A garden with room for a view is one thing but a gobsmacking garden with many rooms, each with completely different views, is something altogether different and a little tough to capture with still photos rather than 3D Sensoround. But I’ll try. On a recent (June 23, 2016) garden tour presented by the Toronto Botanical…
To get into the head of a landscape architect is to see renovated gardens (at least this year) filled with rain barrels, fire pits and native plants. Hammocks? Not so much. I can predict this with relative confidence because The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) conducted a survey last month (February, 2016) to capture…
“We need plants to be more than just the parsley to the pot roast of our house”, he said. Ok. I’m in. Thomas Rainer, landscape architect and co-author with Claudia West of Planting In A Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities For Resilient Landscapes, has a way with plants and words. His landscape designs look like…
In its best show to date, Canada Blooms (March 11 – 20, 2016) is bigger, bolder and filled with more ideas than ever. This event, Canada’s largest flower and garden festival, has finally embraced the fact that it’s smack in the heart of a young, innovative, and very urban environment. Here are my votes (from…
Crisscrossing paths lead, well, nowhere in particular. There isn’t a blade of grass. The home’s rain gutter flows into drain pipes that spill into a rock garden/work of art. And trees aren’t necessarily alive to be considered useful and a thing of beauty. This is a front yard that stops you in your tracks. There’s always…
Hedges with no intention of hedging. Garden beds built for sidewalks. A swimming pool that takes a plunge into the woods. These ideas and more were on display at this year’s Toronto Botanical Gardens Through The Garden Gate tour, this time featuring private home gardens in the Lawrence Park area. Here are my favourites: 1.…
I can stand, staring at one spot in a garden bed, for a long time. Too long, really. You’d think that, after some years of designing gardens and nurturing plants, deciding on what to stick in a bare spot wouldn’t be that much of a challenge. But sometimes, for all the pondering, coming up with…
Commitment-phobic? Then gardening might be the ultimate turn-off. After all, growing plants entails sticking around in the same place to water, feed, prune and, yes, enjoy their beauty, year after year, doesn’t it? Not necessarily. Here are 5 ideas to have green and growing things with you wherever you roam. Click on any photo to read…
Going fabulously fake. Super-sizing. Turning the practical into art. There are plenty of I-can-do-that garden ideas designed for maximum wow at Toronto’s Canada Blooms, the annual festival of all things horticultural in full swing all this week. Here are my top five ‘likes’. Click on any photo to start each slideshow for more details. 1. Try un-natural:…
What’s going to be hot in the coming months is a hot topic every January. My favourite trend predictions so far come from the fashion world, convinced that 70’s throwback styles will rule this spring and, on the home front, from Pantone colour officials who are sure that, very soon, we’re all going to fall under the spell…
If you’ve got a lot with a house on it, chances are you’ve got a fence. It just comes with the territory. Literally. They’re practical things, keeping kids and pets in, other people’s kids and pets out, and quietly asserting just exactly where your responsibilities for grass cutting and baseball tosses begins and ends. But…
Is it just me or are gardens filling up with rocks? Huge stoneworks. Massive boulders. They’re everywhere it seems. If you’re in the mood to add some hard stuff to your personal paradise, get inspired by some of these ideas from gardens here in Southern Ontario. Click on any photo to get the slideshow started…
If Wilma Flintstone was a gardener, I bet her back yard would’ve been gushing with native plants–garden centres selling imported varieties having not been invented yet. But what would that garden have looked like? You can get a pretty good idea by visiting San Francisco Botanical Garden’s Ancient Plant Garden. My besty Diane Hall did…
Ever seen a tree in a park or your neighbour’s front yard and thought “I want that tree for my garden. What on earth is it?” I just discovered there’s an app for that. Two universities and the Smithsonian Institution collaborated on Leafsnap, a free tree field guide for iPhone introduced three years ago. (OK–so…
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 