In the middle of August the garden at Glen Villa is just beginning to emerge from an unusually long dry spell. A few days ago we had rain — buckets of it that washed out our driveway and threw a section of bank into Lake Massawippi. (We repaired the driveway; the lake itself may take care…
For several years now I’ve been working on a trail that leads through the fields and forests at Glen Villa. Sited along the trail are art installations I’m creating that relate to history, the passage of time and the relationship between art and architecture. I wrote about this for the first time in March 2017.…
Mid-July is truly the middle of summer in North Hatley, Quebec, when both the flowers in the garden at Glen Villa and the wildflowers in the fields strut their stuff. The Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’ at The Aqueduct is still blooming, a month after it began. The Eremurus ‘Cleopatra’ that provided such a wonderful vertical accent…
Many people have asked when we will be opening the garden to the public this year. The sad news is, we won’t. This summer we are working on various garden projects that need time to settle in. But I hope that in 2019 we will have one — or maybe two — open garden days. …
As June shines its way towards July, I’m outside soaking it in and enjoying the garden at Glen Villa. There are too many happy-making things to show in a single post, so today I’m focusing on only four. First come the hawthorn trees. We planted them more than 15 years ago and they have proved a…
Yesterday I spoke at the Colby-Curtis Museum in Stanstead, Quebec, home to the Stanstead Historical Society. The museum is a local treasure, housed in a classical revival-style villa built in 1859 called Carrollcroft. The current exhibition, Abundant in Bloom, is well worth visiting. It looks at the gardens created by the women of the Colby family…
In just over a year, the Crabapple Allée, aka the Avenue, has gone from dream to dirt, to bloom and gone. We started with this, a dull bare field. Four months later, The Avenue was beginning to take shape. By mid-November, the site was a mess of wet earth and newly planted…
I saw this wildflower in the woods last week and was surprised to learn its botanical name, Cardamine diphylla. I was surprised because only a week or so ago, I looked up the name of another plant, now growing in damp areas in the garden and in the fields at Glen Villa. Its botanical name…
One of the first projects I undertook at Glen Villa was the China Terrace, a contemporary folly that honours an old resort hotel that once stood on the property. I first wrote about it as a conceptual garden. Following that, I wrote about it sporadically, focusing on the changes I made — the bed that shook off its annuals…
In 2016, in order to discourage Canada geese from ‘littering’ the lawn, we began to transform it into a meadow. We didn’t follow the advice given by experts on how to create a meadow — their process involved too much work and too much expense. Instead we simply stopped cutting the grass. We let it grow throughout the season…