A noun. A verb. A blog.
The Toronto Botanical Garden on a rainy (but clearly not grey) day in November Think November is drab? It doesn’t have to be, if you play your cards right. Look at the lusciousness in the photo above, without the use of a single flower – well, discounting the dried heads of a red-tinged oakleaf hydrangea […]
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 […]
Fight for a just cause; love your fellow man; live a good life = FiLoLi I don’t own a goldmine, do you? That makes us unlike the Bourn family, who built the Filoli estate early in the last century. It’s also pretty certain we’re not Blake or Krystle Carrington (Filoli acted as their mansion on […]
The Italian Garden on Garinish (aka Garnish) Island (aka Ilnacullin) A little putt-putt ferry took us from Glengariff in West Cork across Bantry Bay to see the Garinish Island garden by Edwardian landscape architect Harold Peto. Despite the drenching rain, I was excited. A Peto garden! But whether it was the quality of light on […]
Who wouldn’t want to sit in this shady nook? But wait, there’s more. This Friday’s Idea File contains a single idea, but hopefully one that provokes thought. Sometimes we have our best ideas by turning something on its head. Go on, think of something. Now think of its opposite. Does it make you rethink your […]
Shawn Gallaugher’s new venture Otium Exercise Gardens creates spaces that look like a garden, but act like a gym. A few of the gardens this year incorporated some aspect of fitness and outdoor living. Today’s Friday Idea File brings you ten things of note from this first day of Canada Blooms 2013. With one wee […]
Hot pink peppermint striped tulips with golden daffodils at the Toronto Botanical Garden, 2010 Let’s shake up this grey city with an blast of clashing colours. I’ll go on record here as saying I believe that nothing in nature clashes. She is always original and unabashed in her colour pairings. Designers, however, use clashing colours […]
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 […]
A small-scale garden folly can be like this dry stone fountain in Shelagh Tucker’s Seattle garden (see it close up here) If you watched Mr. Darcy propose dripping wet to Lizzie Bennet in the Keira Knightley version of Pride & Prejudice*, you’ve seen a prime example of a garden folly. Not his ill-done proposal, but […]
Trick #1: Break the line. The design above doesn’t follow a long, linear path, not even with the paving. One line of stone runs into the fence, not along it, and the rock around the fountain claims an oblique corner. Few of us city gardeners have room to be expansive. Yet skinny spaces can be […]
Our cousins’ clubhouse on their farm in Port Perry, circa 1978 Gardens need storage, let’s face it. You need somewhere to put your garden stuff, so why not make it playful or pretty as well as practical? You’ll be looking at it all year round. Let it be good looking – the subject of today’s […]
A rusty orb on stilts contrasts the spiky mullein; Dragonfly Farms, Bainbridge Island, Washington The colour of rust sits comfortably in the natural environment – like green’s complement red, blended with dabs of earth and bark. As with the orb above, even a smooth surface weathers into delicious textural variations. Rust hints of history and […]