A noun. A verb. A blog.
How have you been holding it together? For me, it’s being outdoors. Often. Back in June, I wrote about walking around the nabe in a love letter to my neighbours. But it’s not only out in my yard or on city streets. Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe, that wide band sweeping around Lake Ontario’s western tip, both offer many other ways […]
In 2020, with garden trips and tours and meetings cancelled left and right due to you-know-what, Canada’s Garden Days, June 13 to 21, is all about GLU (Gardeners Like Us). It’s about how garden-variety GLUs find pleasure and activity and peace of mind, even with the usual garden frustrations, in the garden. I’ve learned a lot about gardening from […]
The Islands might be flooded, and the record-setting lake levels are eroding the boardwalk. But all that rain in spring 2019 has had one wonderous side effect. The flowers on Korean dogwoods (Cornus kousa) this year are stop-in-your-tracks abundant. I had to pull over to capture this one exploding in white fireworks, just in time for […]
It was the worst of trees, it was the best of trees. And now my former 90-year-old neighbour is no tree at all. It’s just a stump. Yes, it’s an invasive alien that someone a few generations ago thought would make a great street tree. It did. But Norway maples (Acer platanoides) have also edged […]
This summer, I’ve been battling tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima) like never before. We’ve written before about this struggle, but I’ve never seen it keep coming back so aggressively from the root – till now. Ailanthus is an alien species (read more about it in our previous post), that has become a regular citizen of Toronto’s unguarded laneways and unclaimed […]
It doesn’t cost much to open your eyes in new ways. A $49 Toronto Parks & Rec course in photography, for instance. Ever since our parents put their Brownie box camera into my hands at the age of three, I’ve taken a ton-lot of photographs. Thousands and thousands and thousands. This course nudges us off Auto or Priority modes. […]
While planting the first 300 of my far-too-many bulbs today, I felt I’d earned the right to pause for a moment and admire the red fall foliage on my serviceberry (Amelanchier). The sun had scooted under the clouds and was making the leaves just glow. Amazing. This year’s glow seems stronger than last year’s. However, when […]
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 […]
Here’s a combination to remember! A burgundy-red Clematis (perhaps ‘Nike’? [Ed: My clematis-loving friend Marie suggests it might be C. ‘Mme. Julia Correvon’) clambering over a Japanese maple and then up through the “smoke” of a golden smoke tree (Cotinus coggygria Golden Spirit aka ‘Ancot’). Wow-ow-OW! Let me show you my shoes. I was walking in […]
Another of my plant crushes passed overhead as I began Through the Garden Gate on Saturday. This tree with the dangling bunches of pealike flowers is the kind that, when in bloom, makes you crane your neck back, look up, and say Oooh! It was one of the first trees on my wish list when I […]
This quick Sunday post on the first snowy day of winter 2016-17 takes me back to the Montreal Botanical Garden and their bonsai collection. It was November, too, the last time I was in the green house there, and this colourful and shapely Ginkgo caught my eye. To me, Ginkgo biloba seemed an odd choice for […]
As I admired the carpet of maple leaves in my yard (Norway maple leaves, she sighed resignedly), wondering if I had time to haul out my shredder, I noticed something. To be exact, I noticed something that wasn’t there. Can you see it? No tar spots. None. Not anywhere. We first wrote about the disfiguring fungal […]