When I look out my bedroom window, this is what I see. Or what I will see before long. Lake Massawippi isn’t frozen yet, but frozen or not, the prospect reminds me that this is the time of year to look ahead. And to look back. What did I accomplish in the garden…
Shrubs are a key element at Glen Villa Art Garden, my garden in North Hatley, Quebec. Unfortunately deer like shrubs as much as I do. So when I decided to plant shrubs in an old farm field to add seasonal colour and to block a view of the road, I knew I needed a fence.…
Creating a garden isn’t a quick and easy task, particularly a garden that grows out of personal memories and the history of the site. The most prominent and visible piece of history at Glen Villa, the land where I live, is the ruin of a summer resort hotel named Glen Villa Inn. When it burned down in…
Trees are an invaluable part of a garden, so important that they are sometimes called its bones because they hold the other parts of the garden together. They are slow to grow and consequently are often the first thing planted in a new garden or one undergoing renovation. Trees do more than hold a garden together, though. They are miracle workers,…
The great English landscape architect Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe got it right. What’s past is past. But while it is over and done with, the past can’t be ignored. Instead, Jellicoe said, we should “ponder on the past not as the past but as a pointer to the future.” In troubled political times, this sounds like good advice. It’s…
In January last year, I laid out six garden goals for the year ahead, never believing I’d be able to achieve them all. I put them on paper nonetheless to give myself something to aim for and, to my surprise, I find that over the last twelve months I completed five of the six. This may be due…
Do you know when the phrase ‘tree hugger’ was coined? I didn’t, so I looked it up. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the first known use of the term dates from 1965. Other words coined that year: jet lag, mini dress, pop art, teach-in, doo-wop and time traveller. Reading these words, I felt like a time traveller…
Walking through the woods recently, I passed this installation, called The Forms. The colours of the plexiglass shapes stood out from the muted tones around them, attracting me like a magnet. Closer, I noticed leaves scattered on top of them, some haphazardly, some artfully arranged. The contrast in colours atop the orange…
The autumn colours seem particularly intense this year at Glen Villa, my garden in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Leaves started to turn earlier than usual and the height of the season has almost come and gone. But what a season it has been! It started early, when a small horse chestnut tree (Aesculus pavia) began to…
You know how one thing leads to another? That’s what is happening this year at Glen Villa. Last November we began to rebuild the foundation wall of the old Glen Villa Inn. Once the job was complete and I saw the impressive wall, I knew it needed a garden to complement it. The result is…