A noun. A verb. A blog.
It may sound hyperbolic, but it’s true. This book has changed my interior landscape. For the better. Since getting my review copy of Tara Heibel and Tassy de Give’s book Rooted in Design last spring, houseplants have been popping up at home all over the place. And, if you read this blog, you know how bad […]
If you’re a creative person (as gardeners often are) it’s easy to get hung up on perfection. Rather than appreciating the garden that is, you compare it with the garden that exists only in your mind – your dreams. And you grumble. I love your garden, people might tell you. While, grumbler that you are, you give them […]
Last night, I was presenting at the Newmarket Garden Club – a demonstration on making simple flower arrangements using materials from your (in this case, mostly my) garden. It was a fun 50 minutes, during which I did five designs. The materials weren’t all from my garden. It’s the mini Microgarden, after all. There were five kinds […]
In a tableau I might call “Pardon My Dust” (which you might not have noticed if I’d not pointed it out) I hope to show that even my most lowly terrarium creation in the brandy snifter can add something cool to a tabletop setting. A shocking months and months have passed since I received my […]
This picture shows me where the white tulips are winding down As garden bloggers, we’re often trying to present only the pretty pictures – making the camera show us off to our best advantage. But as gardeners, we really need to look at the “bad side” of our gardens sometimes, using photographs as record-keepers and […]
Keeyla Meadows’ garden in Albany, California – would you be this brave with colour? Oh, my! The sensory overload of Summer 2013. We have so many wonderful gardens to share with you, it’s been hard to know where to begin. We should have been blogging all summer but, as you can see, we were barely […]
Curved walks in both tiny gardens expand the sense of space, turning the few strides to the front porch into a winding path Do you have a tiny front yard? Many people in Toronto do and wonder what the heck to do with it. The photos of two east-end gardens that I recently recovered* show […]
Ingredients: Paper birch poles, staghorn sumach, rosehips, magnolia leaves, silvery eucalyptus (okay, okay, these last two aren’t local), variegated boxwood, noble fir, white pine, and, although you can’t see them here, red-budded pussy willow. Also not visible are the purple chard and Swiss chard from this summer, still producing around the edges. In this one, […]
Between the busy-ness of summer holidays and back to school, September’s garden can be messy. That’s so in my back garden, where morning glories typically take over by September. This year, they are true to type. Because our front yard Grand Simplification project consumed us this summer, the Microgarden in the back is now channelling Aretha Franklin: N.E.G.L.E.C.T., just a […]
Here’s the inspiration I promised when I wrote about concrete garden projects last week: works of imagination – all of them carefully crafted of concrete – by Victoria, B.C., sculptor, Birgit Piskor. And here’s the bonus. Not only is Piskor a gifted sculptor, she is also a gifted gardener. In July, I enjoyed a guided tour […]
Seattle gardeners, Jim and Suzette Birrell (with grand-sprout) The great thing about the private gardens we visited during the 2011 Garden Bloggers’ Fling in Seattle, Washington, was that they were all designed and maintained by the homeowners, themselves. It’s inspiring to see the work of professional garden designers (which some of the homeowners were), but […]
Author/gardener Olev Edur and his book, Ravine Diary Sunday lived up to its sunny name for the Beach Garden Tour. As a change from a photo essay, this profile of Olev Edur’s ravine garden will be the first in a series on some of the gardens… and gardeners… on this year’s Beach tour. Olev Edur’s […]