Carolina anoles, and four box turtles named Aristurtle Onassis, Michelle, Sparkles and Little RayRay.
