On a surprisingly mild winter’s day — not at all typical for Quebec in December — I’m remembering the garden at Glen Villa as it looked earlier this year. January brought lots of snow. February brought snow and gloomy skies. In March, skies began to brighten. April conformed…
Do Christmas trees qualify as topiary? We never think of them as such but they fit the definition — the Oxford dictionary calls topiary the “art or practice of clipping shrubs or trees into ornamental shapes.” And surely Christmas trees don’t grow naturally into the perfect cones commonly seen but have been pruned and clipped to shape them. As…
Gardening in Canada can be frustrating. The range of plants available through nurseries or garden centres is minuscule compared with the number available in England. And seeing so many wonderful cultivars that won’t survive in my Quebec garden makes me envious of England’s more temperate climate. Still, for anyone who loves plants, a visit to…
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…
I head to England today, where I’ll be hosting my final garden tour. I’m sad about this ending, but at the same time, I’m happy to remember the people and places that have formed such a rewarding part of my life. And as I keep reminding myself, ends are also beginning. Before leaving for England, I took a…
This is a bumper year for mushrooms. On a short stretch of path in the woods, I spotted six different types. I didn’t pick any or examine them carefully, and without noting the specifics of their gills and stalks, I can’t identify them with certainty. Mushroom identification is tricky in the best of cases, and without being…
In the middle of August the garden at Glen Villa is just beginning to emerge from an unusually long dry spell. A few days ago we had rain — buckets of it that washed out our driveway and threw a section of bank into Lake Massawippi. (We repaired the driveway; the lake itself may take care…
Mid-July is truly the middle of summer in North Hatley, Quebec, when both the flowers in the garden at Glen Villa and the wildflowers in the fields strut their stuff. The Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’ at The Aqueduct is still blooming, a month after it began. The Eremurus ‘Cleopatra’ that provided such a wonderful vertical accent…
As June shines its way towards July, I’m outside soaking it in and enjoying the garden at Glen Villa. There are too many happy-making things to show in a single post, so today I’m focusing on only four. First come the hawthorn trees. We planted them more than 15 years ago and they have proved a…
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…