A noun. A verb. A blog.
Scrolling through my photo archive, I came across a set of photos I couldn’t believe we haven’t shared. These are just a taste from two visits made to the Royal Botanical Gardens‘ amazing Laking Garden iris collection in June 2014 and 2015. For many reasons, our opening shot lives up to its name. It’s Iris […]
Fellow Toronto Fling organizers Veronica Sliva and Lorraine Flanigan on our scouting mission to Parkwood Estate With Mr. TG reading Roch Carrier’s Montcalm and Wolfe, I’m reminded how little Canadians know (or care) about the history of their own country. That goes for local history, too. How many Torontonians give a second thought to the […]
The Locke-Irey garden alone (seen here with a hint of Buffalo’s many charming streetscapes), will have as many as 4000 visitors over the Garden Walk weekend. If you’d told us five years ago that we would eagerly visit Buffalo, Buffalo!, as a garden destination, we might have looked at you sideways. That was before, through […]
Over the next few evenings this weekend, you can share a close-to-Dickens-y Christmas celebration at an historic site just around the corner in Hamilton. It’s at Dundurn Castle, a national historic site you might not even know about. I didn’t till recently. We Canadians tend to be wimps about our own history. Just as with […]
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 […]
Getting A Lawn by Lynne McIlvride-Evans My headline is slightly misleading, because what I most want to tell you about it the annual Easter art show in the studio home of artist Lynne McIlvride-Evans. In 2012, it runs April 6 to 9 from 1 to 5 pm. I’ve been collecting her work in a modest […]
With 300 varieties and cultivars, the Oshawa Botanical Garden is the home of the Peony Festival If you, like Sarah and I, have a bad case of peonies envy, you’ll want to know that June 11 & 12 is the kickoff for the Oshawa Peony Festival. Peonies, like poppies, tend to come and go in […]