A noun. A verb. A blog.
On a rainy afternoon at the end of June, we and our umbrellas (and cameras) toured twelve lovely gardens in the Upper Beach. This is my first time using a slideshow on the blog. Hope it doesn’t cause any technoglitches. If you have problems seeing the slideshow [ed: or if you want to view the […]
Twitter. Wow. Only through Twitter did I learn about a garden a short drive from home – from someone hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away in the United States. Here’s how it happened. Through Twitter links, I won a copy of the book The Green Gardener’s Guide by Joe Lamp’l. This great book has a […]
This is for islandgardener, who wanted a close-up of the tomato stakes in the front-yard vegetable patch I wrote about earlier. These are sturdy stakes, tied together in a network at the top and anchored to the edging around the raised bed. I don’t know anything about knots, but I have a feeling this gardener […]
Please don’t think I’m all about the flowers. Walking through the neighbourhood today, I was impressed with this front-yard veggie plot. Unsure if you can see it in the smaller photo format, but this little river of vegetables goes aaaaaaaaall the way back. To me, this looks like the work of an experienced and confident […]
Our neighbours G. and W. got a blank slate when they purchased their corner property: a sunny blank slate once their towering Norway maple was devoured by carpenter ants (not all of it, just enough to make removing it a better, safer idea). Look what a dramatic garden they’ve created in place of the old […]
My friends and family should rejoice that this is not my garden. If it were, I might spend half my time sighing with contentment. That’s certain to become annoying. If it were my garden, I’d also be feeling, and perhaps acting, a little smug right now. Ah, the perfect popping of another perfect poppy. The […]
Open Gardens Toronto is a fantastic program that lets us take an informal tour of our fellow gardeners’ spaces during the long weekday evenings of summer. (and on Weekends in fall) $25 gets you a pass for a full season, or you can pay $4 for each garden you view. Proceeds go to the Canadian […]
I’ve no idea what these city-owned strips of (sometimes) grass or (too often) weeds between the sidewalk and the street are called: swales? easements? Anyone know? [Ed: Technically, they’re called “boulevards” but the common name for them is “hellstrips.”] All I know is that more and more gardeners in our neighbourhood have started to cultivate […]
I have way more than one garden vice. Can’t stop buying plants, for example, although I know there’s no room. Call it gluttony. Fortunately, I compensate by killing a few. (A woman who can kill goutweed can kill anything!) I also fall prey to sloth, especially when it comes to weeding and particularly about mid-July, […]
If you are the kind of person who likes to peek into other people’s gardens but you’re always out of town or too busy when the formal garden tours are on, you might like to check out Open Gardens Toronto, which is, as they say, “more of a program than a tour;” a program of “gardeners […]
This little paean to one of Toronto’s hidden garden gems is long overdue. Set at the edge of the Bluffs near where Kingston Road merges with Danforth Avenue, Rosetta McClain Gardens [link updated 11/21/15] is a beautifully manicured space, or should I say: series of spaces. All of them are worth a visit. At the centre […]
Colour! Colour combinations transcend borders. This one came from the to-die-for garden of our first cousin (once removed) Jill. Jill lives in a to-die-for rectory in an equally death-provoking, picture-perfect village in the rolling Welsh countryside. Sheep graze across the dry-stone wall and country brook and lavender springs up at will in charmingly grouped clumps […]