This continues our series about why, despite everything, we keep returning to Canada Blooms:

2. Rekindling the passion

Within the spidery network of the Internet, I’ll probably regret using this term, but one thing you’re always sure to get at Canada Blooms is what I call “garden pornography.” We go to get all lathered up about about gardening.

Like the nasty stuff, this is about outrageous fantasy. Take the opening image in this post which, while not the world’s best photograph, demonstrates the phantasmagoria that we call, Canada Blooms Effect. Let’s clip that to CBE. Some CBE examples:

• Nothing but an egregiously high-maintenance garden would be able to have such a mass of densely planted blooms. To achieve this you’d have to plant only annuals, and be a slave to dead-heading and feeding, or have a “nursery garden” where all those spent tulips could be transplanted to ripen as the leaves turn to withered heaps – plus an army of garden grunts to move them there, then back again in the fall. Acres of greenhouses in which to pre-start the annuals would help, too.
• No easy-care Toronto garden would have simultaneously in bloom: tulips, South African daisies (which see: Sarah’s post on the rare Canadian gerbera) and yarrow.

Another example of CBE is this very pretty but largely impossible Oriental lily/hyacinth pairing, which brings together April and July. (Though, the way the seasons have been discombobulated lately, who knows!) All this perfectly labelled seasonal mish-mosh gives beginning gardeners a wrong-headed idea of what to plant, and what to expect when they do.

Okay, so let’s apply the Mustn’t Grumble Principle. What’s good about CBE?

Well, like those addictive home-reno programs on TV and the glossily puffy garden magazines, and even, yes, like the nasty stuff, Canada Blooms succeeds as it sins by getting the mind worked up about possibilities.

Just like when you look deeply into your lover’s eyes and think, “Let’s make love all night long.” It might, or might not, happen that way. Yet, the fantasy inspires you to begin, and perhaps to try something impossible that turns out to be wonderful. That can only be good for your relationship.

With your garden, I mean, of course.