Welcome to the GVAG Blog

Talking Books and Gardens

Recently, I spent a very enjoyable hour speaking online with Heather Andrews, the Thoughtful Gardener. Her emphasis is on helping gardeners to create sustainable gardens that attract wildlife, support pollinators and increase vegetable yield using native plants. You can find her at Garden Thoughtfully. The website is well worth a look — she shares lots…

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Inspirational Ideas from Innisfree Garden

A few weeks ago I visited Innisfree, a wonderful garden in Millbrook, New York which I first visited fifteen years ago. Unless my memory is out of whack, the garden hasn’t changed significantly since then, but I have. In the intervening years, I’ve visited hundreds of gardens around the world, and as I entered Innisfree,…

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How to ‘See’ a Garden

This special blog post is an excerpt from Autobiography of a Garden, the book about the creation and development of Glen Villa Art Garden, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.      Questions to Ask Yourself When Visiting a Garden Context How does the garden relate to the world around it? Is the location special in…

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Autobiography of a Garden

You are invited!   On Thursday,  I’m launching Autobiography of a Garden from 5-7 at the Visual Arts Centre,  350 Victoria Ave, Westmount, Quebec. Wine and cheese will be served!     Autobiography of a Garden tells the story of my 25-year journey, as a conventional country property became a landscape that challenges what a…

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My Field of Dreams

La Seigneurie is part of Timelines, the trail at Glen Villa Art Garden that explores ideas about history, memory and our relationship to the land. Choosing the route wasn’t easy: there were many choices. I knew, though, that Timelines had to explore the terrain on both sides of the road that runs between our neighbouring…

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