A little siss-boom-bah! from one of the many inspiring gardens we visited in 2014 – Floramagoria in Portland OR Sending you all a wish for a very Happy New Year – plus good health and great growing in 2015!
Floral fireworks for New Year 2014-15
A checkerboard and a chair
The patio in the garden of sculptor Birgit Piskor was actually used to play checkers when this was her childhood home. I love how she kept it when she returned home and made her garden. When the rain and sleet and snow come tomorrow, this is where I’ll be sitting in my mind. Join me?
Breakfast cereal as a floral design tool
Hmmm. Not sure how I feel about this. Here’s a little Sunday Surprise for you – a novel use for Honeycombs cereal, spotted in a restaurant on a Montreal getaway this weekend. What do you think? Inventive or idiotic?
Wind and snow on winter grasses
More blow than snow on this first snowfall of Winter 2014 (well, technically Fall). An almost-wordless Wednesday tribute.
Wordless Wednesday: A crush on every leaf
If you notice a white-haired gal walking down the street with a bouquet of leaves… that’s me. Leaves, from large to small: tulip tree (Liriodendron), Freeman maple (Acer x freemanii), and even that danged alien Norway maple (Acer platanoides).
Missed Wordless Wednesday, so Thilent Thurthsday
Maize oui, it’s Waterlogue!
Wordless Wednesday: Coneflowers in Waterlogue
Coneflowers, photographed outside East of Eliza and filtered through the Waterlogue photo app. It’s almost shameful what technology can do – like turning a photo into a “watercolour,” as I’ve written before. To try this yourself, compose your shot well first. Enjoy my field of coneflowers!
A good kind of cloud
Some kinds of clouds are welcome in blue skies We’re still here; just a bit overwhelmed with this and that. Meanwhile, enjoy this long-awaited spring!
I Am Ed Grimley: The Spring Wait is Like The Night Before Christmas
Double Early Tulip “Monsella” You know that feeling where you’re a kid and there are thrills running up and down your body and you can’t sit still because you can’t stop thinking about the good thing to come? That thing that also seems like it will never come? Martin Short’s Saturday Night Live character Ed Grimley […]
What happens to your Green Bin, Toronto?
Toronto’s Dufferin Waste Management Facility Now I’m gonna talk garbage – more precisely, the stuff we Torontonians put in our Green Bins, and what happens to it. Ever wonder about that? Earlier this month, three other Master Gardeners and I were invited by the Compost Council of Canada to join a day-long tour of organic […]
Gardening without gardening
Leaving your mind blank can give you space for other things. Like admiring this use of chives as an ornamental. I’ve been quiet for a few weeks on the blog and Twitter. You might call it Unsocial Media. Or, in garden terms, The Silence of the Lamb’s Ears. The quiet surface belies the currents beneath. […]
Weeding, a poem on dandelions
Would we think they were beautiful if we didn’t know they were weeds? weeding by Helen Battersby A gardener must not love a dandelion. Its rays must not hook a gardener’s heart or show themselves as stars upon the hills, gold on the imperative of green. A gardener must not love the silken spheres […]