Stuff + Nonsense

Here there be dragons

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If things have been quieter on the Toronto Gardens blog recently, it’s because one of us has been travelling and the other is now back teaching. The traveller (me) is in Ireland, being distracted by – among many other things – dragons.

Dragon in its native habitat on the roof of a cottage in Carlingford, County Louth

While the ones at the top were “captured” in a local antique shop, I’m pretty sure they’re reproductions. The tip-off is that they were hanging out with creatures like the ones below. Our mother’s Welsh heritage (the Red Dragon or Y Ddraig Goch is on the flag of Wales) makes me sympathetic to the existence of dragons, real or imagined.

To see if you could get these back home, if you so desired, I did find a few online sources for roof dragons. However, they’re all based in Europe, Australia or New Zealand. With Game of Thrones working its way to a conclusion, perhaps it will light a fire (sorry) under some enterprising North American source. Who knows?

My son knows a thing or two about how to mould things, so I keep trying to get him to go into the garden ornament business. So far, no nibbles.

We’ll soon be heading home – not before seeing the Irish garden on my wish list, I hope – but till then, here are a few of the other distractions keeping me from blogging. Feel for me, please.

Brightly painted houses and doors off the main square.
Many variations on cute windowboxes. I love this mish-mosh of colour and note with envy that the blue lobelia has self-seeded in the pavement cracks.
Carlingford harbour looking postcardish, with its medieval castle ruin, backed by Slieve Foye or Carlingford Mountain. See that ridge of trees? Keep that in mind.
Here’s how the world looks from that level above the trees. Carlingford Lough, with Northern Ireland’s Mourne Mountains on the other side.

See you soon, back in Toronto.

Helen

Helen Battersby is a gardener, a writer, a garden speaker, and a power-walker, not always in that order!

3 comments

  3. Wow – just beautiful! There is so much natural splendor in that part of the world. Hopefully I’ll get to experience it myself someday 🙂

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