Just Gardens is exactly what you think: a garden tour that puts gardens, not houses, in the spotlight.

Visiting the Northern Neck gardens on the annual tour -- May 16 and 17 this year -- is like walking around your neighbor's yard. You'll feel as if you're visiting friends who just washed their hands after a morning of digging in the dirt.

This year's tour, the eighth, focuses on five gardens clustered fairly close together near the Potomac River in Northumberland County.

During the tour, you'll find your new friends out in their gardens doing a little last-minute deadheading or sitting in the shade of a tree they probably planted. They're delighted to answer questions, explain their designs and talk about what plants grew for them and what plants didn't.

Many of them are Master Gardeners, as are many of the volunteers scattered around the gardens to answer such questions as "What's that pretty blue plant" (catmint) and "Can I grow it in my yard? (You bet).

You'll leave with ideas to try in your own garden and, even better, with the knowledge that you can do them yourself.

Wind blowing off the Potomac River is the biggest challenge for Margie Beane, whose garden is one of five on the tour.

"Because I knew I wanted to garden," she said by phone recently, "one of the first things I did was to plant windscreens. I wanted to do something mixed, not a string of Leyland cypress."

Now, protecting her vegetable garden is a mix of Sea Green junipers and Gilt edge elaeagnus. On another side of her property, her windscreen mixes more junipers with wax myrtle and ornamental grasses, specifically switchgrass.

Why switchgrass? "It's native, extremely tough and drought tolerant. The drought never fazed it."

She also plants perennials that can withstand the wind and can tolerate salt. Plants that do well for her are daylilies, sedum Autumn Joy, butterfly weed, red hot poker, artemisia, Russian sage and ice plant.

Is she doing a lot of extra work to get ready? "As I told a friend, I'm really just doing what I do each year: cleaning up, mulching, filling in, replacing what the voles ate.

"Most of my beds are perennials, and they take two to three years to fill in. So what's there is what's there. I can't really change it.

"I spent a lot of time on it because I enjoy it. It won't be any different this year."

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Besides the Beane garden, there are four more to see on the tour. Here's a little something about each: