A noun. A verb. A blog.
The VegeQuarium, one of the creative ideas at FoodShare’s Canada Blooms booth Imagine a self-sustaining seed starter that turns the fish poo-ey water from your aquarium into both hydration and nutrition. Not only is that just plain clever, it’s one of my favourite gems from this year’s Canada Blooms – but if you blink, you […]
Cherry blossoms in Taichung, Taiwan Oh, how I’ve missed you! A whirlwind winter of work (weally?) has kept me from blogging. But even when I’m not writing about them, I’m thinking about Toronto gardens. Even when I’m far from Toronto. A business trip to Taiwan this month was one thing that kept me away. To […]
Our temporary winterscape It’s the pagan in me that keeps my Christmas tree up long past traditional tree-time. For me, the tree and lights represent the resilient human spirit through the darkest days of winter. Usually, my whim is satisfied by an artificial tree. This year, however, I had a yen for a real one; […]
How cute is that!? Photo courtesy of Janit Calvo, the mini-garden guru, of Two Green Thumbs You don’t have to be a kid to love little. Adults are as likely to be as passionate about dollhouses, for example, as children are. Just look at the Kensington Dollshouse Festival in London, England, which has been drawing mostly […]
For our 600th post on Toronto Gardens, and the final one for NaBloPoMo 2011, I wanted – well, I wanted to do everything. National Blog Posting Month, for those wondering, is the challenge of writing a blog post a day, without fail, for the entire month of November. It’s a sister-act or copycat younger cousin […]
Lesson one: Always have a good place to sit and enjoy the garden. When Sarah & I started our blog over five years ago (last month; we missed our blog’s birthday!), we said we wanted to write about real gardens by real people. None of that garden porn stuff for us. Ha! Well, we’ve learned. […]
Most ordinary gardeners – those not lucky enough to have room in the garage, or a garage at all – have the same problem. Whether it’s a tool shed or a pool shed, how do you disguise it, or integrate it with your garden. A beautifully designed shed can put a serious dent in your […]
Imagine waking to this view I’ve been inspired to take a backward look by Barry Parker’s posts, sharing his trip to many wonderful Welsh gardens this past September. These include, by coincidence, the Cowbridge Physic Garden and the National Botanic Garden of Wales. Barry reminded me of our UK trip in 2008, including a visit […]
Harold & Frances Holt Physic Garden at UBC Botanical Garden Of all the great gardens in Toronto, one thing that seems to be missing is a physic garden – a garden devoted to medicinal plants. These have been around since humans graduated from folk remedies to the science of medicine. Except that the infancy of […]
You might be forgiven for thinking this is a West Coast rainforest garden… but it’s an urban garden in Toronto’s east end Toronto is a city of ravines and lost rivers; Glen Davis Crescent is home to both. Its lost river, Tomlin’s Creek, still runs through a culvert underneath the road in the vee of […]
Talk about a rocky start! Dave and Heidi Rita (sorry, Rita!) Fleury got more than a “rock garden” when they purchased their Beach area home about four years ago – they got edge-to-edge beach stone, punctuated by some accent rocks and elderly evergreens. The previous owners had taken the drastic measure of installing stone to keep […]
Living willow fence on Laird Drive by The Living Wall There are hedges and there are fences. When the twain meets, it’s a living fence, like this one spied on Laird Drive at Commercial Road last spring. A closer look showed the material used as willow wands. Straight, flexible and determined to grow – anywhere […]