A noun. A verb. A blog.
With 300 varieties and cultivars, the Oshawa Botanical Garden is the home of the Peony Festival If you, like Sarah and I, have a bad case of peonies envy, you’ll want to know that June 11 & 12 is the kickoff for the Oshawa Peony Festival. Peonies, like poppies, tend to come and go in […]
Must be my Viking blood. I don’t do heat well. Was up Sunday morning early to douse the garden with my watering can and soaker hose before peak evaporation kicked in. Even laid down a couple of bags of mulch, now that I know where the volunteer seedlings are. (Mulch can be a major destroyer […]
Nip your lily leaf beetle problem in the bud, or in the egg, by squishing this pest’s red, shiny ova before they hatch. Here’s what they look like… laid in a line, on the underside of lily leaves. Oriental and Asiatic lilies are particularly yummy to the lily leaf beetle, and the three successive generations […]
Who doesn’t want a garden that’s low maintenance? Of course, the mantra is: Low maintenance does not mean no maintenance. Even if you’re laying down concrete grass and planting plastic flowers, some maintenance will be required. However, selecting well will help you keep plant maintenance to a minimum. If you don’t want to spend your […]
As someone who has grown bigroot geranium (Geranium macrorhizzum) for many years, I’ve long admired one of its daintier hybrid offspring. While similar in frilled leaf form, Geranium x cantabrigiense ‘Biokovo’ makes tidier mats of foliage, and its flowers poke up their heads without the long, scrawny necks of my bigrooted friend. Then yesterday as […]
Rosa ‘New Dawn’ puts on its party dress for perhaps the last time this season. It’s mostly foliage now for this November Blooms Day 2009. Clockwise, from large photo: the tendrils of Sarah’s perennial sweet pea (Lathyrus latifolius), the sere leaves and drying flowers of ‘Annabelle’ hydrangea (Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’); Daphne ‘Carol Mackie’ with Japanese […]
While doing the initial scoring for the East York Blooming Contest, I saw some high-scoring gardens that didn’t make it into the final round, including this Asian-inspired front garden. The tall tree is a standard form of weeping mulberry (Morus alba ‘Pendula’). In horticulture, standard doesn’t mean “run of the mill”, but refers to the […]
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a few things that got lost in the shuffle of the too-many-things-to-write-about growing season. One of them is Sweet Autumn Clematis (Clematis terniflora – also widely but erroneously known as C. ternifolia, it seems through a printer’s error shortly after its discovery in China; C. recta and […]
Is there such a thing as too many pictures of Cosmos? Perhaps not if they come on the tail of a post about mass plantings. This long fenceful planted end to end with the hardy annual Cosmos bipinnatus makes me happy every time I walk past. Has 2009 been a particularly good year for cosmos? […]
My favourite story about goldenrod (Solidago), the ubiquitous, aptly named native plant, surrounds the tone of surprised delight from one of our visiting, hort-mad Welsh aunts: Solid-aah-go, she trilled, grows wiiiild here! Well, yes. It does. It does grow wild, in every sense. In fact, if there’s a stranger in your Toronto garden with serrated, […]
Despite evidence to the contrary, this photograph does not illustrate why they call it “o-bee-dient” plant. Though the flower does seem to exert a siren call: Oh, bee… Oh, bee-eee…? This is Physostegia virginiana, and it’s called Obedient Plant for the way you can bend the individual florets to your will, making them go thisaway […]
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed when trying to ID daylilies: some of them are very variable in form. This lovely one is in Sarah’s garden, and (when we last discussed it) she couldn’t remember which it was. I love a hunt. But when I did my searching, the aha! prompted by my discovery of […]