What’s likely to happen after you’ve put in all that effort to plant your fall tulips? Get a beautiful patch of blooms next spring? Nope. If you live in Southern Ontario, the chances of them making it through the first 48 hours in the ground without squirrels getting to them is pretty slim. I’ve had…
I just got the cutest poster in the mail. Hand-drawn pictures of flowers, shrubs and trees illustrated “Ontario’s pollinator pals”–pollinator-friendly plants that Ontario Nature is suggesting you plant in your garden. It’s a good idea. Bees, butterflies, moths and birds help spread pollen so that more plants grow. We should help these critters by supplying…
I didn’t think of marigolds as a salad ingredient until I visited the vegetable and herb garden at Les Jardin de Metis, also known as Reford Gardens. The ‘potager‘ as it’s called there (hey, it is in Quebec) is a screaming example of how things you can eat can also make the most incredibly beautiful garden. The…
“When extinction adjusts the number of species to the [undisturbed] land area that remains for the plants, mammals, reptiles, birds, and invertebrates of North America (something that will happen within most of our lifetimes), we will have lost 95 percent of the species that greeted the Pilgrims.” That sentence was excerpted from my textbook, Bringing…
When I first saw this mesmerizing flower at Sissinghurst Castle Garden in the Weald of Kent (which is a fancy way of saying in a bit of South East England) I had no idea that the plant was actually a North American wildflower. All I could think of was that all those delicate white and…
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…
Globe thistle (Echinops sphaerocephalus) shares its name with a cuter-than-cute hedgehog from Madagascar (Echinops telfairi) because of their uncanny resemblance but, by the light of a recent super moon, I thought the plant looked very nearly like a teeny, tiny exploding planet. Almost, but not quite. Planetary explosions must be massively messy and the head of a globe thistle has to…
The sun has almost completed its wide arc around your house and is low on the horizon, finally lighting up your back patio. Beads of moisture start to form on your icy G&T. After hours of chilly AC, you’re loving the heat. But for your flower-filled planters, maybe not so much. If you walk out onto your…
Originally posted on Old School Garden:
Can you spot the odd one out? Old School Gardener
In a post earlier this year I asked “Are you ready to give up your lawn?” The motivation behind the question was sincere but, now that I’m neck deep in organic horticulture studies, I’ve realized I was really just jumping on a bandwagon. Sneering at lawns has seemed the politically correct thing to do for…
I just got tipped off by the folks at Garden Rant that they’d been asked by Time Inc.’s Money.com for some “brutally honest” advice about where to spend big moola on your garden and when to keep your cash in your pocket. From an online collective with a website subtitled “Uprooting the gardening world” that…
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…
A pot of plants at the front door makes a great welcome. But a really BIG arrangement of plants and sticks and stuff that towers over your head registers high octane on the Howdy Meter. Here are some ideas for easy, budget-friendly containers inspired by front entrance whoppers I found on recent garden tours in Cabbagetown…
A pool with its own rain maker, a veggie patch on wheels, complete with pinwheel, and strings of Christmas tree bulbs carefully chosen to match the posies in a June-blooming front garden…. Yup, these can only mean one thing–the annual Cabbagetown garden tour in downtown Toronto. Yesterday, I did this annual walkabout with one of…
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 