Are you a planner? I read a lot of gardening articles about people who have a “ten-year plan” for their gardens. I have trouble planning what I’m going to do this year, let alone ten years from now. I find it admirable, but I’m totally uninterested in gardening within that kind of framework. I do plan...
I was walking down the street yesterday, checking out people’s front yards, and musing to myself: “What makes a flower desirable?” So many perfectly lovely flowers are looked at as scourges by many, if not most, gardeners. I’m talking about the ones we call weeds: dandelions, goutweed, creeping charlie, etc. On the other hand, some people leave...
Those of you who live in my neck of the woods (which includes most of Canada, for the present purpose) have experienced the worst spring in living memory, right? So, today’s weather feels absolutely glorious. Even the high winds couldn’t dampen my enjoyment of the warm sun on my back, the freedom of being out in...
Well, I didn’t make it to Jasmin by the end of April, so I missed using my 40$ off coupon and on top of it I forgot the 20$ coupon at home when I went today. Oh, well. I still had a great time picking and choosing flowers for my garden. I bought quite a...
I don’t think I’ve rhapsodized about primroses lately. Probably it’s way overdue. I was just reading an article about them in my latest Garden Making magazine and I remembered how much I admired their wonderful colours and neat shapes. There’s also nothing wrong with a flower that blooms in the spring, (tra-la!). The article was...
Monday: Since I posted yesterday we had about 10 cm. of snow, it looks like. That doesn’t stop me from reading gardening blogs and getting excited about my future plantings. I’m on the Dave’s Garden Blog email list, so I get an update every Monday from that huge site, which I recommend for lots of...
I’m sitting here in my dining room looking out at the beautiful snowstorm raging on and it reminds me of when I had bronchitis many years ago. It hung on forever, much like this winter. Finally, I decided to ignore the discomfort, the coughing, the lack of energy, and pretend it was all better. I...
Milkweed, that is. I know, funny how that headline kinda grabbed your attention, right? Anyway, my sister, Nora, a wonderful gardener and nature lover, brought to my attention something that has been hovering on the edge of my consciousness for awhile now (planted there by various headlines that I only glanced at); Monarch butterflies are...
I recently completed a run of Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, an opera that I (and almost everyone else) know a few tunes from (Summertime, I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’, It Ain’t Necessarily So), but I had never listened to all the way through. The process was both challenging and moving to me. I...
I have a private space in my house, for the first time in my married life. “A room of my own”, in the words of Virginia Woolf. It is my practice space, but it is more than that. I have plants in the window and I have a bookshelf with various music paraphernalia on it,...