Last month when I posted about the linden, or basswood, tree that is such a prominent feature of Glen Villa, my garden in Quebec, I was worrying that the trunk was beginning to split. I’m still worrying about that since a big hole in the canopy is clearly visible. The linden has…
Beside our house, next to a wooden deck that is rarely used, is a juniper planted when the house was built in 1969. Or to put it more accurately, beside the house and next to the deck are the remains of one. For the last few years, the juniper has been slowly dying. The photo below shows how…
Despite the bright sun that was shining half an hour ago, there’s a cloud bursting now, right outside my window. This cloudburst follows another one last night that knocked out our electricity and blew down three birch trees and a maple. Cloudbursts happen. Rain comes. But these storms are faster and fiercer than…
A month ago, the area at the top of the front steps at Glen Villa looked like this. Now it looks like this. We built the drystone wall that appears in the ‘before’ picture a few years after we moved into Glen Villa. We needed a wall because we had cut into the hillside to…
The Skating Pond was an accident. I didn’t set out to make a pond, for skating or anything else. But that’s what happened. The genesis for the project was an old covered bridge that played a part in my husband’s boyhood. In 2001 vandals burned it down. Seeing the remains, my husband felt as if he’d…