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.…
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…
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.…
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…
For several years now I’ve been working on a trail that leads through the fields and forests at Glen Villa. Sited along the trail are art installations I’m creating that relate to history, the passage of time and the relationship between art and architecture. I wrote about this for the first time in March 2017.…
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…
Many people have asked when we will be opening the garden to the public this year. The sad news is, we won’t. This summer we are working on various garden projects that need time to settle in. But I hope that in 2019 we will have one — or maybe two — open garden days. …
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…