In this first week of autumn I realize there’s nothing new left to come up in the garden – no new flower buds to open, no new unfurling of leaves, no more sudden growth spurts of stalk and stem. The final Hollyhock flowers – those at the very tip of six or seven foot spikes […]
Tag: native plants
Six ‘Weeds’ My Garden Can’t Be Without
As Irish novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford wrote in 1878 (in her book Molly Bawn), “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” When we bought our parcel of land it was a field surrounded by trees. The field had tall grass and, according to some, a lot of weeds. Now, 15 years later, I’ve […]
Favourite (almost) Fall Flowers
More than three weeks left in summer. Officially. But with days getting noticeably shorter and temperatures several degrees cooler than average (single digits when we got out of bed yesterday – Shileau came down the stairs with me but then just curled up on the couch!) it really is beginning to feel a lot like […]
Native vs Non Native gardening
I recently started following the Royal Horticultural Society on Twitter (@The_RHS); I’m not sure how this feed came to my attention, likely it was Twitter itself, that clever creature, that suggested it. It was a good suggestion. Even though it’s a British organization, and the information they share is abut British gardening and British plants […]
Time to revel in Rudbeckia
When I first started gardening (eons ago, it seems) in my tiny Toronto backyard, one of the first flowers I bought was a Black Eyed Susan. It was lovely – small, hairy leaves with bright orange-yellow flowers in late summer. I planted it in an area that started out in full sun but gradually, as […]
mid summer report – happy happy joy joy
Nothing has died. That kind of says it all. This time last year the fields were brown, the Larix were dead, the Rudbeckia was just not flowering. Copious amounts of rain this spring and an average amount so far this summer has brought in the garden great joy to all things growing and, I suspect, […]
Directions from Nature
When early pioneers were rolling their way across the tall grass prairies of North America, sometimes, in mid summer, they would come across a towering plant with huge basal leaves that often were oriented on a north-south axis. They called it a Compass Plant. In later years scientists speculated the leaves point that way to […]
Tale of Two Echinaceas
I have to confess I don’t have just one favourite plant – I have dozens. And the list changes every year depending on things as mundane as the weather (too dry to produce many flowers, or, so dry the whole plant just dies) or as esoteric as did I grow it from seed (or it […]
New Additions
I really enjoy visiting nurseries – especially the small owner-operated ones that specialize in specific types of plants. You can often find things that don’t make it to the larger nurseries, let alone the supermarket parking lots. The people working there (ie those owner-operator types!) are a wealth of knowledge about what grows well in […]
County Gardening 