A noun. A verb. A blog.
Keeyla Meadows’ garden in Albany, California – would you be this brave with colour? Oh, my! The sensory overload of Summer 2013. We have so many wonderful gardens to share with you, it’s been hard to know where to begin. We should have been blogging all summer but, as you can see, we were barely […]
Fight for a just cause; love your fellow man; live a good life = FiLoLi I don’t own a goldmine, do you? That makes us unlike the Bourn family, who built the Filoli estate early in the last century. It’s also pretty certain we’re not Blake or Krystle Carrington (Filoli acted as their mansion on […]
The Italian Garden on Garinish (aka Garnish) Island (aka Ilnacullin) A little putt-putt ferry took us from Glengariff in West Cork across Bantry Bay to see the Garinish Island garden by Edwardian landscape architect Harold Peto. Despite the drenching rain, I was excited. A Peto garden! But whether it was the quality of light on […]
‘Chiare, fresche et dolci acque’ (Clear, fresh, sweet water) – opening line of a poem by Petrarch – surround a fountain. Clear, fresh, sweet cocktails (well, Chardonnay for me, but, hey, poetic license) were sipped in the garden of artist and garden designer Shirley Watts and her husband Emmanuel Coup in Alameda, California. And ’twas […]
The home, garden and studio of San Francisco sculptor Matt Gil and his wife Lesa Porche are tucked against a rocky slope beneath a highway overpass Unhappy with your garden? I’ll give you something to gripe about: A tiny footprint, most of it vertical. And rocky. Really rocky. The view? Highway pilons, albeit with a […]
I wasn’t the only one slathering over this lush boulevard planting in Forest Hill It’s time to mark garden tours on your calendar. Yesterday, the press – and that would include lucky old moi – previewed the city’s “really big shoe” Through the Garden Gate, which on the weekend of June 8 and 9, 2013 […]
How much compost is in this bag? Today’s Idea File is really an “I-Have-No-Idea File” – for when someone asks you how much mulch or manure or compost or topsoil you need to cover an area, and you answer, “I have no idea!” This is especially tricky in Canada, where we straddle metric and imperial […]
Swordless swordfish takes a dive I’ve been dying to use this picture ever since some enchanted afternoon in 2011, when I saw this bright blue swordfish across a crowded room – garden room, that is, during the Gardens of the Beach garden tour. Now most people browsing a vintage shop would look at a swordfish […]
Who wouldn’t want to sit in this shady nook? But wait, there’s more. This Friday’s Idea File contains a single idea, but hopefully one that provokes thought. Sometimes we have our best ideas by turning something on its head. Go on, think of something. Now think of its opposite. Does it make you rethink your […]
Hot pink peppermint striped tulips with golden daffodils at the Toronto Botanical Garden, 2010 Let’s shake up this grey city with an blast of clashing colours. I’ll go on record here as saying I believe that nothing in nature clashes. She is always original and unabashed in her colour pairings. Designers, however, use clashing colours […]
Curved walks in both tiny gardens expand the sense of space, turning the few strides to the front porch into a winding path Do you have a tiny front yard? Many people in Toronto do and wonder what the heck to do with it. The photos of two east-end gardens that I recently recovered* show […]
A small-scale garden folly can be like this dry stone fountain in Shelagh Tucker’s Seattle garden (see it close up here) If you watched Mr. Darcy propose dripping wet to Lizzie Bennet in the Keira Knightley version of Pride & Prejudice*, you’ve seen a prime example of a garden folly. Not his ill-done proposal, but […]