A noun. A verb. A blog.
While we’re in San Francisco on our visit to the Gardens of Alcatraz, let’s take a little sidetrip. We met up with Bay-area friend and travel blogger Alice Joyce to see some of the city’s small gems, including the World’s Crookedest Street. Little did we know, it was also a garden. You’ll get an idea of […]
Forget that COVID-19 has us housebound. Instead, let’s take off for a garden tour – in the safety and comfort of our favourite seats. Where better to begin our jailbreak than the gardens of Alcatraz! I’ve wanted an excuse to show you them since way back in 2013 after the San Francisco Garden Bloggers Fling. To me, the name “Alcatraz” went with movies like “The Bird Man […]
It isn’t unusual to see Toronto playing other cities on film or TV. Toronto pretends to be New York in shows like Suits, for instance. But I went Hey! with delight seeing our city cast as a place on a different planet in a recent episode of Star Trek: Discovery. Welcome to a celebration on Vulcan! That accounts […]
Before the rain began this morning, our walking group headed west for a change. The Distillery District would be our turnaround point, but I never made it that far. Corktown Common and a golden patch of flowering witch-hazel fixed me and my phone camera to the spot. Click the arrows above for the slideshow. What an excellent […]
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 […]
If you’ve travelled along Queen Street East, you’ve passed the white-picket fence enclosed Ashbridge Estate. This is the family homestead of one of the east end’s earliest settlers. The Ashbridges – from whom Ashbridge’s Bay gets its name – were Loyalists from Pennsylvania, granted 600 acres that stretched from the waterfront of Lake Ontario to Danforth […]
Unless the real person happens to have been a multi-millionaire, real gardens by real people doesn’t apply in this case, but I can’t resist. The person in question was Sir Henry Pellatt, the super-rich Edwardian industrialist whose dreams and moneybags built Toronto’s castle* Casa Loma. At least, this picture is of a garden… which gives […]
Edit: The pink peony we found on site is probably Cora Stubbs, an old variety, highly scented. A while back, we wrote about discovering the recently installed Scarborough Community Garden on Kingston Road. The space provided for the garden came from the grounds of the historic Cornell Campbell Farm next door. William Cornell settled here […]
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 […]