Today, on the last day of the year, I’m looking back at what happened in the garden in 2019. Without question, the single biggest event was the Open Garden Day in July. Over 300 people attended and we raised almost $10,000 for the Massawippi Foundation, helping that organization to continue its support for community activities and…
The foundation wall of the old Glen Villa Inn is once again standing tall. Rebuilding the wall has been quite a process. In its prime the wall was the base of a grand structure. Unfortunately, like so many summer resort hotels built of wood, it didn’t last. A colour postcard of the hotel sent…
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…
Slowly the wall that used to hold up the old Glen Villa Inn is beginning to look like a wall again. As exciting as the re-building are the treasures we discovered when the wall came down. We found glass bottles of all sorts, clear and coloured, broken and unbroken. Some of the bits of glass…
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…
Don’t worry, it’s not a border wall we are building, only the foundation wall of the old Glen Villa Inn. The grand old resort hotel was built in 1902 and burned down in 1909. In the summer it attracted guests from around North America, particularly southerners who came north to escape the heat and…
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…
For the last eighteen months or more I’ve been working on an art installation that stretches along a 3-4 km trail at Glen Villa, my garden in Quebec. The trail moves in and out of fields and forests, and each environment has its own character. When I started the project, the idea behind it wasn’t entirely clear.…
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…
One of the first projects I undertook at Glen Villa was the China Terrace, a contemporary folly that honours an old resort hotel that once stood on the property. I first wrote about it as a conceptual garden. Following that, I wrote about it sporadically, focusing on the changes I made — the bed that shook off its annuals…