Making space(s) with walls at Keppel Croft Gardens

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…

Getting personal at Keppel Croft Gardens, Ontario

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…

Keppel Croft: A garden with magic rabbit holes

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…

The OMG Summer Tour, Part 3: Rocking the countryside

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…

The OMG Summer Tour, Part 2: Hot colour in the country

As the day grew hotter, so did the colours in the next couple of gardens we visited on our Toronto Botanical Gardens tour led by Frank Kershaw. Now we were pushing into Southern Ontario’s horse country, a verdant quilt of velvety green fields plumped on rolling hills fringed with forest. As much as the last…

The OMG Summer Tour, Part 1: A city garden redefines “space-saving”

There were plants everywhere–in the ground, dangling from trellises, stacked over other plants and lining the tops of fences. And yet, despite the sheer number of plants crammed into this garden, there was a distinct sense of calmness and elegance. This was an eye-opening garden. But discovering a place that leaves you gob-smacked is to…

A garden festivus for the rest of us

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…

7 reasons for visiting Reford Gardens

Two weeks ago I drove (and drove and drove) to Reford Gardens, also known as Les Jardins de Metis in Grand-Metis. The historical landmark sits on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River about halfway up the humped back of the Gaspe Peninsula. The journey there took two solid days of driving from my…

Oh, Canada: National Garden Days, 2014

Ignore the calendar. Today’s your lucky day. There’s an Urban Vegetable Patch Garden Tour in Oshawa starting at five this evening. You can ride a bike to each private patch. Kate’s Garden Annual Lavender Vintage Fair in Unionville just kicked off its two-day shindig this morning. And you can do a Honey Tasting featuring honey harvested…