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Let’s focus here on just one of many reasons to love the garden of Lee and Jerry Shannon on the Minneapolis Garden Bloggers Fling*: Alpine troughs made from recycled fish coolers. Yes, that’s right. Fish troughs. Even while photographing them, I had no idea they weren’t concrete, stone or hypertufa, but styrofoam. This row of troughs […]
A welcoming way to break in garden equipment – invite it to a party and put it to work This wasn’t why we bought the trough, but as a happy coincidence it arrived at our house just before a Big Birthday. Post-Prosecco we put it (and another just like it) to work in another way: […]
One of a series of willow arches around the kitchen garden of Domaine Cataraqui, Québec A couple of years ago, we wrote about living willow fences. You can build just about anything out of willow – it’s a tree with a great determination to grow! This summer on a visit to Québec City, these willow […]
Look what’s being served as an appetizer on the glass-top table in this contemporary, east-Toronto garden! Could be the icy weather but, for this Friday’s Idea File, I’m thinking about glass (in French, ice is the sound-alike glace). Mirrors are one of my favourite uses for glass in a garden. They expand a small space, […]
Michelle Blais, in her do-it-herself garden, stands in front of her hand-made garden shed. What fun it is to peek into other people’s gardens, and at its best when you see garden solutions that you can actually use. Spying the garage in this garden, I thought “Wow, what a great reno of an old garage!” […]
Landscape artist Jean Paul Ganem and creative chef Michael Stadtlander having a laugh on the site of the Singhampton Project, earlier this year. World-renowned local chef, Michael Stadtlander, together with landscape installation artist Jean Paul Ganem spent this summer creating a special event—a gastronomic installation—at his farm north of Toronto this August : The Singhampton […]
Last summer, I was thrilled to visit the queen of all things handmade, Lorene Edwards Forkner, to see real-life versions of projects that would appear in her then-upcoming book, Handmade Garden Projects from Timber Press. Stick around to learn how you could win a copy in Toronto Gardens’ first-ever giveaway. If you’ve read my disaster with concrete […]
A great idea for a DIY bee hotel, from St Fagans National History Museum in Wales Remember that hose the car ran over – and sprang a leak? It could have new life as a home for solitary bees. Look at the example above from St Fagans, the National History Museum in South Wales. St […]
My son’s hand at age 12 still waves to me in my garden My first “concrete” art-making experience involved 250 kids, a stack of take-out trays, latex gloves, and a cement truck. My idea was to have each kid make a stepping stone with their hand print and name. We’d use the stones to repave […]