City Gardening

Another entry in the Year of the Vegetable Gardening Book, Sonia Day’s Incredible Edibles: 43 Fun Things to Grow in the City is sure to be packed with Sonia’s earthy advice. Her practical, no-nonsense approach to gardening means the pages of her latest book are bound to offer great growing advice for city gardeners.     [...]

  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 [...]

  11. Bottle trees Discovering new plants is a big part of why I attend conferences such as the 2009 Garden Writers Symposium in Raleigh, North Carolina. It can also be frustrating, especially if the plants aren’t hardy enough for my USDA Zone 5 garden in Toronto. None-the-less, I’m always captivated by shrubs, trees and [...]

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 [...]

9. BirdCam “Look at the birdie!” has never had more meaning. While roaming the exhibit hall for new gardening products at the 2009 Garden Writers Symposium in Raleigh, North Carolina, I found a great bird-watching gadget. The Audubon BirdCam actually lets you capture images of the birds that visit your backyard feeder. This weather-resistant outdoor [...]

   I should know by now that gardening life rarely leads us down a straight and narrow path. But a cooking show, and a healthy one at that? But that’s exactly where  my gardening friends, Carol Cowan, Carol Gardner and Lorraine Hunter and I wound up. Last week, W Network’s Healthy Gourmet, televised on the VIVA  channel, taped [...]

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 [...]

The semi-annual Journees des Plantes at Courson, just outside Paris, draws plant nerds from all over France, Europe and North America — including me! In May, 2009, three and a half days of pouring rain tested the mettle of both visitors and exhibitors alike. But muddy ruts a foot deep and tractors pulling cars out [...]

Niche marketing has reached new heights. Just in time for Easter, I’ve discovered a nursery that specializes in chocolate plants. Chocolate Flower Farm in Langley Washington features all things chocolate, from candles, soap and teas to annual and perennial plants and seeds. Oh my, and what temptations they have!  I’m salivating over Nicotiana ‘Chocolate Smoke’ and [...]

Just in the last week, I’ve attended two lectures on vegetable gardening, read innumerable blog posts about planting veggies and today, what do you think arrived in the mail? Doug Green’s Guide to Canadian Vegetable Gardening. For a dyed in the wool carnivore, all this talk about vegetable plots is a tad difficult to swallow. [...]