The entrance to a garden is very important. Ideally, at least in my view, you should walk into a garden and then find yourself drawn to discovering other parts of it by a path. Big square patches of garden and lawn are not for me--I prefer the meandering path. And crucial to everything in this ideal world is the perfect Garden Door. I saw one just recently on a trip to Bermuda, and I’ve been wanting one ever since. ...
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Every summer I look forward to heading over to Otter Lake in Ontario for a few days of vacation with my family, especially my three nephews. Snorkeling for lost fishing lures, eating spaghetti sandwiches, and playing poker with imaginary money are only three things on our annual Must Do list. The other is paddling over to a truly amazing marsh in my kayak to see natural water gardening at its finest. This year there were literally thousands of white water lilies in this fairly large...
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There are weeds and there are flowers, and we are usually quite adamant about which is which. But in some cases, like that of the bull thistle, a weed, I feel the argument should be made that it is a wonderful flower in all the important ways.First, there are its hot brilliant purple blooms which are just bursting from the hedge where I missed seeing it as a weed earlier this summer. ...
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Every once in a while the garden reveals a completely new and unexpected thing. This week I came into the garden with my morning coffee and I found a cicada sunning himself beside the jasmine. I had never seen one before, and only knew what it was because I had a tablecloth from Provence where the cigale, as it is known there, decorates each corner...now one was decorating my porch. It was not beautiful in an obvious way. ...
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Without hammering the sentiment and making it into the cliché that is just waiting to happen, the garden can be full of life lessons. My favourite is the pruning life lesson, i.e., that sacrificing the early flowers from a plant will make it stronger and produce more flowers in the long run. Because the acquiring of patience is the Master Class of gardening life lessons, after all. Not to mention the fact that now that I’m 50, anything that promotes the idea that more beautiful...
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To fulfill my bucket list gardening dream of putting in a miniature lavender field in my yard, I've learned that it will take at least 60 plants of English Lavender (lavandula vera) to start. But even if I find that many this late in the season, that translates worryingly into the digging of 60 holes, and the measuring of, say, exactly 24 inches in between each one. And the reality is, I've never been very good at Math. ...
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This week I came one step closer to realizing a bucket-list gardening dream of mine: a lavender patch planted in rows, just like in those postcards from Provence--only with fewer plants, obviously. Say, a few thousand. Still, lavender crop rows i will have, oh yes.I've been wanting a lavender field forever it seems....
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Butterfly gardening, and Earl Grey tea making, is simple when you have bergamot plants. I put three of the plants, also known as bee balm, in last summer, and already they are huge and blooming with spiky purple/red flowers. In fact, they have kind of taken me by surprise because they have grown so fast. ...
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There seems to be something resonant about the word "blue". From the Blue Mosque to a Blue Moon to The Blues themselves, there seems to be no end of mystery to the invoking of blue to describe something. Enter the Blue Poppy. Hudson’s Deirdre Gilbert has become a successful blue poppy grower, and she answered a few questions for those of us who long to be such a brilliant creature, but who have failed miserably so far. Thanks so much, Deirdre. After reading this, I suspect we just...
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Being a short, 50-something woman, Special K is really the only possible breakfast to eat these days if I'm going to get into my bathing suit this summer without injury. But at least for two mornings in a row, this meager fare has been supplemented by my own strawberries. Not picked from a patch, they grow from a panier (two paniers to be precise), and hang where both the birds and I can reach comfortably....
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