This year autumn is slow in coming. Often by the end of September, the hills are as colourful as the big box of Crayola crayons I always begged (unsuccessfully) my mother to buy, with trees standing in ranges of red, orange and pink, gold and chartreuse, and occasional patches of dark wintery green. Not this year.…
Coming home after a tour of gardens in the UK is always a shock. English gardens are so lush, so flowery, so impressive in predictable and unpredictable ways. In comparison, my garden in mid-September is a let-down. In fact, it makes me think of a gangly 13-year old. The teen may have good bones and a sense of…
For the last ten days I’ve been touring gardens in Scotland and the north of England. A few days ago the group I’m hosting stopped to investigate two prehistoric standing stones. Their setting could not be more prosaic — a hayfield close to a busy highway, not far from the city of York — but the…
Yesterday I arrived in Edinburgh and tomorrow I begin a tour of gardens in southern Scotland and northern England. This tour is similar to one I hosted last September, which means I’ll be taking this year’s group to many of the same places I visited then. On the 2015 tour I was seeing some gardens for…
This summer I’ve been watching what used to be a manicured lawn turn into a meadow. Seeing the changes month to month has shown that what pleased me in June … became even better in July. I was thrilled. Was the transformation from lawn to meadow going to be as…
“No matter how panoramic its scope, a view of surrounding countryside becomes a genuine garden picture only when it has been framed.” – Penelope Hobhouse Recently I came across this statement from the English garden writer and designer Penelope Hobhouse. I read it quickly, nodded in agreement, then paused and read it again. Did I agree? Does…
Yesterday’s Open Garden Day was a fabulously exhausting experience. Some 325 people attended, and the feed-back was incredibly positive. Best of all, we raised over $6000 for the Massawippi Foundation — which means we can keep building trails through the land we’ve conserved, opening to the public a beautiful area previously inaccessible and helping more and more…
For the last few weeks, everything and everyone at Glen Villa has been focused on preparing for the first (annual?) Open Garden Day on August 4. Twenty volunteers are primed and ready to go, each assigned to a three hour time slot and to a specific area in the garden. When one of the volunteers asked…
It’s garden visit time at Glen Villa. Last week a group from Quebec City visited the garden; this week it’s a group from Ontario and the following week it’s another group from Quebec. Then, on August 4, comes the big Open Garden Day when we could realistically have 500 people or more. I think all…
Four weeks ago I wrote about the experiment I’m conducting this year on the Big Lawn. The idea was simple: let the grass grow and see what happens. My husband suggested the idea as a way to discourage the Canada geese who were frequenting the lawn and who don’t like long grass. I was sceptical but he…