Re: Klehms

            I'm a bit behind on reading my gardening e-mails, so am just
now replying to the discussion about Klehms. I live in Champaign-Urbana
and used to go out to Klehms every year at peony and then at daylily
time when they had a display garden open to the public. After they
closed the display garden and only did wholesale, we'd still drive out
periodically to see the fields from the road. It's a beautiful site in
corn and soybean country to see a farm field of flowers in bloom.
            Then they moved out entirely and set up Song Sparrow in
Wisconsin, as others have said. Now a family that runs a vineyard down
in southern Illinois but have some U of I connections have come to
Champaign and planted grape vines and set up a shop for selling and
tasting wine on the old Klehms property. They have had some trouble
getting vines that can take the winds out there that are so drying and
the soil has pesticide overload problems. But they are selling their
wines from down south and working on establishing new vines with the
help of U of I agriculture people.
            A woman who works at the vineyards (where they have had jazz
in the evenings this summer, in the old hosta shade house, actually)
told me that the Klehms people were involved in some kind of
embezellment or fraud or fixing the books or something and that somebody
actually did some prison time for it. Before leaving, they dug up most
of the plants, but there were still some peonies and they deliberately
killed them so nobody would get them for free ... nonetheless, you know
how peonies are ... a few came up this spring, the present owner mowed
them down because they were "in the way", but this employee remembers
where they are and she plans to dig them up and take them when she moves
this fall. This is all hearsay, of course, but it makes an interesting
story ...         
 
Susan
 
Dr. Susan Campanini
Coordinator of Instructional Development
Guided Individual Study
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
302 East John Street, Suite 1406
Champaign, IL 61820
Phone: 217-333-1320
Fax:  217-333-8524
campanin@uiuc.edu
www.outreach.uiuc.edu/gis
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