In January last year, I laid out six garden goals for the year ahead, never believing I’d be able to achieve them all. I put them on paper nonetheless to give myself something to aim for and, to my surprise, I find that over the last twelve months I completed five of the six. This may be due…
The autumn colours seem particularly intense this year at Glen Villa, my garden in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Leaves started to turn earlier than usual and the height of the season has almost come and gone. But what a season it has been! It started early, when a small horse chestnut tree (Aesculus pavia) began to…
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…
Spring is here, finally, with the promise that summer is a-comin’ in. Or so it feels today. And maybe it will feel the same tomorrow, but who knows? Oscar Wilde said that conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Not so for gardeners in the Eastern Townships of Quebec where I…
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.…
Coming home from a tour of English gardens I felt a short, sharp shock. Everything in my garden looked inadequate, not up to the standard I had come to expect. I moped. I complained. Why can’t I grow the hundreds of plants I saw and admired? Some of them must surely suit my climate. So why don’t…
Gilbert and Sullivan got it right when they wrote about spring flowers. The flowers that bloom in the spring, Tra la, Breathe promise of merry sunshine — As we merrily dance and we sing, Tra la, We welcome the hope that they bring, Tra la, Of a summer of roses and wine. Right now, I’m…
This year autumn is slow in coming. Often by the end of September, the hills are as colourful as the big box of Crayola crayons I always begged (unsuccessfully) my mother to buy, with trees standing in ranges of red, orange and pink, gold and chartreuse, and occasional patches of dark wintery green. Not this year.…
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…