A noun. A verb. A blog.
Sarah and I garden two doors away from each other in the same dry shady conditions. But, when it comes to colour, we couldn’t be further apart. Sarah’s all about the hot colours, reds, oranges, yellows; I prefer mine muted, going for pinks, corals, creams and blues. The red of this little ‘Happy Thought’ pelargonium […]
It’s that time again, when walking through certain Toronto neighbourhoods fills your nose with the scent of the black locust tree. These trees are all around the city, originally planted because their hard wood was useful for farm implements. They have a bad-mannered habit of spreading themselves around. You can see them, for example, sprouting […]
Today’s oblique musical reference is about Euphorbia marginata, also known by evocative common names such as snow-on-the-mountain, smoke-on-the-prairie, ghost weed, or summer icicle. All refer to the frosty-edged bracts of this Poinsettia cousin, in “bloom” right now in sunny Toronto gardens. The “fire” in this icicle relates to the toxic milky sap, common to all […]
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, […]
By August, my front garden is past its floral (tongue firmly in cheek as I write this word) glory. Spring is the bountiful season in this sandy, dry shade garden, and it all kind of slides downhill from there. Now the daylilies and Asiatic lilies are finished, leaving a few containers, some quiet hosta blooms […]
There are 23,000 species in the Compositae or, much more fun to say, Asteraceae family – including coneflowers (Echinacea), sunflowers (Helianthus), and, of course, Asters. Many of them are inspiring pollinators to do the happy dance right now. This little fellow is as happy as a bee in cosmos; Cosmos bipinnatus, to be precise. It […]
Part of the joy of travelling is the novelty of new experiences. Some are ephemeral, like the beauty of this particular sunset over Lake Huron in Pinery Provincial Park. In Toronto, not many places give you sky and water unmarked by human intervention, so this was a thrill. Also at Pinery is this shot of […]
We have been lucky enough to gain the use of two unclaimed 4×10′ allotment plots in a local community garden. My husband and I haven’t planted veggies on any scale since we foolishly gave up our Leslie Street Allotment plot when we bought our first house 25 years ago. I don’t count an occasional cherry […]
After inadvertently toasting my Hoya this week, two days of rain have both quenched and spurred the garden. Poppies are in tatters and the necks of my alliums are bent and in a few cases, sadly, broken. The perky stems of catmint are prostrate, and risk being trodden flat along the pathway. Morning glory seedlings […]
The deep red poppies belonging to my neighbour M. are making their brief but miraculous appearance in his garden. Therefore, I must bow down and worship, oh ye amazing Papaver orientalis ‘Beauty of Livermere’. It’s hard to decide which way to photograph them: as here, backdropped by the purple smokebush (Cotinus coggyria ‘Royal Purple’), or […]
Full disclosure: On this Blooms Day in the Microgarden, it’s mostly green. However, you can see my opening statement of columbines; some blue Aquilegia alpina and an unnamed pink of the granny’s bonnet form. Both prefer the cracks in my paving stones, where their feet stay cool and moist. All efforts to get the alpinas […]