City Gardening

a gardening journal by Lorraine Flanigan

Archives for the ‘Style’ Category

This calendar’s a winner!

By Lorraine • Jun 28th, 2010 • Category: Designers, Gurus & Trends, Fresh Dirt, Style

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

By Lorraine • Oct 14th, 2009 • Category: Places, Style

 
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 [...]



10 of 12 Great Things I Found at Raleigh

By Lorraine • Oct 12th, 2009 • Category: Designers, Gurus & Trends, Style

10. Play Checks
My family, friends and most passersby who spy the newspaper on the front porch at 9 a.m. know that I’m not a morning person. So, when I dragged myself out of bed to attend the 8 a.m. keynote speech at the 2009 Garden Writers Symposium in Raleigh, I sincerely hoped it would be [...]



6 of 12 Great Things I Found at Raleigh

By Lorraine • Oct 5th, 2009 • Category: Designers, Gurus & Trends, Style

 
6. Natural landscapes for the real world
Larry Weaner, a landscape architect based in Glenside, Pennsylviania, opened his talk on “Breaking the Rules” at the 2009 Garden Writers Symposium in Raleigh with a story about how Native Americans were this continent’s first ecologists. Among their sustainable practices was the deliberate division the carex plants growing in [...]



Eye-Level Pots

By Lorraine • Jun 6th, 2009 • Category: Containers Forever, Style

Spotting trends at the Journees des Plantes at Chateau Courson, France is pretty darned easy. Making a fine first impression were Francis Arsene’s towering zinc planters, which lined both sides of the walkway to the entrance booth of the show. Working through his company, Arzinc, Arsene has used zinc to craft everything from furniture, lamps [...]



Potted Potager

By Lorraine • Mar 31st, 2009 • Category: Containers Forever

In small city gardens, it’s often a challenge to find enough space to grow all the ornamental plants you love, let alone veggies and herbs. And if you live in an apartment, it takes a certain dedication not only to find enough space to grow, but to surmount drying winds and scorching temperatures to bring [...]



A Cornucopia of Plants for Fall Containers

By Lorraine • Oct 13th, 2008 • Category: Containers Forever, Style

With fall in the air, all gardeners’ thoughts turn to autumn planters – right? Like opening the closet to examine the state of our fall wardrobes, planning a container of autumn plants signals the change of season from the fun, but toasty days of summer, to the energizingly crisp cool days of fall.
Each year it [...]



Garden Show Off Contest

By Lorraine • Oct 8th, 2008 • Category: Style, Tempting Projects

Attention, home-grown garden designers. Canadian Gardening is running an online beauty contest for the best home and garden makeovers. This is a chance for all city gardeners to strut your stuff and show off your horticultural accomplishments. Even if you don’t think your garden is worthy, it’s fun to scroll through the entries with a savvy eye [...]



3 Ways To “Fluff” a Garden

By Lorraine • Oct 4th, 2008 • Category: Style, Tempting Projects

My cleaning lady is a “house fluffer”. When she’s not vacuuming and dusting, she’s tarting up a house to make it look its best before it goes up for sale. An outsider like her, charged with the task of transforming well-lived-in spaces into masterpieces of interior design, has a fresh and objective eye on what [...]



City Farmers

By Lorraine • Oct 2nd, 2008 • Category: Designers, Gurus & Trends

Growing vegetables in the city has become so popular that the University of Guelph has launched The Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming. The one hectare market garden located in the northwest corner of the Arboretum offers hands-on, practical experience as part of part of U of G’s major in organic agriculture. Hankerin’ to be an [...]