On July 17, I went on the 67th annual Camden House and Garden Tour. The tour took in seven properties in Camden and Rockport. As numerous Camden Garden Club members told me along the route, the event is always on the third Thursday in July. Its regular date means that lots of people come back. Some even plan their vacations with the tour date in mind.

I have to admit that, before I went on the tour, I only had a vague idea of what it might be like.

I’d heard about garden tours before, and my grandmother is an avid gardener, but my only direct experience with gardening was working briefly on an organic farm in high school. I felt a bit more confident about the “house” part, since I’d taken a few classes in college that covered architectural history, but my knowledge got a bit sketchy after identifying the parts of a Greek column.

The night before the tour, just to be sure I wasn’t going to completely embarrass myself, I called a friend who had had a house in a house tour and asked her what the protocol was for these things. She told me that homeowners and gardeners work like mad to get everything perfect. She said she’d gone out while her house was on tour, because after all that work to get it looking great it was hard to watch hundreds of people tramp through.

Indeed, several Garden Club members and others on the tour told me they get approximately 1,000 people each year.

Jim Gamage, of All Aboard Trolley & Limousine Co., thought it had been more than a 1,000 this year. He told me they had been running 10 golf carts up and down Mount Battie all day, to transport people from the parking lot to Dyke Messler’s house halfway up the slope. Whether it was over or under 1,000, that’s a lot of people walking through your house in blue medical booties, and peering appreciatively at the colorful variety of your cross-pollinated poppies.

Given what my friend told me, I was surprised by how many homeowners and gardeners were present at each of the stops on the tour.

Dyke Messler and his architect and builder were present for most of the day, greeting people and talking about the house and gardens.

Barbara Yatsevitch, whose roses were the largest and most expansive I saw, was sitting in front of her house with the Garden Club hostess when I arrived, welcoming each person that came in.

Barbara Furey, with the multicolored poppies that interested several visitors, had her daughter and granddaughter on hand to give out lemonade.

Deb Soule, the owner of Avena Botanicals, gave tours of her herb farm and answered questions about managing rosemary through a Maine winter (she brings her rosemary bushes inside, and then replants them in the ground each spring).

At Denise and Tom Wolf’s house, the women who had designed and managed their sunken garden were present to answer questions.

Even at the houses where the homeowners had opted to, understandably, take a break from the constant stream of visitors, there were always several members of the Camden Garden Club, greeting people, pointing out particular plants or views, and sporting an impressive array of hats. These were black, red, blue and cream-colored, decorated with feathers, bows and, of course, flowers.

The visitors themselves were more varied than I had expected. I had pictured groups of middle-aged women in broad-brimmed gardening hats, chatting knowledgeably about shade plants and the acidity of various soils. These women were, of course, present, but there were also many couples, teenagers, whole families enjoying the day together. In among the Maine license plates at each stop were plates from Tennessee, California and Florida, among many others.

“It always amazes me, the number we get from away, and the number of repeat visitors,” Claire Sanford of the club told me. “It’s quite a tribute to the club and the generous people who open their homes.”

Ann Vanosdol and Fran Moore, both club board members, told me that the Millinocket Garden Club comes down from Penobscot County every year for the tour.

While many visitors were no doubt avid gardeners, it struck me more and more as the day went on that the whole event was about a lot more than just gardens. While I overheard conversations about particular plants, or the arrangement of paths and beds, I overheard just as many about the picture window at Judy Wolf’s house Briney Breezes, or the animals sculpted out of chicken wire at Barbara Yatsevitch’s home.

The house and gardens that seemed to have knocked everyone’s socks off, mine included, was Dyke Messler and Rickey Celentano’s on Mount Battie. Inspired by Charles and Henry Green’s Gamble House in Pasadena, Calif., this house was Arts and Crafts style re-imagined for midcoast Maine.

The architect, Dominic Mercadante, told me that because the Greens had built homes in southern California, he’d had to adapt the style of Messler’s house for chillier weather. This meant finishing the inside of the house in light Douglas fir, instead of the darker woods used in some California Arts and Crafts houses, and making the overhang of the roof shallower to let in more light in the winter.

The architecture and open gardens of this house charmed many visitors. However, smaller details were equally as interesting. In the basement, after peering into the home cinema, I passed a small group congregated around one of the bathrooms. They were admiring a fancy apparatus attached to the toilet.

“It has one of those bidet things,” one man said.

“And it plays music,” said one of his friends.

“And it throws you off when you’re done.” This got a laugh.

Bathrooms seemed to be particularly interesting everywhere. Upstairs in the same house, one woman leaned forward and waved her hand above a granite countertop with a circle of light imbedded in it to illuminate the sink.

The last house I visited was Loie and Stephen Hanscom’s in Rockport. There, Sherry Cobb of the Garden Club told me that people enjoy the tour for lots of reasons, from garden appreciation to interior decoration.

This fit with what I’d realized myself. All seven gardens were impressive in their own individual way. Some were rambling and expansive, others controlled and efficient, others personal and sweet. The houses, too, ranged from simple and welcoming to grand and exotic. But what made them all fascinating and wonderful, inside and out, was the fact that they each presented an ideal.

To put it simply and avoid quoting Romantic philosophers, they were like houses and gardens in magazines. The owners and gardeners had put in hours, weeks, months, polishing and pruning, weeding and straightening, so that for one day crowds of people could walk through these perfected portraits of human life. None of the houses looked how I imagine they must look on a day-to-day basis. Certainly none of them looked like my kitchen table looks right now. None of the gardens had buckets of weeds or discarded gloves sitting on the grass, although I’ve visited my grandmother often enough to know those things are pretty common in a well-tended garden.

Everyone, probably, has a fuzzy idea in their heads of their dream house, and every gardener probably has a dream garden to go with it, cobbled together from childhood homes, places you’ve visited, and lots of home and garden-type magazines. The Camden House and Garden Tour and other tours like it give people the chance to admire other people’s dream houses and dream gardens, spiffed up just for them.

As Sherry Cobb observed to me, perfection is impossible, but for the day of the tour each of the houses and gardens are made as close to perfect as they can get. And as I walked through the gardens and houses and admired them, I felt that particular mixture of envy and pleasure that one gets from a particularly wonderful spread in a gardening or architecture magazine, from that impractical but wonderfully romantic image of the dream home, the dream garden. The added bonus was that, on a tour, I could pull on the blue booties I was issued and walk across the plush carpets, admire the tidy kitchen. I could step outside and walk across the grass, breath in the scent of gardens in bloom.

For more information on the Garden Club and on next year’s tour, which will commemorate the club’s centennial with a selection of historic homes, click here. For information on other annual garden tours in the area and elsewhere in Maine, click here.