Lust List: Heaveny Blue

By September, I’m usually the Girl from Ipomoea, with a garden totally, er, beribboned and festooned (aka choked) with morning glories. Mine are not the ones pictured here. They’re the pretty but common Ipomoea tricolour, likely old-fashioned Grandpa Ott, the first seeds of which were probably sown about the time the foundations of our house […]

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More massed media

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? […]

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Take it Outside! Your Houseplants’ Summer Vacation

Monstera Philodendron and Orange Abutilon spending the summer on my canopied deck. You’ve got overwintered geraniums and houseplants that have been cooped up indoors for months. You’ve noticed they’ve started packing their bags and are impatiently awaiting their summer vacation. They’re ready to burst through the screen door and start soaking up that gentle spring […]

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Top 5 Underrated Annuals

Our gardening tastes always get more sophisticated the more we know, and gardeners, self included, always get excited about all the new annuals (and perennials) available in the garden centres. Sometimes we turn up our noses at all the old standby annuals that have been in people’s gardens forever. Perhaps we scorn them because we […]

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Cracks in the sidewalk

Cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus) is a favourite of mine. Under the right conditions, they can be light and ethereal, with starry flowers that live up to their name – like white, pink, mauve and cerise constellations. Rotten things. “Right conditions” means that they grow better in sidewalk cracks than they do in my garden. When too […]

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Smell-o-vision

Too bad this invention doesn’t exist, as this post about garden plants whose smells I love would be a lot easier. How to describe smells? Almost impossible. I suppose there should be some way of doing it, like the way wine experts use descriptive terms to describe the flavour of wine. When I read those […]

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