MARION — A little light drizzle wasn’t enough to stop garden aficionados from soaking up the sights at the Marion Secret Garden Tour on Friday, June 25.

The one-day event featured eight private gardens located throughout the town which presented a variety of styles and landscapes, from understated backyards decorated with rare dogwood and ginkgo trees and exotic varieties of underbrush, to sprawling sea-side lawns and elegantly appointed courtyard rose gardens.

By all accounts, the tour was a bounty of botany.

“This is the best [garden tour] we’ve seen here out of all the years we’ve been coming,” said Andria Savery and Diane Allen, who both said they’ve been attending the garden tours for years.

Liz Hatch — the president of the Marion Garden Group, which hosted the event, and the owner of one of the properties on the tour — said the group had sold almost 600 tickets with a final count still to come.

Hatch made a point of praising the garden group’s planning committee which started organizing the event in January.

“They’ve thought every single detail through,” she said, “down to the take-away lunches.”

The event was sponsored by Kate’s Simple Eats, which pre-sold boxed lunches to tour-goers and distributed them at a booth in Bicentennial Park, where the tour began.

One garden designer, the aptly named Michael Jardin, who designed two of the gardens shown on the tour, said that he had been working on one of them for about 13 years.

“It’s a very mature garden,” he said of the backyard at 60 Water St. “My true-to-form style is Japanese and American woodland and that garden is a good example of it.”

Jardin explained that he likes to use trees as his centerpieces with only one or two kinds of undergrowth covering the ground beneath to compliment them.

As one garden group volunteer, Diane Kelley put it, “it’s all about color and texture, contrast and motion.”

Proceeds from the event will be used to help fund the garden group’s future town beautification projects, according to Hatch.