A noun. A verb. A blog.
If this seems a gruesome way to begin, it’s because of my “undying” admiration of the paddle cactus or prickly pear (Opuntia spp.). Did you know that southern Ontario has a native cactus (in the wild, it’s endangered)? This is the family, if not the one. And we can overwinter it here in Toronto’s USDA Z5/Canadian Z6. When […]
On October 15 (that’s today), registration opens for the 2017 Garden Bloggers Fling in Washington, D.C. and the Capital Region. My sister Sarah and I are both gonna be there, and we hope to see you there, too. We’ve written before about why we Fling. So much of it is the people we’ve met, some are now friends for […]
Houseplants and vegetables are the “gateway drugs” to gardening. They certainly were for me, and I think they are again today. I was a university student with a windowsill full of houseplants when first bitten hard by the gardening bug. Later, Mr TG and I had our first apartment and an allotment garden at the Leslie Street Spit. One […]
We should be grateful to Philippe Kahn, credited with inventing the camera-phone, back in 1997. (Or not, according to C-Net.) Whomever the mastermind, he (or she!) ensured we could have a camera, all the time and everywhere. So as we walked briskly past this fence near Woodbine Park one evening this May, I could follow up my double-take with the […]
When my mum used to tend our infant son, he’d pick up little expressions from her that, from his baby lips, were particularly cute. One was this, “Let’s sit down and have a little chit-chat.” And wouldn’t this be a lovely place to do it? It’s the charming, Englishy-formal pond courtyard at Squire House Gardens in Afton, Minnesota. […]
The Minneapolis gardener who installed this sash of mesh netting across her front garden bed (can you see it?) told me it was to discourage deer. I don’t have a deer problem, but it looked simple and cool. I neglected to ask her one question: Does it work? Have you tried this technique? And how would you […]
Ah, common names! Here’s a plant with many: spotted or dotted mint, spotted or dotted beebalm, horsemint and spotted horsemint (and possibly even dotted horsemint), for example, all with the botanical name Monarda punctata. No, it doesn’t look like your typical monarda, does it? Whatever you call it, you can call it great for native bees. Pollinators […]
Think of this as a late-blooming “Wordless Wednesday” – a visual, almost-silent* paeon to the glories of the late-July garden. These are all from the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, viewed on banquet day at the Minneapolis Fling. I’m not even going to name the flowers, but you can ask in the comments if you’re interested. Just […]
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 […]
The small studio garden of Hearts + Ivy designer Donna Hamilton is like a jewelbox, sparkling with gems. With colour everywhere, everywhere, you feel like a bee, wanting to flit from flower to flower to flower to flower. This got me thinking about focus. I don’t usually post people pictures from garden tours, but this one makes […]
Sometimes the things you find by accident are the best finds of all. Before the Minneapolis Fling began, my roommate Joanne Shaw (of Down2Earth) and I stumbled on this plaza when exploring the city while waiting for our room. Wow, I thought, that looks like something by Martha Schwartz. Well, guess what? It is something by Martha Schwartz. The […]
Herding 60 cats bloggers into our Minneapolis Fling group shot in the sunken garden of the Marjorie McNeeley Conservatory in Saint Paul’s Como Park meant we ran out of time to do Como Park’s Japanese Garden justice. At least, I felt so. But all was not lost. Perhaps it’s the dry shade in me, but I heard the sunlit waterlilies […]