A noun. A verb. A blog.
A Rose by any other name… would be much happier. Or so our daughter says. Our nearly-summer-solstice Gift Child dislikes her second name, Rose – given because their bloom is almost timed to her birth. Yet, each birthday, I run out to gather the first-blown rose on the vine for her birthday bouquet. Now that […]
Wow, wow, WOW! The pre-sunset “golden hour” lights up butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) Stopped in my tracks on the streets of East York. That’s the only way to describe my reaction to this plant just after 7 pm on Wednesday evening, and thank the photo gods for my iPhone. Capturing the last of the sunlight […]
Ricki Pierce, aka The Rock Pirate, a mason and a Mason, grins at the entrance to the home, garden and little Utopia on Wambold Street that he and his wife, artist Damaris Pierce, have created in West Asheville, NC. They call it Wamboldtopia. There are many, many doorways in this garden, and doors are symbols of hope, […]
The star-shaped brownish-maroon flowers of dog-strangling vine. This picture makes them seem almost pretty. Don’t be taken in. One of Toronto’s worst – if not the very worst – of weeds is now making babies. Millions and millions and millions of them. It’s an ideal time to nip all that fecundity in the bud. Dog-strangling […]
Can social change grow alongside art in a garden? I’ve been mulling this question over since Sarah and I returned from the annual garden bloggers’ meet-up, known as the Fling. This year, the Fling was flung in the trendy Appalachian town of Asheville, North Carolina. The Battersby Girls (plus Sarah’s son J, a good sport) were the sole […]
Garden tours are like a box of chocolates. There’s sure to be at least one you love. It’s Toronto garden tour season! Last week, I previewed a few of the gardens you’ll oooh! and aaaah! over in Resplendent Rosedale for the city’s splashiest annual garden tour Through the Garden Gate, held every year in a different location as […]
Last summer, I was thrilled to visit the queen of all things handmade, Lorene Edwards Forkner, to see real-life versions of projects that would appear in her then-upcoming book, Handmade Garden Projects from Timber Press. Stick around to learn how you could win a copy in Toronto Gardens’ first-ever giveaway. If you’ve read my disaster with concrete […]
Get started on your beautiful garden. Local plant societies are beginning their plant sales for 2012. Toronto Gardeners in the east end won’t want to miss the upcoming 2012 Beach Garden Society plant sale. The sale is tailor-made for city gardens, with personally chosen Beach Babies (see below), hand-selected Connoisseur Collection plants and great bargains on […]
Grand simplification in progress, May 2012 A couple of years ago, I embarked on a garden project I called my Grand Simplification. My goal was to make my gardening life less complicated by rethinking the space. Simple is hard, as any designer will tell you. While the process is nowhere near finished, this is my […]
Clematis alpina ‘Pamela Jackman’ is in the Group or Type 1 or C (oops!) A pruning group. (Sometimes, a proofreader would be handy, too.) Clematis are usually classed as Type A, B or C (aka Group 1, 2 or 3), each with different pruning requirements. I know what the requirements are. Trouble is, I can never […]
In Queen Victoria Park, countless people stop for the ultimate portrait, surrounded by 500,000 daffodils Did you know that Niagara Falls, Ontario, is the Daffodil Capital of North America? I didn’t, till I found myself looking for things to do when heading there on business last week. And there it was – 500,000 reasons to […]
Titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) on its way to flowering I came to Niagara Falls for the daffodils; 500,000 of them. More on that later. My surprise find was one of the world’s biggest, smelliest, most suggestive flowers in bud, the titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum). In the next couple of weeks or so, it will burst […]