BEDFORD -- Caravans of gardeners roamed these back roads Saturday visiting the homes and yards featured in the Bedford Garden Club's Follow the Blooms Tour.

Launched in 1935, the Bedford Garden Club maintains a trail of public gardens and green spaces throughout town and promotes the art of backyard gardening. The tour featured the gardens of a handful of some of the club's greenest thumbs.

“Some of the gardens have pools and water, others have raised beds. It all fits whatever your property is,” said Sue Fahey, who headed up the committee that organized the tour.

The gardens ranged from cozy and colorful hideaways to sprawling, multi-level extravaganzas with gushing fountains, intricate rock formations — and even some unique touches, such as a custom-designed gazebo for a small, backyard flock of chickens.

Throughout the day, SUVs that normally transport small crowds of kids, pulled up to each home on the tour and let out groups of mostly moms and grandmothers, many of whom were looking for a little inspiration to take home to their own yards.

Kathleen Catania, who sat by her pool chatting with visitors, said her huge garden, complete with a lily pond that features a deck and built-in fountains, gives her a sense of serenity.

“If you're tense or aggravated, digging in the soil releases that tension,” she said. “Life is crazy enough, we have so much going on. This is a place where you can escape all that.”

Lily Arcidy has also created a peaceful but playful retreat on her 4½ acres of home and garden on Campbell Road. From the front of the four-story brick house, the garden looks like a perfectly manicured collection of hot-house flower beds and shrubs, a place where no weed would dare sprout.

But as visitors wandered further in, they noticed all types of details and green tableaux, like a bright pink tray of kids' boots and shoes that have been turned into flower pots, or a table set for tea for two with cups filled with flowers and foliage.

Several gardeners, such as Donna Guibord, divided their yards into different rooms or spaces for plants that like sun, or shade, or for thriving vegetable patches. In Guibord's garden, a honeysuckle vine that's a magnet for humming birds and butterflies steals the show in early summer.

Many on the tour said they felt at home in Jeanne and Stan Popielarzes' back yard stonework garden built into a hillside. Jeanne Popielarz said it took a few years to transform the steep slope of ferns into a tiered set of beds overflowing with flowers and greens all tied together by a 14-step granite staircase. And it's still a lot of work.

“I spend about six hours a day in the garden,” she said.

Although one woman on the tour conceded she might start to resent a garden that wanted six hours of her time on a daily basis, a lot of people on the tour seemed ready to go home and start planting — and that's what the Bedford Garden Club members seemed to have had in mind when they planned the event.

“Gardening is a lot like painting,” said Mike Sills, a club member who helped run the tour and doled out cookies, water and gardening advice at one of the stops. “It's creative and very personal.”

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Barbara Taormina may be reached at btaormina@newstote.com.