A noun. A verb. A blog.
It all started with a basement pillar that had been removed, years ago, by a previous owner. The shoring-up they’d done might have once been code. According to the structural engineer we consulted, just in case, it wouldn’t be code now. And our basement project escalated from there. For me, the worst of it wasn’t […]
In every season, you’ll find many pretty things to see, hear, and even touch in the garden. But after a long, hard winter, the forgotten sense that comes back to life in spring is the sense of smell. My nose reminded me as I passed a planter outside a client’s office. Suddenly, I was whisked back […]
Are you inexorably drawn to the gardening department of a big box store when you go in to buy light bulbs? I am. Admit it, you are too. Especially after the winter we’ve had. Back in early March, I needed to get an injection of growing things. And, while Home Depot’s garden section doesn’t always represent fine […]
Author Steven Biggs is the gardener who convinced us that we could grow figs in our Canadian climate. Now his new book, Grow Lemons Where You Think You Can’t gives us the good news that we can grow lemons too, even in Canada. Steven’s serious interest in growing lemons began when friends gifted him with […]
We’d come home exhausted after a day of loading and unloading furniture and boxes for our #1 Dot’s move to a nearby city (okay, it’s Hamilton). What was waiting for us on the porch but this beautiful arrangement. As I turned it round and round to choose “the front*” it occurred to me that a well-designed floral […]
Did you do this in grade school? You should do it again. Watching beans grow inside a jar is like Jack and the Beanstalk meets x-ray vision. I did it recently to get pictures for a Gardening with Children Master Gardener presentation I was writing. But with the beans growing right beside me on my desk, I could not stop obsessing over roots and shoots […]
My first snowdrop of 2019 revealed itself this morning, on St. Patrick’s Day. Here and there are more nubs of up-pushing Galanthus foliage, too. For me, the first snowdrop is a sign that, despite this long winter of our discontent, beneath the soil surface the garden is growing. Press on, says Nature, nothing in this world can take the place […]
Have you ever paused to think what a challenge it must be to force 70,000 plants into leaf or peak bud or bloom in time for the March opening of a show like this? Especially over the dark, rainy, sleety, snowy Ontario winter like the one we’ve survived in 2018-19! That’s an accomplishment in itself. And to […]
Of the things in my folder to share with you about this year’s Canada Blooms, this is the one that excited me most. It’s Jonas Spring’s Cliff Garden. Spring uses reference points from nature to inspire the shape and form of the gardens he builds for clients. Essentially, cities are cliffs; houses are boulders. Layered on this […]
Flutter down to Woodbine Beach in Toronto’s east end to visit the 2019 Winter Stations and surround yourself with The Forest of Butterflies (PDF). You have till April 1 to see the half-dozen temporary installations in this annual design competition, this year with the theme of Migration. Did you know it takes four generations of Monarch butterflies to […]
After February 2019’s unreasonable insistence on winter weather, today’s evidence above, I’m all too eager for spring. To have it happen three weeks earlier than the Vernal Equinox – around March 21st – would be psychologically uplifting, right? Guess what? March 1st is the first day of meteorological spring. Yip-yip-yippee! Spring starts today! Perhaps you knew […]
The theme is A Family Affair at Canada Blooms 2019, a little more than a week away. Just for the event, I’ve written a brand new talk on Gardening with Children for the Toronto Master Gardeners’ presentation library – you can see it (and me) on the Harrowsmith Garden Solutions Stage at noon on Tuesday, March 12th. My talk is just one […]