Must a garden have flowers? Must it have trees and shrubs? Must it have plants at all? I think most people would say yes. But consider England’s great landscape gardens. Some of those designed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown in the late 1700s had few if any flowers. And what about that masterpiece of garden art, the…
The hunt is on for a lost peony, the Lady Byng. This special peony was said to be very pretty, and it definitely was colourful, bright crimson carmine with a distinctive cushion of buff and deep red. It was also expensive: in 1926, it cost an astronomical $35. This is what it looked like: …
A year ago this week I wrote the first entry for this blog, Glen Villa: Site and Insight. In the introductory post, I acknowledged that I didn’t know how the blog was going to evolve. I know I want to write about my garden, Glen Villa, and about how it got to be what it…
The end of January isn’t the obvious time to do a year-end review, but since 2013 is well and truly over, it’s now or never. And since next week marks the one year anniversary of this blog, and I plan to review some of the top posts and your comments about them, writing a month…
A few months ago Don Stratham, a New York state garden consultant, wrote a blog post about garden mishaps, or learning from failures in the garden, in his blog called Rooting for Ideas. He listed some of his mistakes — and what they had taught him. But what his post made me think of was…
I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. But planning ahead for the garden is a regular winter activity. So this is what I plan (correction: make that hope) to do in 2014. 1. Clean up loose ends. This category includes more things than I like to think about. I often start new projects before the old…
After several more days of snow, our landscape is a study in black, white, and grey… Birch trees on the hillside: an arrangement in grey and black, minus Whistler’s mother. with the occasional touch of green… Spruce trees in the lower field and yellow. A touch of yellow on a broken ash tree. So many…
For the first time since I started writing this blog, a post is late, and by several days. Oh, well, it’s the holidays, you may think. But no, for almost a year now, I’ve managed a timely entry despite holidays, vacations and intense pressures to come away from the computer and enjoy myself. So it’s not…
How hard can it be to go from this… On the beach in Perth, West Australia to this? A snowy day at Glen Villa Very hard! But it is even harder to go to this… Montreal on a cold win’ter’s day: the view from my apartment window When I left Perth, West Australia, on Friday,…
Sydney’s Royal Botanical Garden is smack dab in the center of this vibrant and energetic city. Farm Cove, the first farm in Australia, was located on the site, which means its European-influenced history dates back to 1788 when the first fleet of convicts arrived from England. Traces of this convict past are still visible in the…