Forget celebrity train wrecks or political scandals. Real dirt, the kind under everyone’s feet, can be riveting. Before your eyes start rolling into the back of your head or you make a quick flick over to Facebook, watch Symphony Of The Soil. OK, maybe it’s not the most tantalizing of titles but this documentary is…
Fall’s loud and brassy flower show may have packed up and left but nobody bothered to tell the rhythm section. Seed heads of every shape and size are still shaking it up–none more rattlingly satisfying than Baptisia australis, a hardy perennial commonly called Blue false indigo or Blue wild indigo. A native of the Northeastern U.S., this robust…
Originally posted on gardeninacity:
Judy saw a coyote trotting down the street in front or our house a few days before Thanksgiving. Hurrah! Coyotes enjoy the suburban life. Photo from urbancoyoteresearch.com. I like to think that this means we now have our own neighborhood coyote, maybe even our own pack. We need some predators around here…
Originally posted on Canadian Museum of Nature Blog:
Have you ever wondered: Are Ewoks and Jawas related to each other? What kind of plants were Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru growing on their moisture farm? Do the crystals in a Jedi’s lightsaber come from granitic pegmatites? In the lead-up to the museum’s Star Wars Identities:…
The non-stop carols on the radio are already driving me crazy. I wish there was a switch I could flip. Before December 1st–no holiday anything. After December 1st–full-on Santa insanity. But I have one exception to my no-holiday-related-anything-before-December rule. That’s my adorable new Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides). Set into the ground just a few weeks…
Southern Ontario just got our first dump of snow and even though it’s only added up to a few centimetres (sorry, Buffalo), I’m already feeling nostalgic for green and growing things. So discovering a posting on David Suzuki’s website about eco-connections between urban and natural environments such as pavements and cliff faces, gutters and streams, was a…
If this coming winter is anything like last winter, I want to make sure I give my trees the best chance of making it through to spring. So I’ll be watering them, particularly the evergreens, until the ground is practically frozen solid. Here’s why: The needles of an evergreen are actually their leaves and, like…
You’d think a tree covered in pine needles in the middle of summer would A) be a pine tree and B) be evergreen. I’m learning how wrong I can be. And how un-evergreens are golden in the fall garden. Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus) is indeed a pine tree–a beautiful, fast-growing native of Ontario with long,…
Now that the temperatures are finally dipping below zero celsius here in Southern Ontario, my container plantings are beginning to bite the dust. And so the big fall clean-up begins. But this time around, I’m going to be smarter about it. Having spent this year studying organic horticulture techniques, I’ve found that there are easy ways to…
Small is relative. When I went looking for a small evergreen to fit into a narrow garden bed I have in the backyard, it seemed most nurserypersons’ version of dwarf varieties was my version of gigantic. A shrub growing to the height of 15 feet is not my idea of small. So I could’ve hugged John…
What’s more fun? Visiting a garden that can kill or finding The Blob in your garden? Let’s see… The Poison Garden at Alnwick in England has a sign on its locked gate that says “These Plants May Kill”. I can’t think of a better incentive to enter for gawkers and gardeners alike. There are over…
Looking like a small sea of green waves caught mid-curl, my hostas have brought a soothing kind of coolness to the garden all summer long. But, now that we’re edging closer to November, that coolness has turned stone cold ugly. In another week or two, they’ll be flat on the ground and rapidly turning into…
I love a good swale. They’re so when-you’ve-got-a-lemon-make-lemonade. In garden geek terms, a swale is a shallow ditch. But it is a ditch transformed. A regular run-of-the-mill ditch catches the rain as it sheets off a gentle slope (like a lawn-covered front garden, for instance) and, in the case of suburban ditches like the one…
You see them there, looking vaguely sinister in near-black silhouette, projecting explosions of spikiness. So it’s totally understandable that you might want to wade into your garden bed, armed with a sturdy pair of pruners, and give your coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) the big snip. Hey, you’re making the garden tidier and, let’s face it, friendlier…
When you want to give your garden a brilliant send-off before it slips into winter, asters can supply the fireworks. Looking like mini-daisies in purple, pink or white, they’re easy-to-grow perennials and (bonus!) the best of the bunch is a native wildflower of Ontario–New England Aster (Aster novae-anglia). They’re the tallest of the asters and…
Horticulturist, Arborist and Garden Columnist
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ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
Reflections On A Life in Exile
Saint Andrews Forest Farm Blog
a chat over the garden fence
There's always room for one more plant.
a little garden near Gawler
.....and nurturing my soul
Ministry of the fence 