Last week’s post titled ‘Winter Interest’ sparked a critical comment from Anne Wareham, a reader in Wales who is editor of the on-line site ThinkinGardens. Using the word ‘interest’ to describe anything in a garden, she wrote, “seems so very odd and hardly apposite really.” I agree. Interest is one of those lazy words we use…
When I first began gardening,, I thought that Quebec’s winter landscape could offer nothing of interest. Now I realize that I only needed to train my eye to see things differently. Instead of looking to plants for interest, I needed to look for patterns and details. Details like the sun-sparkled fuzz of snow that coated a clump of…
Are gardens intellectual endeavours or places to soothe the spirits? If a garden is intended to be a conceptual work of art, does it succeed if it has to be explained? And what responsibility rests on the person viewing the garden to understand the ideas that shaped it? Make the questions personal: should I have…
Last year I ‘followed’ a tree, a rather pitiful corkscrew hazel, becoming less and less enamoured with it as each month passed. But I enjoyed the process of closely examining the tree and chronicling the changes month to month — and I enjoyed following other trees written about by other tree lovers from around the world. I…
I love quizzes, crossword puzzles and any kind of mind-testing game. For years, they have been a feature of our family’s New Year celebrations. So as the final blog post of 2014, why not join in the fun? I wish I had thought of the quiz idea myself but I am borrowing it — quite shamelessly…