If you caught last week’s post on Chanticleer, I hope you were left craving more. Chanticleer seemed to me to have a never-ending supply of gardening ideas. A water feature that mimics a giant sarcophagus/banquet table, evergreen mastadons and a cutting garden to rival Giverny? Oh, yeah! The Ruin Garden The “ruin” in the Ruin…
On a recent visit to Pennsylvania, I visited two world class gardens–Longwood Gardens, which I covered in a post two weeks ago, and Chanticleer. Trying to compare these two extraordinary places or pick a favourite would be like trying to choose between Cabernet Sauvignon and Champagne. In my world, it can’t be done. They’re two…
Longwood Gardens in southeast Pennsylvania, U.S.A., has been on my bucket list for years and I finally got the chance to visit this outstanding place last week. Entry tickets are timed during the summer so my friend and I had no choice but to explore the gardens during a downpour. Were we disappointed? Not at…
Down an unassuming lane in the countryside of Vancouver Island, a half-hour’s drive north of Victoria, is an extraordinary feat of landscape design. I’ve been wanting to visit this garden for a long, long time and then, just a week and a half ago, we finally made it there. I knew we were going to…
The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens is a system of gardens working together to make one enormous woodland garden that rocks (appropriately with rocks) on the rocky, amazingly beautiful coast of Maine. My guy and I were there only last week and the ideas I got from these gardens are still whirling in my head–massive stone…
My guy and I just got back from an epic road trip to Maine and I couldn’t wait to show you the mesmerizing moves of this dancing garden sculpture we discovered on a rainy day at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Powered only by the wind, its long, curving stems appear to dip and sway.…
A garden can be similar to the Tardis, as small as a phone booth to the casual observer but encompassing a boundless space with transportive properties. Parts of Keppel Croft Gardens have these qualities as well and it seems to me that the clever use of walls has something to do with it. So, for my…
In my previous post, I tried to describe Keppel Croft Gardens, the unique gardening experience created by Bill and Dawn Loney near Big Bay on the Bruce Peninsula in Southern Ontario. If pictures really are worth a thousand words then, when it comes to Keppel Croft, I still needed a lot of photos to describe…
On the eastern shore of the Bruce Peninsula in Southern Ontario, Bill and Dawn Loney’s very personal garden is equal parts labyrinth, zen oasis and trip down a variety of magic rabbit holes. Thank goodness they open it to the public during the summer. Though untrained in any formal sense, both gardeners have created a…
Sorry for the delay. I’d promised you this third and last post in the OMG Summer Tour series sooner but, well, life sort of happened. But I do apologize for any confusion. This post covers the last two gardens we visited during the extraordinary tour presented by the Toronto Botanical Gardens and hosted by the…
One day, somewhere in the middle of the 23rd century, Spock boldly goes on a plant hunt (watch the video clip at the bottom of this posting). He discovers a species that, at first, he dismisses as the horticultural version of “a happiness pill”–as if such a thing couldn’t exist. Every gardener knows that they do exist. And…
Houseplants can get a bad rep as limp dust-collectors your Grandma lines up along her dining room windowsill. But when you walk into the Wisley Glasshouse, part of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Wisley gardens complex in southern England, you get in-your-face proof that these plants can have a much wilder side. In a previous posting,…
Even on the wettest and chilliest of grey winter days, Wisley is a wonder. Granted, just about anything green and blossoming in the dead of February would seem like a minor miracle to this Southern Ontarian’s snow-wearied eyes. But this garden isn’t a jewel in the Royal Horticulural Society’s collection just because it so effectively reaps the benefits…
Genius idea or disaster in the making? Ever since Thomas Heatherwick got the green light to span the River Thames with a pedestrian bridge lined with trees, flowers and meandering walkways, the project has been accumulating naysayers. Called the “most expensive footbridge in the world”, it’s also received plenty of negative feedback for its location and potential policy for limiting the size of…
You’d be forgiven if you read “International Garden Festival” and thought “Hoity Toity Ho Hum”. But the annual showcase of out-of-this-world garden designs at Reford Gardens in Grand Metis, Quebec, is simply amazingly crazy fun for kids, adults, gardeners and non-gardeners. I recently posted about seven reasons for going to this extraordinary place but didn’t…
Horticulturist, Arborist and Garden Columnist
Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
Garden of Flowers, Beads, and Yarns
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 