By David A. Sargent,Special to the Sun Journal

LEWISTON -The flowers and plants looked great, but the people tended to wilt as they made the rounds of seven gardens on the Maine Music Society’s 12th annual Home and Garden Tour on Saturday.

Hot and humid conditions, with temperatures hovering around 90 degrees, kept the turnout lower than in some years. Nevertheless, many who took the self-guided tour rated it among the best.

The tour’s map had three stops at Lewiston locations, two in Auburn and one each in Minot and Poland.

Visitors to Ken Hewitt’s spectacular garden on the Old Woodman Hill Road in Minot marveled at the profusion of blooms on more than two acres.

“This is by far the most phenomenal garden I have ever seen,” said Lola Lowell of Lisbon, as she walked through the Hewitt garden with friends Tracy Mishou of Richmond and Jane Patterson of Bowdoin.

“It’s just overwhelming,” she said. “I can’t imagine taking care of all this.”

Hewitt tends to agree.

“It’s a hobby out of control,” he said. “I keep making it bigger each year, but after this year, no more expanding. That’s it.”

Hewitt said people talked with him a lot about his daylilies.

“I have about 500 clumps of them,” he estimated. Among his own favorites are his tree peonies, which bloomed earlier with enormous blossoms, he said.

Hewitt said he doesn’t know exactly how many varieties of flowers he has, but it numbers in the hundreds or even a thousand.

Paths wind through Hewitt’s close-packed gardens, where every turn opens up an amazing view.

Hewitt’s plots of Japanese iris and his collection of English delphinium also attracted a lot of attention. He is a member of the Delphinium Society of Great Britain.

The garden was begun in 1979, Hewitt said, and its size really took off when he retired in the 1990s. It was featured on the garden tour in 1996 and 1999, but since the last time it has increased in size by about a third, Hewitt said.

His plantings are mostly open to full-day sun. The gardens are behind his house and barn and are surrounded by fields.

Another favorite on the tour was the Lewiston garden of Mark and Dawna Swiedom on Ryder Street. Their front and side yards have lush plantings of astilbe, geranium, daylilies, iris and pasque flowers, which are lilac-colored and covered with white, silky hairs.

As remarkable as their flowers may be, it’s their two-tier water feature that grabs everyone’s attention.

Mark and Dawna explained how they carried all the rock to make the ponds. Mark said he turns on the small 300-watt pump in the spring and it runs until fall, sending cascades of water over two waterfalls.

“It doesn’t make a big dent in our electric bill at all,” he said. “It’s like running three light bulbs all the time, and most people do that by accident.”

At the Maplewood Road home of Jo Ann Donovan in Lewiston, visitors found a cultivation of natural space rather than formal gardens. Remnants of old stone walls are still found amid woodland flowers.

Ray and Jo-Ann Jackson’s garden on West Hardscrabble Road in Poland features a backyard gazebo surrounded by many flowers. On the other side of the house, a fenced vegetable garden is flanked by more flowers.

For the first time this year, the fundraiser for the Maine Music Society included house tours. One of these was at the Auburn home of Stephen and Melanie Ness. She was an organizer of this year’s event, and she noted that the day’s heat seemed to be slowing people down.

Counts of visitors at the in-town locations seemed to be about the same as at the Minot and Poland gardens.

Other stops on the tour included the Memorial Courtyard Garden at Lewiston High School and the Women’s Literary Union garden on Elm Street in Auburn, which included tours of the interior where historic furnishings and art were on view.

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