City Gardening

a gardening journal by Lorraine Flanigan

Fresh Dirt

Tour the Trees of Casa Loma with LEAF

Join LEAF’s Lauren Brown on the grounds of Casa Loma where you will learn the history of its urban canopy. The tour will be led by guest expert Philip van Wassenaer, who has his Masters of Forest Conservation, runs his own urban forestry company has worked on assignments concerning urban forestry and the preservation of significant [...]


Gardens

High Line in Winter»

I love New York City at Christmastime: the sidewalk vendors roasting chestnuts; skaters at Bryant Park; open-air craft booths that sprout up in Central Park — and now, the High Line.
 
Non-gardeners just shake their heads when I tell them one of the highlights of a recent pre-Christmas trip to New York (apart from the no-hassle [...]

8 of 12 Great Things I Found At Raleigh»

8. Private Gardens
The story tours of private gardens are a real treat of any Garden Writers Symposium, and the 2009 symposium in Raleigh was no exception. These tours offer a chance to see the best gardens of the region, to talk with the garden-makers and to discover new plants, plant combinations, and design ideas. Here’s [...]

Plants

If I had to choose just one … Japanese anemone, it would be ‘Honorine Jobert’»

The first time I saw ‘Honorine Jobert’ was in the south of France — near Nice I think — when I was on vacation and just new to gardening. I was dazzled by an entire border of these tall, white-flowered perennials waving in the wind. When it came time to plant my small woodland garden, I [...]

If I had to choose just one … brunnera, it would be ‘Jack Frost’»

You may prefer the creamy edges of Brunnera ‘Hadspen Cream’ or the gold-rimmed ‘King’s Ransom’ or even the silvery leaves of  ‘Looking Glass’, but my heart will always be true to ‘Jack Frost’. It’s not just the snowy foliage (it reminds me of Frosted Flakes cereal — maybe it’s a nostalgia thing…), or those gorgeous forget-me-not [...]

Style

This calendar’s a winner!»

Whether it’s the World Cup, Olympic Games or the Oscars, everybody loves celebrating a winner, and right now garden communicators like me are congratulating one of our own for her Silver Medal Award-winning garden calendar. The Garden Writers Association has just annouced the winners of its annual awards program, and Niagara Falls-based Theresa Forte has won big [...]

12 of 12 Great Things I Found at Raleigh»

 
12. Sir Walter
A few days into the 2009 Garden Writers Symposium in Raleigh, North Carolina, a fellow garden writer glanced up at the statue in front of the convention centre that we’d passed about a million times and realized it was Sir Walter Raleigh. I’m not sure what took us so long to make the connection between [...]