The ferns are poking their heads up above ground, and I photographed several groups of them when I went out this morning for a walk. Much to my surprise, when I looked closely at the photos, it seemed that conversations were going on. Some ferns were lecturing, or at least giving instructions to others that were…
On the weekend, my heart was dancing with Wordsworthian glee. There weren’t ten thousand daffodils in bloom but there were far more than I wanted to count. For the last umpteen years, we’ve been planting daffodils on the berm above the Skating Pond. I’ve never ordered single varieties, always choosing instead to use…
This is a strange year. Like most of you, I’ve been spending far more time than usual at home, inside, seeing almost no one apart from my husband. I’ve wasted time and saved my sanity by reading, baking brownies and doing jigsaw puzzles. The weather has been strange too. Spring came about two weeks earlier…
Last week I advised myself not to set overly ambitious garden goals for 2020. I must have been under the weather. This week, I’m back to normal, aiming to accomplish most of the goals I set myself even while acknowledging that doing that will mostly likely be impossible. Although I set six goals for the year, I made…
We are preparing for the holidays at Glen Villa and waiting eagerly for family and friends to arrive. The group below came early. I counted 15 of the prehistoric-looking animals munching their way through the field where the long line of crabapple trees grow. Until last week the field was covered…
Work continues as we rebuild the foundation wall of the old Glen Villa Inn. I first wrote about this project a few weeks ago in a post titled We are (Re)Building a Wall and in that post I recounted some of the history of the old hotel. Last week I wrote about…
The job of rebuilding the hotel foundation wall is progressing but more slowly than we hoped. The slow-down was unavoidable, thanks to (really, no thanks to) the snow that fell this week. The snow is attractive, no doubt, but it has come much too early. The early snowfall is one part of…
I’m not pining away, but the pine tree is. Or was. This week we tackled a big job that I’ve been wanting to do for a few years, which was to remove an enormous old pine tree near the bank of Lake Massawippi. The photo below from 2014 shows the beginning of the end of this…
This weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving, and today I’m giving thanks for the splendours of autumn. All week the colours have been spectacular! This view along the driveway at Glen Villa gives some idea of how brilliant the colour is. On the stone wall of the house, Engelman ivy is a symphony of…
The China Terrace is my interpretation of history … a room in the garden at Glen Villa where I have recreated parts of Glen Villa Inn, the old resort hotel that once stood on our property. Towards the end of summer I wrote about the new ‘walls’ that we installed to mark the division between…