A noun. A verb. A blog.
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 […]
It’s Charlie Brown’s cry of guilty anguish as he puts the last ornament on his Christmas tree, promptly causing it to keel over. It is not a happy moment. And it’s precisely how I feel when I kill a plant. There are many ways to kill plants. A lot of them have to do with […]
Oh, how I enjoyed my nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus) yesterday. How lovely they were, so many flowers, so many peppery leaves. How perfectly lovely it was to think of adding the leaves to a salad while I was tidying them up with my deadheading snips. I must remember to do just that, I thought. Nasturtium leaves […]
Deadheading can be strangely satisfying. Unlike indoor chores, dishwashing, for instance, where you do the same thing over and over and get the same result—clean dishes—deadheading has a double reward. One, the wonderful cleanup effect Ugly seedheads are off so your garden looks less forlorn and…dead. There’s nothing that perks up a garden like deadheading. […]
Plantaholism has a positive side effect. When it leads to a superfluity of plants (as we know it does), it can make one seem very generous. Take the wonderful ‘William Baffin’ Explorer rose seen here. Please. No, actually, you’re too late. After languishing for years with sporadic blooms (mostly on my neighbour’s side of the […]
Gardening Instructions generally fall into two camps: the first goes into so much detail that you are tired and feeling inadequate even before you start, and the second is full of non-threatening but vague and wispy words. Words that are meant to make a difficult, possibly back-breaking, nail-breaking and sweat–inducing task sound like the easiest […]
Not everyone has your passion for dead leaves. – Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility What is it about Canadians and dead leaves? The spurning of them, I mean. To my utter horror, I’ve just discovered that my new downstairs neighbour has carefully raked and stuffed into plastic garbage bags every single decaying leaf in the […]