This photo shows a wood chip path at Holbrooke Gardens, an English garden specializing in informality.

Garden Paths

Working on Timelines, the 3 km trail at Glen Villa that opened last weekend, started me thinking about trails and paths more generally, and particularly about the way the size, shape and the material a path is made of affect how we respond. What a difference there is, for instance, between the effect of a winding…

John was already on site at the registration desk when I took this photo at 6:45.

Open Garden Day Success

On Saturday July 20, over 300 people visited Glen Villa to view the garden and walk Timelines, the 3km trail that opened for the first time. The day was exhausting because of the heat and humidity but it was exhilarating to welcome so many people to the garden and to hear how much they enjoyed the experience.…

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Wildflowers and Wild Life

Some wildflowers are called weeds… but often those ‘weeds’ have pretty flowers. Consider crown vetch, for instance. Its purple flowers are lovely from a distance and it is useful as a temporary ground cover to prevent erosion. But it’s also a menace, in some cases covering and shading out native plants.  Chickweed, on the other…

I deliberately made the questions difficult to read in order to slow people down.

Words on the Land

A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the old saying goes. But sometimes a word says all that needs to be said. Or perhaps, more than a thousand pictures can convey. Words label each section of Timelines, the 2.9 km trail that we are opening to the public for the first time on…

The many petals of this peony capture raindrops.

Favourite Things

Sometimes, pictures of pretty flowers are enough. I took these photos in a garden in Knowlton, Quebec that I visited last week. It was a grey, rainy day but the gardens were glorious! The flowers in one garden were the stars of the day.     Bright copper kettles are no competition for the WOW!…

This drawing from Wikipedia shows the layout of a typical seigneurie. The St. Lawrence River is shown in blue at the bottom.

La Seigneurie

In the 1600s, when Quebec was known as La Nouvelle France, land was divided into seigneuries, properties under the control of a seigneur, or lord of the manor. Fields farmed by habitants were arranged in long narrow strips fronting onto the St. Lawrence River, making it easy to transport goods by water at a time when roads…

You can see the drone camera easily in this photo. The speck of white at the end of La Grande Allée is much harder to see.

Perspective

Last week I showed a tiny speck of white at the end of the La Grande Allée.   In that post, I promised a closer view of that hint of white. And here it is.     The white crabapple trees along La Grande Allée have finished blooming now, thanks to several (wonderful) days of…