For the last eighteen months or more I’ve been working on an art installation that stretches along a 3-4 km trail at Glen Villa, my garden in Quebec. The trail moves in and out of fields and forests, and each environment has its own character. When I started the project, the idea behind it wasn’t entirely clear.…
Paintings on rock made by indigenous people many years ago give us insights into their daily life and the events and objects they valued. (I wrote about rock paintings here.) Monuments and memorials serve a similar purpose. So what do they show about what we value today? Traditionally monuments were erected to great men and generals who led…
Cave paintings on the island of Borneo showing animals and human hands have recently been dated back some 40,000 years, making them the oldest known example of figurative rock art in the world. (Details of the story can be found in various articles, including one here from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.) Think for a moment about how long ago that…
At home after three marvellous weeks visiting gardens (and friends) in England, I find much to criticize in my garden. After many years of travelling, I’ve come to expect this — and to accept that a garden in Quebec’s harsh weather conditions will never resemble an English garden, with its lush foliage and flowers, topiary…
Over the last half dozen years or so, I’ve visited several gardens in England designed by the Dutch plantsman, Piet Oudolf. These include Bury Court in Hampshire, Scampston Hall’s Walled Garden in Yorkshire and Hauser & Wirth in Somerset. Because I’ve seen and enjoyed these gardens, I was eager to see Oudolf’s Millennium Garden at Pensthorpe Natural Park…
On a sunny day, what could be more agreeable than strolling through a landscape designed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown? Earlier this week, two friends and I took advantage of the fine weather to do just this when we visited Petworth House in Sussex. The landscape there is one of the finest surviving examples of Brown’s work.…
Last week we added two new bridges on the Timelines trail. They aren’t large constructions but both allow us to keep our feet dry. The first bridge, near the end of the avenue of crabapple trees, avoids the ditch at the end of a culvert that goes underneath a road that connects our village of North Hatley…
Sometimes small changes make a huge difference, or as I wrote last fall, Little Things Mean a Lot. I was writing then about some small changes I’d made at the Skating Pond at Glen Villa, my garden in Quebec. Later in the fall, after I wrote about the changes, I made one more. I added a bench.…
Yesterday I spoke at the Colby-Curtis Museum in Stanstead, Quebec, home to the Stanstead Historical Society. The museum is a local treasure, housed in a classical revival-style villa built in 1859 called Carrollcroft. The current exhibition, Abundant in Bloom, is well worth visiting. It looks at the gardens created by the women of the Colby family…
In just over a year, the Crabapple Allée, aka the Avenue, has gone from dream to dirt, to bloom and gone. We started with this, a dull bare field. Four months later, The Avenue was beginning to take shape. By mid-November, the site was a mess of wet earth and newly planted…