Montreal is blessed with several great outdoor markets. My local one is the Atwater Market, smaller than some, larger than others. It sells meats, fish, cheeses, breads, fruits, vegetables and almost every sort of food you can put a name to. At this time of year, though, the Atwater Market is brimming over with pumpkins.…
Site and Insight: Reflecting on Art and Landscape has been honoured with a prestigious Silver Award for electronic media. The award, for the website overall, was given by The Garden Writers’ Association, a large American-based organization that brings together garden writers from around the world. Site and Insight was one of 231 entries judged…
Last year, Michael Gordon, a gardener in New Hampshire, wrote about a book called Go With Me: 50 Steps to Landscape Thinking. In his blog post he described how he used the book to enrich a tour he was leading through gardens in England. His description intrigued me and I immediately ordered the book on…
Crocus and daffodils are sure signs of spring, and I await their appearance at Glen Villa, my garden in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, with bated breath. (Will snow come again or is it finally safe to remove my winter tires?) A less common sign of spring here is the flower that was blooming yesterday…
Winter this year was longer and colder than usual, and the deeper-than-normal snow lingered long past its ‘best before’ date. I worried that spring would be so short that our sugar bush would yield less sap than normal, and so less of that delicious product, maple syrup. I needn’t have worried. The late…
Finally, the snow is melting and the ground that has been hidden for so many months is beginning to re-appear. Today temperatures rose to 15C or so, a big change from what we’ve been experiencing. And the sky was bright and beautifully blue. Despite this, not much is happening yet to the tree…
Last fall I submitted a proposal to the International Garden Festival at Métis, Quebec as part of a mulit-disciplinary team. The Festival is one of the leading annual garden festivals in the world — a “forum for innovation and experimentation and an exceptional showcase and launching pad for participating designers from a host of disciplines,” to quote…
An earlier version of this post referred to a photo found on line and credited there to the Cultural Landscape Foundation. Thank you to Christine Facer Hoffman for pointing out that the photo said to be of the Garden Cosmic Speculation was actually her own photo, of her own garden at Througham Court. For my review of…
Flowers are lovely things. The colour, the shape, the texture, the scent: flowers have them all. But at this time of year, when flowers are only a future prospect, I am searching for beauty in other places. (Yes, there is beauty in the winter landscape, but I’ve had enough of it.) So instead…
I’m a big fan of ThinkinGardens, the British website edited by Anne Wareham. While the bulk of the posts relate to gardening and gardens in England, posts also cover topics of wider interest. As the website itself says, it’s a website “for people who want more than gardening from gardens.” ThinkinGardens isn’t modest or retiring, and…