A noun. A verb. A blog.
Not very promising for Blooms Day, eh? But don’t go away. You might be surprised by how this story ends. Yesterday’s wind did a good job trimming branches from the trees, including these whips from a weeping willow. I wish I’d found more. Because, with their flexibility and buttery colour, weeping willow whips make excellent […]
Last March in the Dominican Republic, I watched a craftsman build a palapa or tiki hut from wood and palms. I recorded the process in pictures and have wanted to share it ever since. But how is the construction of a tropical palapa relevant to a Toronto audience? Especially a wintry Toronto audience. That was […]
Papaver orientalis ‘Beauty of Livermere’ is an astonishingly red red*. Our grey-day colour series continues with red. A craving for red seems to be programmed into our red-blooded DNA, especially at this time of year. And this red is pure Santa-suit, Rudolph’s-nose, holly-berry red – the red that seems even redder when paired with its […]
Sarah and I were talking about blue foliage plants this afternoon. She’d been thinking of a blue hosta for a friend’s garden. Large blue leaves would be just the right counterpoint to her friend’s fine-textured gold spirea. Trouble is, that spot in the garden gets baking-hot sun. The glaucous waxy coating that makes blue hostas […]
Look what I found at the industrial park! The contradiction in that phrase always strikes me as quaintly hopeful. It’s industrial. Yet it’s a park. Builders in the 50s and 60s must have been inspired by the great promise of industry – the same impulse that turned warehouses and pumping stations into cathedrals in the […]
Sarah and I garden two doors away from each other in the same dry shady conditions. But, when it comes to colour, we couldn’t be further apart. Sarah’s all about the hot colours, reds, oranges, yellows; I prefer mine muted, going for pinks, corals, creams and blues. The red of this little ‘Happy Thought’ pelargonium […]
If you’ve consulted Baldrick’s Dictionary, you know the definition of Irony. It’s like goldy or bronzy, only it’s made out of iron. I pass these neat examples of irony on my way to my Ryerson class every week. The wonderful coraline railing is on Granby Street, and the archway is between Carleton and Granby. Here […]
Never thought of garden design as a numbers game. But the Ryerson landscape design course I’m taking this summer is all about the math: Landscape Construction, Materials and Methods. For the past five weeks, my head has been swimming with formulae and calculations. Yi, yiyi, yi, yiyi, yi! The fascinating learning for me is about […]
You can add texture to your garden in many ways. Here, we have a tulip with fringed petals, one of the many forms (or textures) available in hybrid tulips today. Imagine having two tulip varieties blooming together in the same colour, but with different textures – simple but dramatic. Or try contrast. I don’t know […]
Last Sunday, Sarah and Helen visited Barry Parker’s Open Garden Toronto and were once again blown away by this lovely Parkdale garden gem. Helen: The first thing that impresses me about Barry’s garden is its structure. Structure is one of the things that moves a garden from good to great. And Barry proves that you […]
Here’s a cute idea to toast with your wassail cup. These orange slice curtains were tucked into a little corner of one of the Allan Gardens Conservatory greenhouses, and might be easy to miss flanking a doorway on the north side of one of the tropical houses. The late sun doesn’t show these off to […]
This mosaic of botanical tiles caught my eye in a panel beside the elevator in the upstairs mezzanine of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington. They look like fired clay, with the imprint of actual leaves and flowers. Please excuse the fuzziness of the images, taken in dim light with a hand-held camera. Hope […]