Taking it slow

Life in lockdown is not so different from normal life for me. I don't have small children out of school to worry about and I can work from home with no great difficulty. With Mike and Child2 here with me, I don't feel particularly isolated, and I'm still in regular contact with my father and my aunt in England. We have plenty of space for a long walk with the dog (although he's getting on a bit and not as keen on a long walk as he once would have been...). I know we are luckier than a lot of people who are cooped up with less ability to get out in the fresh air.

What has changed is the pace of things. Not that my life Before was exactly a whirlwind of activity, but now I am not rushing to get out of the house before 7.30 to see my mother-in-law in her nursing home before going off to work, things feel much more leisurely. The library where I normally work was closed to staff from 23 March and I went in on the 24th to finish some jobs and pick up a few things (including the office orchid!). Working from home involves connecting to my desktop remotely and this can be a frustrating experience: there's a bit of a lag across the network and it feels like I am working in slow motion most of the time.

I think my brain is on a go-slow anyway, with a low-level background level of panic which actually reminds me of my state of mind back in May 2007, just before we left England for Canada. It's quite hard to concentrate on anything for any length of time: reading fiction seems beyond my capabilities at present, for example, and my sleep is disturbed. I feel unproductive as a result, but I am not going to beat myself up about that: if we can't make exceptions for ourselves in exceptional times, then when can we?

Outside of work, I'm focusing on watching the garden come back to life and getting comfort from the usual cycles of plants and wild birds. Humans might be making a mess of things, but Mother Nature is still doing her thing. Hope you are safe and well wherever you are reading this.

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!

Flying visit

I took Mike's mum back to England last week and was able to squeeze in a visit to Wisley with my aunt. We had a great day and I feel like I've topped up my annual peering-at-plants requirement. Although the downside to visiting amazing gardens like this is the resulting huge sense of inadequacy I experience when I think about my own!

Easter parade

I couldn't have asked for better weather for the Easter break. It got increasingly warm and sunny over the course of the weekend.

The bees don't have many open flowers to visit at the moment, so these anemones growing in the cracks of the paving at the front of our house were proving popular:

And the daffodils are finally starting to open - a full month later than the earliest I've seen them (in 2012). I think they're a bit shorter than normal, too. The last of the ice melted from the lake on Saturday (April 19th) - definitely the latest we've seen it still frozen.

I spent the whole weekend either cooking or gardening. All the tomatoes and peppers were transplanted into pots in the greenhouse (208 tomato plants and 34 peppers this year) and I dug dandelions by the dozen out of three of the vegetable beds.

The children gathered up all the bits of tree which had fallen during the ice storm - we'll turn those into woodchips for chicken litter. We didn't lose too many large branches near the house, but up by the hayfield is another matter. There are several fairly large ash trees up there which look like this one:

I think Mike is going to be busy with his chainsaw when the ground dries out!

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.

Disgusted at Drummondville

I've seen a couple of stories along the lines of the one reported by the CBC on Wednesday. A couple living in Drummondville, Quebec, have been told that they have to replace their front-yard vegetable garden with at least 30% lawn or face fines of $100-300 per day. There was a similar story about this time last year about a family in Oak Park, Detroit who also faced fines and possibly jail time over a similar issue. In that case, the charges were dropped after the city was bombarded with negative publicity. I hope the same will be true in Drummondville.

In both cases the vegetable gardens were a credit to their neighbourhoods and had been started with the best of intentions by the families involved. I find these by-laws baffling and anachronistic. I can (sort of) understand them being passed in the 1950s, when the suburban lawn was the height of fashion, but in today's world, where we are more aware that maintaining the monoculture of a lush lawn is a waste of precious water (and not to mention the toxic weedkillers and fertilisers that make their way into those water supplies)?

Out of interest, I went to Google Street View to see if there was a 'before' snapshot of the Drummondville front yard. By some fluke, I landed on the exact spot on my first look. So here is the garden as it looked whenever the Google car went past (if I've got the right property):

And here it is today as recorded by the CBC.

So much more interesting and vibrant, I'd say. Not to mention productive, health-enhancing, environmentally responsible... Sigh.

The Drummondville case is even worse than the Oak Park one, because the city is planning to ban all front yard vegetable gardens in homes built after this Fall. You can probably hear me banging my head on the desk from there.

Furry and unfashionable

I'm not the person you'd consult on any sort of fashion, be it haute couture or horticulture, but I recently read a remark about sumac (sorry, can't remember where!) that suggested this is a deeply unfashionable plant among UK gardeners. I do recall my parents putting a sumac tree into our 1970s garden. Mind you, they painted the walls of the bathroom orange at around the same time, so maybe the current unpopularity of sumac is a response to 1970s bad taste in general (sorry, Dad).

Staghorn sumacs (Rhus typhina) grow wild here (often in large groups along the side of the roads) and I'm going to thumb my nose at those who dislike them because I think they are beautiful plants, particularly at this time of year, when their colours are so vivid. I took a series of photos of a big clump of them on my way home tonight to prove my point. Then found I'd left my camera cable at work, so couldn't download them. Bah. This picture is from an obliging Flickr user called tboard who has allowed others to make use of it. It's even better than mine would have been, as the sun is shining through the leaves, which it wasn't here today.

"Soil is death"

Heard a brief but inspirational interview on CBC Radio's Definitely Not the Opera this afternoon. The whole programme was about waiting and it ended with a woman called Catherine Richard (not sure of the spelling), who is terminally ill with ovarian cancer: waiting to die. She has completely reassessed how she wants to spend her remaining time and when the weather is good, she chooses to spend her time gardening. In her words:

Well, when you think about it, soil is death. It is decomposed life and out of that decomposed life comes food and beauty and all the things that we rely on for living. So you can't be a gardener and be afraid to die because you know that everything just gets recycled through the soil.

The whole podcast is available for download and this segment starts at around 53 minutes into the programme.

Spring at Wisley

It has been a bit quiet around this blog because I've been on a longish trip away: first Amsterdam, then London, then Manchester, then Buckinghamshire, then Edinburgh and finally to Kent. All in eleven days, so it has been a hectic rush on occasions.

Last Wednesday was one of the more peaceful days in the mix, when my aunt took me out to the Royal Horticultural Society's gardens at Wisley in Surrey. I'd never been before, so this was a real treat. The daffodils, magnolias, hellebores and camellias were looking lovely in the warmish spring sunshine.








The dogwoods (Cornus sanguinea) were looking striking, too. I thought this one, 'Midwinter Fire', was particularly impressive.


The bursts of colour in the Alpine houses were beautiful.


Next door, in the rock house, the resident cat, Sunny, was having a luxurious bask in the sunshine, while pretending to be a plant.


I've been wanting to visit Wisley for ages, so am really grateful to have had this chance, and on such a beautiful day, too.

Raised beds (be VERY careful!)

Carol at May Dreams Gardens has written a great post on the subject of raised beds. I commented there briefly about my experience, but thought it might be worth blogging about it here, with some pictures to record what happened with mine (as a cautionary tale, too, perhaps).

We had a small easterly-facing back garden in Manchester (about 100 square metres/yards) which was really just a square of lawn with some shrubs around the edges and a small patio area. In 2005 (inspired by two allotment-owning co-workers) I decided to put a raised bed in the lawn near to the house as my first foray into vegetable-growing.

The frame was made from three eight-foot lengths of pressure-treated decking, screwed to four posts (the posts ended up shorter than they were in this picture). On 16 January 2005 I dug the grass up, put in the frame, added a big bag of compost, put the grass back in (upside down) and covered the whole thing with some heavy black plastic, weighted down, to stop weeds and to kill the grass. At the end of all that the bed looked like this:


Two months later, the covers were off and I was sowing my first vegetables. By the end of May the bed was looking full of green life and I was fully addicted to the process of growing food.


On New Year's Day 2006 the second raised bed was constructed.


This was not followed by a third bed in 2007 - because by then we were busily planning our move to Canada and weren't going to be in that house to gather in the harvest. I still couldn't resist planting seeds in the beds that year, though (more proof of my addiction). And yes, part of the motivation for our emigration was the chance of getting hold of a decent-sized plot of land for growing food without bankrupting ourselves.

As soon as we saw the new house in April, the potential of the barnyard as a vegetable plot became obvious and this blog records the progress we've made since we moved in here in June 2007. With ten large vegetable plots already established and plans for another one of those and three raised beds in the greenhouse this year, I find it a bit amazing that it was only four years ago that I started all this by digging out one little raised bed.

So, a warning might be in order. If your spouse suggests putting in a raised bed this year ("Just one dear, and it won't take up much space."), there is a danger that you might find yourself leaving your country a few years later to satisfy their insatiable hunger for more land for their crops. Be warned!!