A noun. A verb. A blog.
Black tar spot of maples (Rhytisma acerinum) is one of the few excuses I can accept for sending your leaves off in the yard waste truck. Toronto gardeners have likely noticed this unsightly fungal disease over the past few years. It manifests as dime- or quarter-sized black spots on leaves, hitting many kinds of maple […]
Park path in Beach area of Toronto, right off busy Queen Street Something about pathways through woods, parks and deep-dark forests has always been compelling to me. Did it start with watching The Wizard of Oz? A journey through strange places amongst strange people where you can’t get lost, because you have a surefire path […]
A week ago, we put our baby (allotment) to bed. Our community garden project of Summer 2009 was a qualified success. It got us back into the vegetable gardening groove, something my husband and I hadn’t done since becoming parents, nearly 25 years ago. And it gave us modest returns on our investment and labours; […]
Why would anyone commit to writing a blog post a day for the whole month of November, as I’ve just done for NaBloPoMo, the blogging equivalent of NaNoWriMo AKA National Novel Writing Month. A garden blog post. In November? November! When nothing of note is happening in any garden in the northern Northern Hemisphere. A […]
Perhaps it’s our English or Welsh blood*, but I like the rain. Sometimes we might get too much of a good thing, but there it is: a good thing. With my hefty, 2,424-page Compact Oxford English Dictionary (New Edition) came a button-shaped reading glass to magnify the mouse type. I love the way rain does […]
Compose your own captions for this Hallowe’eny Wordless Wednesday…
“Timelines, Strata and Ephemera” – See further info on this installation below. Québec City was born in 1608, and in 2008 it had a big party to mark its 400th. The Ephemeral Gardens were among the events and happenings that unfolded all through the year-long celebration – and which included a free concert by Céline […]
Linda from Crafty Gardener has alerted us to a new way to revisit some of our blogging blasts from the past – to introduce them to new readers and because some things are just worth repeating. This great idea comes from Happy To Design, who hosts links to reprises from bloggers everywhere. This post, written […]
When my son came across this circa-1928 image in the Toronto archives, I realized how much we take our urban forest for granted. This is a picture of the school across the street, taken from what is now our front lawn. And here is how the same scene looks about 80 years later… That tiny […]
The fall foliage I uploaded yesterday leaned strongly towards reds. Yet, sometimes yellow can make an equal statement. Especially a yellow intense enough to literally drag me down the street to investigate. Meet the Japanese katsura tree (Cercidiphyllum japonicum), a tree that should be planted more often in Toronto. This picture is just as it […]
Purple barberry (Berberis) showing its little red pal how to really do red in fall. In full sun, berberis gets that glowing embers effect; purple, red, orange yellow. Amur maple (Acer tartaricum var. ginnala, formerly Acer ginnala), striking in red. Yes, must get myself one. Too bad the columnar form is harder to find. The […]
The rose window of the Toronto Heliconian Club, for women in arts and letters. A colleague of my husband’s invited us to hear her perform a Bach concert at the Heliconian Club on Sunday. The club, celebrating its 100th year in 2009, is a place I passed daily when (long ago) I lived in the […]