A noun. A verb. A blog.
Is there such a thing as too many pictures of Cosmos? Perhaps not if they come on the tail of a post about mass plantings. This long fenceful planted end to end with the hardy annual Cosmos bipinnatus makes me happy every time I walk past. Has 2009 been a particularly good year for cosmos? […]
This summer of 2009, my Rosa ‘New Dawn’ has put out a bumper crop of new shoots. Typically, in August, this climbing rose has three or four long stems of new growth. This year, at least a dozen have shot their wands to the sky. Lucky me. Really. This means my arbour is gifted with […]
It never ceases to amaze me what evil can be done to a tree, simply with a tie and a stake. These homeowners probably thought they were doing a kind thing to their young tree, propping it up with a stake. However, this poor puppy should have been let off its leash long ago, before […]
My favourite story about goldenrod (Solidago), the ubiquitous, aptly named native plant, surrounds the tone of surprised delight from one of our visiting, hort-mad Welsh aunts: Solid-aah-go, she trilled, grows wiiiild here! Well, yes. It does. It does grow wild, in every sense. In fact, if there’s a stranger in your Toronto garden with serrated, […]
Despite evidence to the contrary, this photograph does not illustrate why they call it “o-bee-dient” plant. Though the flower does seem to exert a siren call: Oh, bee… Oh, bee-eee…? This is Physostegia virginiana, and it’s called Obedient Plant for the way you can bend the individual florets to your will, making them go thisaway […]
This story happened in Quebec, but it’s a story that could have happened anywhere with trees. Take one 150-year-old sugar maple tree. Apply wind; lots of wind. Aaaand… oops! Miraculously, this tree-sized branch missed the car, landed on a fence but didn’t crush it, even the birdhouse made it through the branches unscathed. However, the […]
By August, my front garden is past its floral (tongue firmly in cheek as I write this word) glory. Spring is the bountiful season in this sandy, dry shade garden, and it all kind of slides downhill from there. Now the daylilies and Asiatic lilies are finished, leaving a few containers, some quiet hosta blooms […]
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed when trying to ID daylilies: some of them are very variable in form. This lovely one is in Sarah’s garden, and (when we last discussed it) she couldn’t remember which it was. I love a hunt. But when I did my searching, the aha! prompted by my discovery of […]
There are 23,000 species in the Compositae or, much more fun to say, Asteraceae family – including coneflowers (Echinacea), sunflowers (Helianthus), and, of course, Asters. Many of them are inspiring pollinators to do the happy dance right now. This little fellow is as happy as a bee in cosmos; Cosmos bipinnatus, to be precise. It […]
What’s black and white and mulch all over? Yes, newspapers. With a family addition nearly due to distract them, our neighbours G. and W. are cleverly smothering a former weed patch in their garden with newspapers, topped with a few inches of woodchips. That should keep weeds down to a dull roar while the new […]
This may be our last chance this summer to catch a major pest before it spreads its seeds. Watch out for these monsters: Under-ripe pods, packed with feathery, airborne, milkweed-like seeds. If you’re a Toronto Gardens reader, you’ve noted our campaign against the steamroller known as dog-strangling vine (DSV) or pale swallowwort (Vincetoxicum rossicum, syn. […]
The fleeting beauty of certain flowers might be what makes a song of love such a sad song*. Now it’s the turn for the Oriental and turk’s cap lilies. Wish I could send you the fragrance of the former. These pure whites, airbrushed with pink as they age, are sweet without being funereal. The texture […]