Garden Bloggers' Fling, 2015

I'd been aware of the annual Garden Bloggers' Fling since the first one, back in 2008 when it took place in Austin, Texas. I didn't think I'd ever get the chance to go to one, but when I realised that this year's was in Toronto, I jumped at the opportunity.

I wasn't disappointed. The event was superbly well organised and in total we visited 30 gardens and parks in the three days that I attended. Those doing the optional Niagara excursion on the fourth day would have seen even more. It was a real pleasure to spend time with so many passionate gardeners and designers. I feel like I have learnt a tremendous amount and have definitely made some new friends.

It's hard to know where to begin with describing the Fling: there was so much crammed in to the three days. I'll just pick out a few themes from the 563 (!) photos I took.

There was an interesting variation of scale, from the huge formal garden of the Aga Khan Museum

 to the intimate gardens of Cabbagetown, once home to Irish immigrants.

The Toronto skyline was ever-present throughout the Fling, either up close when we headed by ferry to the Toronto Island gardens on Friday,

or glimpsed from a distance as it was from the Aga Khan Museum

and from the Hugh Garner Co-op roof garden.

This coming weekend is the Peony Festival in Oshawa, and peonies were a noticeable feature in many of the gardens we visited. From the subtle and understated,

to the bold and beautiful,

and the downright outrageous.

There were a lot of Alliums around, too,

The importance of pollinators was another theme of the Fling: we learnt about the Fairmont Royal York's rooftop garden and bee hives on Friday and at the Toronto Botanical Garden on Sunday we were told to plant up our containers to 'attract guests'  like this honey bee who was busy visiting the salvia 'May Night' at the TBG.

We saw some interesting human-made objects, too, in the course of the Fling. I completely fell in love with the reclamation work going on at the former Don Valley Brick Works, where an industrial site has been turned into a fascinating space for people and wildlife. The 'Watershed Consciousness' artwork on the site is amazing.

I also (inevitably!) loved the way that archival images have been used to tell the story of the site's past.

You don't need a lot of space to make effective use of objects. I'm not generally a huge fan of garden art (or of city skylines, now I think about it) but I did rather like this little elephant in a Cabbagetown garden.

All in all, this has to be one of the most exhausting three days I've had. It was packed full of sensory, social and learning experiences; I will be thinking about this event for days and months to come. A hearty thanks to the Toronto Fling Committee for all their hard work!

Botanical gardens, Berlin

I've been in Berlin for a few days on a business trip this week, with two days free at the end because of stupid flight pricing. Yesterday I went on a fantastic bike tour of the city centre with a group of other tourists from all over the world. That was great fun (especially the part where we were cycling through the Tiergarten: the park is really beautiful at this time of year).

Today I headed for the botanical gardens. I got there just before they officially opened, but the entrance gate was already manned, so I paid my €6 and set off into the garden, armed with a printed guide to the best parts to visit in the autumn. For about half an hour I didn't see anyone else at all and felt as though I had the whole space to myself. It was a sunny, dewy, morning with just a touch of mist in the air.

I wasn't expecting to see many flowers, so late in the year, but the trees more than made up for that. The season is less advanced here than it is at home and the trees are looking beautiful. The arboretum is full of interesting-looking small paths which beg to be explored: it doesn't feel at all formal, apart from the labels on the plants.

One that caught my attention in the North American part of the arboretum was this witch-hazel (Hamamelis virginiana). I hadn't realised that this was native to our part of the world. Looking at its range, we're right at the northern edge of it, but it would be great if we could grow this in our woods at home.

Also in flower in the arboretum was this striking plant:

This is Cimicifuga simplex, otherwise known as bugbane. This is native to Asia, but the North American equivalent is Actaea (or Cimicifuga) racemosa, a.k.a. black cohosh, black snakeroot or fairy candle. Another one to look out for at home.

The roses in the garden were mostly showing off their hips. These are from the dog rose:

There were one or two brave roses still flowering. I didn't make a note of the variety, but this one looked lovely with its light spritzing of dew:

The glasshouses and their contents were architecturally impressive:

I narrowly missed taking a photo of a small brown newt which was sitting on this plant the second before I pressed the shutter button:

I've never been wild about cacti, but there's something about this group that's almost cuddly.

And did I mention that the trees were gorgeous?

Having spaces like this almost makes it worth living in a city, although I must admit that I liked it best in that first half-hour when I felt I was only sharing it with the birds. By the time I left there was quite a long queue at the entrance, so the garden is clearly appreciated by the city's inhabitants and visitors.

Big views, little views

 It's been one of those mad fortnights where I've been dashing from venue to venue and city to city. I've seen two different Londons, one of which suffered a riot while I was there (and it wasn't the one you might expect). My travel plans were complex, sometimes bordering on the convoluted, but went surprisingly smoothly. Well, all except for the last day, when Toronto's waterfront was cushioned with a fluffy layer of fog and the plane I was on couldn't land there. We ended up going to Ottawa to get more fuel and finally landed back in Toronto four hours later than scheduled.

An unexpected bonus of the diverted flight was that we flew over Prince Edward County on the way back to Toronto. I was sitting on the right hand side of the plane and got a good view of the Bay of Quinte and Lake Consecon. At times like that, you wish there was an option to don a parachute and get straight back home without having to go to the airport and then take the train for the two-hour trip back along the shoreline. Although it might have been tricky to get my suitcase down to earth in one piece, I suppose.

It was good to get home and catch up with what had been happening here. The weather has been unseasonably warm, meaning that the greenhouse sowings I made before I left have been making impressive progress. The experimentally pre-sprouted peas have come up in soldierly-looking lines of sturdy little plants. This is definitely the best way I've found so far of ensuring germination and growth of early peas. Says she, counting her peas before they've podded.

The carrots I sowed last autumn are looking good, too:

Outside, it's been warm enough for the tyre/tire-garden rhubarb to start unfurling its leaves.

On my rushing-to-catch-up to-do list for Sunday is: sow eggplant/aubergines, peppers and tomatoes; clean out chicken coop; cut down last year's asparagus ferns.

Day of rest? I think not.

Fronts on Front Street

The older stores on Belleville's Front Street show a genteel, polished appearance to users of the street, but it's a different story in the alleys leading up to it. There, the limestone structure of the buildings is on display, with no attempt to hide its roughness with a layer of plaster.

I haven't yet worked out why 'Front Street' is the preferred term in this part of the world for 'Main Street' (or what would be 'High Street' in England). But when you see the contrast between the sides and the fronts of these buildings, it makes you wonder if that's got something to do with it...

Postcard from Cambridge, MA

I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a meeting. I haven't had a lot of time to explore, but I did take a few pictures as I walked around the city last night and on my way to the meeting this morning.

Some interesting old buildings:

A truly hideous lamp for sale (if you can see it past the reflection):

And, perhaps most worrying of all, a risk of zombie chickens:

Art Gallery of Ontario: first impressions

It's hard to do justice to a gallery or museum on a first visit - there's always far too much to see and my legs always give up before I feel I've done the place justice. My overall impression of the AGO was positive, and my response to the physical space that was the Galleria Italia (below) was one of 'Wow!'.

I had time to visit the current exhibition on the Maharajas (worth seeing for the amazing restored Cartier diamond and ruby necklace towards the end, alone (the photo in that article doesn't do it justice)), the Canadian artists section, most of the European section on level 2 and the ship models in the basement. These are watched over by a splendid lion figurehead. Which I wasn't allowed to photograph and which isn't online anywhere, so you'll just have to imagine it. You can see highlights of the Canadian Collection on the gallery's website. It's a shame that you can't click from one image to the next, rather than having to go back to the list all the time, but at least you can see some of the artworks without having to visit Toronto.

My favourite piece of art in the Canadian section was Franklin Carmichael's Cranberry Lake (1931) - the way he's captured the sun on the water and the eerie shapes of the dead trees in the foreground. In the European section the image which caught my attention the most was James Tissot's The Shop Girl
- I love the tangle of ribbons on the counter. I was also fascinated by the carved items in the Thomson Collection - some of them quite macabre, such as the rosary pendant showing a skull being eaten by worms and lizards. The incredibly intricate wooden carvings in prayer beads were also amazing - such detailed work in such a tiny space.

I paid a visit to the basement café, which was rather a disappointment after the rest of the gallery. Like having a cup of tea in someone's basement, in fact. I think they could have made it a more interesting space. But, perhaps, as so often happens, the money ran out before the basement could be properly finished. ;-)

Adventures in public transport

I've been on a trip to the UK since the beginning of October, which I hope explains my blogging silence. It was a strange visit, starting in Aberdeen and ending up in Kent, with lots of buses, trains and walking in between.

One of the big differences between living in rural Ontario and living in a British town is the availability of public transport. In my trip away I saw the best and the worst of UK public transport, from severe overcrowding on trains in London and Leicester, to punctual and frequent bus services in Aberdeen and Dundee. OK, the bus from the airport into Aberdeen on my first day wasn't so good - I had a half-hour wait in wind and rain and then the woman who was sitting behind me vomited into her bag as we got into the city. But otherwise, my bus experiences in Scotland were fairly positive.

In Leicester I enjoyed the scenic environs of the New Walk very much. Except for the point when a man entered the park and urinated against a tree just twenty feet from where I was sitting. That was another low point of the trip. As I walked back to the station, a couple were having a screaming row on the path. So loud and passionate were they ("This time I never slept wiv no-one!"), that I half-suspected it to be a piece of street theatre, with hidden cameras recording the responses of passers-by. At times on this trip I wondered if all these people had been sent to misbehave around me just to reassure me that I'd made the right decision about emigrating.

The only other note-worth journey was the experience of going into and out of London's St. Pancras station on the Southeastern Highspeed trains. It was novel to get from Kent to London by first travelling through Essex. The trains had a mildly annoying three-note chime before every announcement.*

On my journey back into Kent something had gone wrong with the automated announcements altogether and it seemed to be stuck on a continuous loop, repeatedly informing us that the train was on its way to Faversham. This began by being irritating, but soon I became close to breaking into unseemly giggles, as everyone else in the carriage was studiously ignoring the repetitions. Perhaps it happens every night. I began to feel that there was some deep significance to the brief pause and then seductively breathy emphasis that the female voice gave to the final word of the announcement "and...Faversham". It was quite a relief to get off that swish, clinical and high-tech train at Rochester, to board a smelly regular train, whose digital display insisted, for the remainder of the journey, that the next stop was going to be Bromley South.

Where we are now, there isn't much public transport at all, so I miss these delights, in a perverse way. Now, when I go back, I feel like an outsider and observer of British life, rather than a part of it. It's an odd feeling.


*British readers of a certain age might remember a similar arrangement in announcements made in the 1980s sit-com Hi-de-Hi. It was very similar to that.

Pier 21

I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia at the moment, at a conference. It's a lovely city and we've been lucky with the weather: warm and sunny all the time, so far. Here's the view from my hotel room:

Looks a bit industrial, perhaps, but this complex of buildings is highly significant in the history of twentieth-century Canadian immigration. It's known as Pier 21 and is where ships bearing immigrants tied up and discharged their human cargo between 1928 and 1971. The main building is now a museum dedicated to the experiences of those new arrivals in Canada.

As a relatively new arrival myself, my feelings about the exhibits were mixed. In one sense, it was disturbing to think of my recent immigration experience as something that people could learn about in a museum. Although Pier 21 is no longer a point of entry for immigrants and therefore has passed into history, the immigration process has not. To me, it is still a fresh and recent experience and there was something very strange about seeing stories like mine represented in a museum. I felt very unsettled by it.

The oral history aspects of the museum were excellent, although I was less convinced by the audio-visual experience called Oceans of Hope. There was one unintentionally very funny part with a war bride who had the most peculiar English accent I've ever heard. I nearly laughed out loud when she claimed "I've lived in London all my life!". No part of London I've ever visited, I thought...

Overall, the museum was well worth a visit but it did leave me with confused emotions which I'm finding hard to adequately express. Mostly I suppose I felt that the museum didn't address the fact that immigration is an ongoing Canadian fact of life as well as part of the country's history. Will have to think about it some more...

Park life

I dragged everyone out for a walk this afternoon, as the day was fine and mild. We went to Belleville and did the circuit of Zwick's Park. It's a level route which is popular with cyclists and skaters as well as dog-walkers. There were quite a few people out enjoying it today.

A pair of swans were feeding on the east side of the park, where the Moira river empties into the Bay of Quinte. I did take some in-focus pictures of them, but this one, where the camera paid attention to the tree instead, is my favourite:

The park is bisected by the Bay Bridge Road carrying traffic to and from Prince Edward County over the Norris Whitney Bridge. The path goes underneath the road in two places. Just after going under the road for the first time we caught sight of a red-tailed hawk, gliding to rest on a tree:

There were only small patches of ice left in the edges of the bay. Not enough to make this sign useful, though.

There are good views of the bridge from the western half of the park. I have no idea who Norris Whitney was, by the way.

In the water just to the right of the bridge we saw a beaver. And just as I pressed the shutter button it dived underwater. Pesky rodent.

We've been over this bridge many times but this was the first time I had been under it. I liked this view of the supports: a bit like the effect you get when you're caught between two mirrors.

Postcard from Boston

I'm on another one of my occasional city jaunts. I had some spare time to explore Boston today, so went walking around the city centre, intermittently following the Freedom Trail which is a route marked by a red line around the town. Only intermittently though, as after a very short period of time I decided that I didn't like being told where to go (where's the freedom in that?!). On one of my detours I found myself unexpectedly coming into the Granary Burial Ground by its north entrance. I spent quite a while in this graveyard, which was peaceful and covered in fallen and falling leaves.

It was one of the few places in the city where you could feel connected to the original inhabitants, away from the noise and bustle of everywhere else.

I re-followed the red brick road after this and it took me straight to the King's Chapel burial ground, which is even older. The carvings on the stones have weathered amazingly well:

I suppose it is entirely predictable of me to prefer to spend time in those parts of Boston that are quiet and full of trees and history!

Recht Boomssloot

I have only been in Amsterdam for three hours but have learnt a few things already.

1. It is very easy to get lost while walking in the city centre
2. The roads have wonderful names (the title of this post is the name of the street in the photo)
3. I wouldn't want to be responsible for parallel-parking a car next to one of the waterways

Where in the world...

...am I tonight?

Well, here's a visual clue:


You may already be guessing that I'm not in rural Ontario.

I'm on another of my intermittent city jaunts and, as usual, am mostly taking pictures of plant life. At home all the leaves have left the trees (and it even snowed a bit this morning), but here there are still some leaves attached to branches, although there are plenty more blowing about in a blustery breeze and coating the ground of the big park in the centre of the city:


This next view of this park probably gives my location away:


Yes, it's Central Park. Which somehow is a lot more rugged and wild-looking than I was expecting it to be. I've never been to New York before, but you see the city so often as a backdrop to films and news reports that it is instantly familiar. I'm trying to be cool about being here, but there's a small part of my brain that keeps jumping up and down excitedly and shouting out "I'm in New York, I'm in NEW YORK!".

It really is a fleeting visit - I'll be going back tomorrow - so I won't have time to do the proper touristy things. I did go past the American Museum of Natural History this afternoon, so here's a picture of one of the two festive dinosaurs outside it, for my son, who was very jealous that I'd be near the set of Night at the Museum.

Although, to be honest, I wasn't at all sure about the fact that the dinosaurs were holding a wreath each. It didn't seem like a likely activity for a pair of, well what are they, iguanodons? I suppose they were herbivores, but still...