A noun. A verb. A blog.
When you get an email on Wednesday evening from a Fine Gardening Magazine* editor saying she’ll be in town and she likes your blog and would love to meet you and see your gardens, what do you do? Do you rub your hands together as you survey your perfect borders? Or do you do what […]
If you’ve consulted Baldrick’s Dictionary, you know the definition of Irony. It’s like goldy or bronzy, only it’s made out of iron. I pass these neat examples of irony on my way to my Ryerson class every week. The wonderful coraline railing is on Granby Street, and the archway is between Carleton and Granby. Here […]
Who in this metricized, largely urban world even knows what a peck is anymore? In grade six, when our family was living in a rural community, our class had to memorize all the Imperial agricultural measurements: 2 pints in a quart 4 quarts in a gallon 2 gallons in a peck 4 pecks in a […]
Q: I am hoping you can help me with my Annabelle Hydrangeas. Last year I planted 15 small plants. This year they look as though they are receiving IV steroids every day. They are 5 feet tall and have enormous flowers that are absolutely beautiful. The problem is that we have had so much rain […]
More garden inspiration from Through the Garden Gate 2010 in “my” neighbourhood, the Beach. Some of the tiniest gardens were the most intriguing due to the added challenge of space – or lack thereof. The Asian-inspired garden above is one of five or six on this year’s tour designed by local landscape designer Kim Price. […]
Today was the first day of the Through the Garden Gate 2010 garden tour in the Beach. Despite having walked 21K in the heat this morning, I couldn’t not try to catch some of the gardens with my darling sister Sarah – although, afterwards I did feel as if all the bones had been removed […]
Welcome to the Microgarden this Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. Hope you like my new cushions… and enjoy the jasmine fragrance of the Hall’s honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica ‘Halliana’) by the front porch. I wrote recently about the nice perfume of the black locust tree. Well, Hall’s honeysuckle is yet another of those highly invasive plants with […]
If you haven’t nipped it in the bud yet, at least get this menace before it sets seeds. The brownish flowers of dog-strangling vine aka swallowwort (Vincetoxicum rossicum, syn. Cynanchum spp., from the Greek meaning “to choke a dog”) usually look fairly insignificant, though they seem fairly showy in this picture. I guess this particular […]
Never thought of garden design as a numbers game. But the Ryerson landscape design course I’m taking this summer is all about the math: Landscape Construction, Materials and Methods. For the past five weeks, my head has been swimming with formulae and calculations. Yi, yiyi, yi, yiyi, yi! The fascinating learning for me is about […]
It’s that time again, when walking through certain Toronto neighbourhoods fills your nose with the scent of the black locust tree. These trees are all around the city, originally planted because their hard wood was useful for farm implements. They have a bad-mannered habit of spreading themselves around. You can see them, for example, sprouting […]
Through the Garden Gate is the major garden tour that’s an annual fundraiser for the Toronto Botanical Garden. Today, I attended a press preview. It was hot, it was bright (the worst kind of day for taking garden pictures), but it was oh, so worth it. I’m not saying this because it’s on my home […]
Must be my Viking blood. I don’t do heat well. Was up Sunday morning early to douse the garden with my watering can and soaker hose before peak evaporation kicked in. Even laid down a couple of bags of mulch, now that I know where the volunteer seedlings are. (Mulch can be a major destroyer […]