Meet Bob and Kathy Jaskowiak. Like so many in this region, they volunteer uncountable hours at a public garden - in this case, Glen Foerd, in the Far Northeast, the subject of a story I'll be doing on Feb. 17.

Bob's a retired city employee - he did HR for 33 years - and Kathy is a semi-retired nurse. In 2005, they moved from their home in Wissinoming to a condo near Glen Foerd, which they learned about when one of their daughters decided to hold her wedding reception there in 2001. (Weddings, in fact, constitute the bulk of the estate's visitors.)

You wouldn't call Bob and Kathy horticulturists. But you would call them indispensable to the upkeep of this 18-acre, 19th-century estate on the Delaware, particularly the rose garden. They keep it clean, pruned and mulched. They plant replacement roses for those that die or are the proverbial wrong plant in the wrong place.

With other volunteers, they're also trying to stay on top of the invasives problem. There are weed trees on the banks of the river and elsewhere on the grounds. There's an entire grouping of lilacs that you can't even see anymore!

But the sense you get when you walk around here is that things are pretty much under control. Not without a lot of sweat and hard work, of course. (And money. A new roof on the art gallery of the house cost $800,000!)

This is the story I hear at just about every public house/garden I visit. Some draw volunteers better than others. One of Glen Foerd's issues, which a new executive director is trying to address, is that it's not wellknown. You can drive by and never know it's there. That's part of the charm - but it's a definite challenge, and in this age of dwindling grant money and government support, it's critical to find ways to attract both donors and visitors.

I've taken walks at Glen Foerd many times, but until this week I'd never been in the house. It's worth a visit. But the current hours aren't convenient, at least for folks like me who work fulltime, which is another issue.

If you have an older house, or you're a gardener, you understand about all this maintenance, money and hard work. Hey, I wouldn't mind a government grant for that myself!

Say what? You've probably never heard of this place. It's an old estate on the banks of the Delaware way up in the Northeast, a hop and a skip from Bucks County. And let me tell you, it's a beauty.

At the moment it has limited visiting hours and not much programming, but that is about to change. This morning I spent a very fun couple of hours with Colleen Boyle Sharp, a board member and chair of the program committee, and Meg Sharp Walton, the (relatively) new executive director. They're out to make some this a higher profile kind of place.

I've been to Glen Foerd for walks in summer and spring, but never before inside the house. Can't beat the view! This morning I ran into two women - one a dead-givewaway-birder with her binoculars looking for bald eagles and ospreys, the other the owner of three little dogs named - I kid you not - Izzy, Gizzy and Wizzy. They were out for a walk.

I'll be writing about this lovely mid-19th century estate and its 18 interesting acres, the last riverfront home open to the public in the city of Philadelphia. Yes, Andalusia is right down the road, but it's in Bucks County.

Glen Foerd is a combination of Glengarry, for the ancestral Scottish home of the original Macalaster owners, and Foerd, for the Foerderer family, which lived here until the early 1970's. In 1988, it - fortunately ... more on this later - passed to the Glen Foerd Conservation Corporation and the Fairmount Park Commission.

For all its public provenance, this place is not easy to find. The signs are small. Traffic has to go around the block, rather than straight in. Glen Foerd may be a public house but it is not on the public radar. It will be interesting to see the changes unfold.

I'll be back up there tomorrow - this time, to talk PLANTS.

This delicious photo accompanied an email from Lorraine Kiefer, the effervescent co-owner, with son Joe, of Triple Oaks Nursery & Herb Garden in Franklinville, who's doing a rose program later this month. (See below.) Lorraine is always fun to talk to, both for horticultural information and personal remembrances of plants and family.

She notes that the International Herb Society has named the rose its herb of the year for 2012. Surprised to learn that the rose even IS an herb? More on that in a bit.

I'm in a rose frame of mind. The sun is shining. The weather is acting like spring. I'm starting to think about what this year's garden will be. And on Monday, I'll be visiting Glen Foerd on the Delaware River, a historic house so-named by Robert and Caroline Foerderer, who bought it in 1893. Robert made his fortune making ultra-soft goat skin to feed the societal appetite for leather products. He later became a U.S. congressman and head of the Keystone Telephone Company. Now you're talking serious money.

Lots more to the story, which I hope to get on Monday. I bring all this up because once I saw Lorraine's rose image in my in-box, I was reminded of the roses at Glen Foerd. I look forward to seeing it - and the grapevines - and to hear of all the efforts there to restore the beautiful gardens and grounds.

Here's Lorraine's event, next best thing to spring: 

Everything Coming Up Roses I " on  Sunday  February  26  at 1:30, which involves a short session on growing and using rose, as well as making  a dried rose wreath and potpourri. All Crafts made with real essential rose oil. Preregistration required. 856-694-4272.

In my spare time, what little of that there is lately, I like to lose myself in garden books. Of necessity, they have to grab my attention immediately and hold it or I toss them over. My latest victim is How to Grow More Vegetables, the 8th edition of John Jeavons' what-I-understand-to-be classic that has sold more than a half-million copies. Jeavons is the champion, the guru, of intensive gardening, a high-yield, fully sustainable growing method he's spread around the world.

The newest edition has a forward by Alice Waters. Tells you something, and I'm sure it has great value. Just not for me and, I think, most other home gardeners. Building plans and planting layouts and how to use the U-bar ... all this is both more than I can absorb and more than I need to know for my little vegetable patch in the city.

But, if you're interested, there are things to study in here. Such as the charts on companion plants, a subject that's intrigued me for awhile. Sunflowers, like the lovely one here that grew in Chanticleer's vegetable garden last summer, are good companions for cucumbers. You plant them together - the cukes tucked in and around the tall sunflowers, which offer afternoon shade. This is good for cucumber production.

The cucumbers, in turn, can serve as a kind of living mulch, squeezing out the weeds and helping keep moisture in the soil. With those terrific yellow, red or white sunflower heads and the flowering, fertile cucumber vines, you have yourself a pretty nice combination.

I often read that companion plants offer beauty, help repelling nasty pests and attracting good guys, flavor enhancements of the nonchemical kind and sometimes, supposedly, added growth. I'm not experienced enough to know first-hand.

But sunflowers and cukes, they seem like pals to me.

Here it is - the wave, literally the high point of the 2012 flower show's central feature. I'll be writing more about this when we get closer to the show, which runs March 4-11.

This will be the sixth flower show for which Gary Radin has done the set design for the central feature. Last year it was the Eiffel Tower. This year, with a Hawaiian theme, visitors will walk through a giant orchid wave with video images projected onto it - sea turtles, surfers, fish. Thousands of white orchids and anthuriums will cover the trussed "spines" of the wave and there'll be sound effects of rippling water and crashing waves with music. Now that sounds like an antidote to winter! Even the winter we've had.

The wave will be 40 feet wide and 50 feet deep, the width of all six of those doors that you walk through at the convention center to get into the show. And instead of heading straight in, as we did last year with the tower and have pretty much done every year, we'll be guided to the right. This should alleviate some of the scrum that typically forms by the entrance but it's also intended to change things up for the sake of change - to make "the visitor experience," as they say, more interesting. The layout of the show hasn't changed since it moved from the old civic center in West Philly to the convention center at 12th and Market in 1996.

There's much more to the central feature, and the showcase gardens, but it's the wave that will get most of the attention for both its size and novelty. You can see the rendering behind Gary, who has a design studio in Fishtown. His other projects include design and art direction for TV and live events, commercials.

There will be real water at the show - a 25-foot waterfall and another cascading falls. "Managing water inside is always a hoot," Gary says, remembering when a visitor to the "Bella Italia" show  accidentally bumped a stone along the long reflecting pool, which tore the plastic liner, which caused a leak.

No getting that close to the falls this year. Otherwise, they'd need a lifeguard. 

If you saw my story yesterday (http://articles.philly.com/2012-01-29/news/30676220_1_zones-warm-winters-winter-aconite) you may have felt relief that you aren't the only one experiencing a springlike winter in the garden. Bulbs are popping 4-6 weeks early all over the Philadelphia region, along with forsythia, hellebores, azaleas and other plants.

This means our spring - which, believe it or not, doesn't begin till March 20 this year - may be a little less colorful. Which is too bad. Don't know about you, but i'm not ready for spring just yet. It's a little too chilly out there to be in spring mode.

I took a stroll around the garden yesterday. Just to see what's what. What a mess. We may not have had snow this winter, but we've had a lot of wind. It's "Pick Up Sticks" time again in my back yard.

Since I'm basically under construction at my house - more on this at a later date - I have the added issue of mud, lost plants, undone irrigation system and the general chaos that comes when your yard is dug up to install new drainage pipes.

On the one hand, this had to be done and after all, they're just plants. I get to redo about half of the garden and get it right - or at least, better - this time. Less maintenance, more appropriate plants, less crowding. On the other hand, wahhhhh! Years of purchases, divisions, work, and hard-fought trial and error are gone. As I said, couldn't be helped.

We'll see what survives. But for me, the coming spring - the real one, not this faux season - is looking more expensive by the day. Just when I thought I was done buying plants!

Oh, and speaking of bulbs, most of mine are gone. Dug up in the Big Dig.

You can see the hula dancers in my video and photos taken by staff photographer Michael Wirtz with my story on philly.com, but the only photos I got at this morning's kickoff for the 2012 flower show were like this one - fruit. There's one of banana bread, too, but I doubt you care to see that.

The event was colorful, though the light wasn't so great for shooting the dancers, on the top (33d) floor of Loews Hotel at 12th and Market, a stone's throw from the convention center, where the show opens to the public on March 4 and runs through March 11.

It sounds like a fun time, with motion graphic waves and 25-foot waterfalls and fire raining down on Pele's garden, dancers and musicians from Hawaii, and a host of changes. The layout's different. The Marketplace is redesigned and realigned. There's a 100-seat restaurant in the middle of the floor, new sponsors, a "man cave" sponsored by SugarHouse casino (more on that later!), food in the Marketplace (I like that idea) and a lot more info about vegetables. Techno stuff, too, including a new (free) flower show app that will give you the show layout, alerts for demonstrations and lectures, information about exhibits and other stuff.

PHS President Drew Becher, in earlier interviews with me, referred to a huge lettuce wall that will be featured at the show as "the largest lettuce wall in the world," though I'm not sure there's any actual competition there!

I'll be doing a lot more on the show. Boy, will I. Stay tuned.

I don't know about you, but going to my local post office these days is an ordeal on many levels. So I buy my stamps online and only venture into the neighborhood post office when there's no other choice.

Yesterday was one of those days. I had to mail a package. But bonus! Some new bonsai forever stamps debuted that very morning and I figured I could pick some up in person. But no, they didn't have the new stamps. Half the time they don't have 1-cent stamps either, which is a real pain when you've got a desk full of 44-cent stamps and postage goes up a penny - as it just did.

But I digress. Bonsai stamps: I'm not a huge fan of this ancient art but the stamps are surprisingly lovely, and a welcome diversion from the bland American flag forevers. Sue me for saying so, but I think flags and liberty bells make the worst stamps. Give us color. Give us a character or a story. Give us something fun to put on the precious few things we actually mail anymore.

The postal service gave us four bonsais: a Sierra juniper,  a trident maple, a black pine, and what you see here, a multiple-trunk azalea such as you've probably never seen before. The plants depicted are less than two feet tall.

Flower show's coming up, and while I just said I'm not a big fan of bonsai, I make a point of stopping by the bonsai exhibit at the show. The artists are often on site and open to answering questions. It really is fascinating, even if you're not interested in keeping your trees small.

Then again, you could always mail those artists a letter - using your new bonsai stamps, of course.