A noun. A verb. A blog.
No, we don’t want you to take a tumble. However, the view of the Don Valley from the Leaside Bridge is one of my favourite places in the city to enjoy the fall colours. As it’s impossible to stop on the bridge, the best way to get there is by bike, or park your hybrid […]
This Thanksgiving Weekend is a time to give thanks for all our blessings – like the wonderful family weekend Sarah’s family and mine spent together two years ago at her little house in the country near Marmora. Here are some outdoorsy images of that autumnal time.
The unvarnished truth: My front garden, complete with hose and bald patches, doing its best to pose for its “before” picture at right. That headline almost said “Taking stock of the carnage.” After summer’s heat and drought, my garden – especially the front garden – usually does look like a battlefield by September. (To my […]
Today’s oblique musical reference is about Euphorbia marginata, also known by evocative common names such as snow-on-the-mountain, smoke-on-the-prairie, ghost weed, or summer icicle. All refer to the frosty-edged bracts of this Poinsettia cousin, in “bloom” right now in sunny Toronto gardens. The “fire” in this icicle relates to the toxic milky sap, common to all […]
Right next to our community garden is a field of white asters. Wow, I thought, the bees must be having a field day. Then I noticed. They were! This one makes me think of a bee angel. Hard at work, busy doing all the things that bees do. Hanging around, packing in the nectar and […]
My favourite story about goldenrod (Solidago), the ubiquitous, aptly named native plant, surrounds the tone of surprised delight from one of our visiting, hort-mad Welsh aunts: Solid-aah-go, she trilled, grows wiiiild here! Well, yes. It does. It does grow wild, in every sense. In fact, if there’s a stranger in your Toronto garden with serrated, […]
In Toronto, the blooming of the silver maple, Acer saccharinum, is a true sign of spring. Yet most people don’t even notice the modest little pompom flowers because they’re way up there on some of the city’s tallest street trees. When it’s not in leaf, you can recognize the mature silver maple by its shaggy […]
As I drove back from a meeting today, this little fountain of sunshine rose up from all the mousy brown blanketing the city. Had to double back with my camera. This is the witch hazel, Hamamelis, so valuable for its splash of colour (and, in many cases, perfume!) at one of the most drab and […]
What great flowers for late summer and early fall the Rudbeckias are. They’re like sunshine on a stick! This lowly little Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) is one of the earlier ones. Right now, the city is alight with constellations of Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’ which, in 1999, was rightly chosen by the Perennial Plant Association as its […]
Got all the plants inside, with the exceptions of a few casualties. Sad to see the succulents turn from a healthy turgid puffiness to one-step-away-from-putrefying liquid, but you can’t win ’em all. There were some pots on my sister’s back deck that I forgot about. I still haven’t even checked on them, but after the […]
It’s really time now, although I’ve been saying I’d better do it all month. The weather report says it got down to zero last night. Our neighborhood seems to have a bit of a microclimate, so I didn’t lose anything to frost, thank goodness. Now, I’ve got to figure out what to with with everything […]
I have tomatoes growing on two plants on my deck. Now. In October. They are actually growing leaves and forming tomatoes and flowers and it is October 21st. Both plants are the cherry variety. One of these plants, ‘Gardener’s Delight‘, I grew from seed, sown in April. The other plant was a rescued tomato plant. […]