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…
Tasmania has a wild side, where native vegetation flourishes. It also has a cultivated side, full of bits and pieces of a colonial past. Some of those pieces are idyllic, like this riverside scene that could, at a glance, be almost anywhere in England.. A riverside scene at Nant Distillery, where very good whiskies are…
Looking at the photo below, it would be easy to think you were in Canada or somewhere in the mountains in the United States, walking alongside a clear, untroubled lake. For a moment you might wonder at the colour or the patterning on the bark of the fallen tree, but any differences from normal would be…
My first attempt to use ornamental grasses was in a section of the garden I call the yin yang. An old resort hotel once stood on the property (to my amazement, I find I haven’t written about that… must do so soon. ) In front of the hotel was a low circular stone wall. Horse-drawn…
This post comes with a link to Rain, a music video filmed at Glen Villa and in and around North Hatley, Quebec where I live. The video features Canadian folk singer-songwriter David Francey. As you will hear from his accent, David was born in Scotland and immigrated to Canada as a boy. For some years he…
I’ve been using ornamental grasses for about ten years now, and I’ve used them in various parts of the garden, including at the aqueduct, which I wrote about last week. One of the first places I put them was on the hill that slopes down to the lake. The plants, ordinary miscanthus sinensis, were a…
I don’t know when ornamental grasses began to gain popularity but I’d say that 20-25 years ago, few gardeners used them regularly. Thanks among others to designers like Piet Oudolf from Holland and James van Sweden and Wolfgang Oehme in the U.S., perennial grasses have become popular staples in many gardens. Their fluidity suits a looser, more…
Ever since writing in a recent post about Througham Court and how Christine Facer Hoffman, the owner and designer, incorporated Fibonacci numbers into the garden, I’ve been noticing photos of plants that illustrate this natural sequencing. Deborah Lee Baldwin showed this one in a recent entry on Gardening Gone Wild. Apparently this plant is euphorbia gorgonis.Who…