Beside our house, next to a wooden deck that is rarely used, is a juniper planted when the house was built in 1969. Or to put it more accurately, beside the house and next to the deck are the remains of one. For the last few years, the juniper has been slowly dying. The photo below shows how…
Despite the bright sun that was shining half an hour ago, there’s a cloud bursting now, right outside my window. This cloudburst follows another one last night that knocked out our electricity and blew down three birch trees and a maple. Cloudbursts happen. Rain comes. But these storms are faster and fiercer than…
A month ago, the area at the top of the front steps at Glen Villa looked like this. Now it looks like this. We built the drystone wall that appears in the ‘before’ picture a few years after we moved into Glen Villa. We needed a wall because we had cut into the hillside to…
The Skating Pond was an accident. I didn’t set out to make a pond, for skating or anything else. But that’s what happened. The genesis for the project was an old covered bridge that played a part in my husband’s boyhood. In 2001 vandals burned it down. Seeing the remains, my husband felt as if he’d…
A fully-grown tree doesn’t change that much in a short time, or so you may think. But compare two photos of the linden, or basswood, tree (Tilia americana) that stands in my Quebec garden, Glen Villa. I took the first photo on June 13. I took the second one two days ago, on July 8. Even…
One of the first projects I tackled after we moved into Glen Villa in the late 1990s was what has become the Yin/Yang. A low, circular stone wall on the Big Lawn was full of overgrown highbush cranberry bushes. (I wish I had a photo to show you, but I don’t.) I loved the bushes with their…
It seems I’ve been travelling forever. First almost a month in Italy (yes, it was wonderful), then a week in Toronto for the Garden Bloggers’ Fling (exhausting and wonderful), then a week with my sister for some together time on Long Island and in New York City (hot, humid and wonderful). Bur finally I’m home…
Sometimes trees are part of a forest, sometimes they stand alone. As a child, the lone tree at the top of the field by my grandparents’ house in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia was a beacon, calling me out of the fenced farmyard and into adventure. The fact that it was a forbidden destination only…
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…