This weekend, July 24 to 25, the gardeners of the City of Buffalo open their gardens for a tour-de-hort that’s free to all and sundry, including we Canucks (and no HST!). And after a sneak preview during a recent garden bloggers meet-up (yes, Virginia, there are enough garden bloggers out there to meet up — more than [...]
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. 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 [...]
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 [...]
Story tours are a popular part of Garden Writers Symposiums. We all board buses, usually at ungodly hours of the morning, to tramp through public and private gardens. It’s a real challenge to take a photo without a single garden writer in the frame, and just as difficult to stay out of the way of [...]
Where can you ogle 300 beautiful gardens for free? At the Buffalo Garden Walk, which takes place on July 25 and 26. This is one of my favourite self-guided walking tours. Not only are there some great gardens, but it’s a chance to look beyond the outlet malls and explore the many unique and interesting neighbourhoods in [...]
If you attend only one gardening event this year (poor you!), make it the Toronto Botanical Garden’s annual Through the Garden Gate tour — Beyond the Bridle Path, which takes place on two days only: June 20 and 21. It’s not every day you get a chance to ogle the gardens of one the toniest [...]
6. Get thee to a greenhouse!
When it’s frosty outside, it’s a tropical paradise inside a greenhouse or conservatory. Here in Toronto there are several indoor gardens, including Allan Gardens in the heart of the city, the Cloud Forest Conservatory to the west of the downtown core and Centennial Park Conservatory in Etobicoke. Outside of town, [...]
Fall is my favourite season for a host of reasons. My Barracuda leaf vacuum and mulcher rates in the top 10 things I like about autumn. On crisp, sunny days, you’ll find me sucking up the fallen leaves from the linden in the front yard with my trusty Barracuda, or in the backyard chopping bags of [...]
In an age of instant gratification, it’s a wonder we have the patience to plant fall bulbs at all when we know it’ll be a good five to six months before we see their flowers in bloom.Why do these plants hold such sway over our impatient tendencies? Certainly there’s a feeling of satisfaction at planting [...]
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