All-star annuals for Containers

So we've selected our containers, and prepared our soil, and we know where we want to put our containers (maybe). Now comes the fun part: picking out the plants. I happen to really, really enjoy selecting annuals for containers, and yes, I'm going to focus on annuals because that's what I primarily use. I do have one concrete trough of alpines, but I also have lots of room around our place for perennials, shrubs, trees, etc, and I like doing containers of annuals because I can change them up with ease, they flower their little heads off or have sparkling foliage, and I don't feel guilty consigning them to the compost heap at season's end.

You can pick plants with flower colours that match your container colours, or that contrast, whatever suits your tastes. I do some of each, naturally. This big mosaic pot was custom built for me by a local artisan, and because its colours are so striking, I tend to choose annuals with flowers that more or less match; blues, orange, greens, a bit of purple. In this caseI used a brilliant orange gerbera, purple heliotrope, blue lobelia (probably from the Techno heat series, which last really well in our garden even during the heat that we do get in high summer)and a callibrachoa, possibly 'Terra Cotta' or 'Purple Sunrise.


For those who love blue, and who are frustrated by lobelias, try anagallis. It comes easily from seed, or you can purchase the various cultivars such as 'Skylover' or 'Wildcat Blue' and it works reasonably well in a container. I normally shear mine back when I first get them as they do get leggy in a nursery setting, and they tangle their stems with other plants nearby. But anything this blue can be naughty if it wants--all is forgiven when it flowers.


This African daisy is a Venidium, sometimes called Venidio, that I wouldn't be without. I find them in red, rosy pink and coppery orange at a couple of local nurseries, and they are great with that silvery grey foliage. Deadhead them, and they will go until the hard frost of November--really! I have photos from last year, and you may remember me extolling this plant's virtues in the past.


Obviously I have something about African daisies, or just daisies in general, because this is Osteospermum 'Astra Pink Yellow', definitely a star performer last year. I've read that some people don't like pink and yellow together, or find them problematic to match up--this plant solves that, and provides a colour combination that I found I really liked. Hopefully I'll locate this plant this year, because the cuttings I took didn't root.


I fell in love with Torenia, or wishbone flower, a couple of years ago when I saw this colour combination, so different from the usual purple-white or blue-white combinations. Maybe the wishbone doesn't show up as well--but I'm smitten with 'Yellow Moon' very much so!


Portulaca love the heat, and they will take it a bit drier than my climate gives them if planted in the ground. The solution has been to plant them out in containers; some go in a large hypertufa trough, others into terracotta containers along with annual ice plant (Mesembryanthemum) and still others get put into small black metal planters I picked up a few years ago. They bake nicely in these containers, and flower like maniacs, and I'm reminded of my mother's twin sister, my late aunt, whenever I see them, as they were a favourite flower of hers. And that's why I plant them and mollycoddle them a wee bit. This is 'Yubi Rose' at least I think it is!


While I LOVE Steve Silk's recipe for planting containers with Thrillers, Fillers & Spillers, I don't always follow that recipe, although this is a plant that I consider a thriller: Agastache, or Hummingbird Mint, in this case 'Acapulco Orange'. Everything about this plant makes me happy, from its lemon-minty scent to its floriferous, easy care nature, to the way it DOES act like a magnet for hummingbirds and other pollinators. I generally have it in rose as well as the salmony-orange, and several different companies have their own versions in shades of salmon through to magenta. This may well be perennial for others with better winter drainage or slightly less hostile winters, but I haven't overwintered it outside--so far!


Bacopas bored me until two years ago, when some savvy breeder produced a couple of cultivars with gold-green variegation in the foliage, as well as lavender flowers. This is Copia Golden Leaves, and I know I've raved about it before, but it truly was an outstanding annual, as you may remember from this first post on containers, where the snow-covered bacopa/sutera was still flowering in November. I've already sourced it for this year, and I'm not telling where--til I get mine home, of couse. Bwah hah hah!


It's been probably a decade since I first discovered lantana and was besotted with it. Not with its scent, that's for sure, which I find very unpleasant, but it sure is a butterfly magnet and does especially well in containers for me. It does need to be deadheaded, and although this is a photo of one of the Sorbet coloured types, I really like the stronger, hot-coloured ones. The problem I find is that each company has its own names for the various colours, and yet there's not always a lot of difference between the offerings of one company and another, so I get confused and forget ALL the cultivar names. Must be my age.


I was never a fan of ageratum until a couple of years ago when I discovered a deep wine coloured variety, (One was called Island Mist Magenta, but there was one with wine in the name, too. Same problem as with lantana). Then I discovered that I rarely use white in my containers, and the purity of the white ageratum really delighted me, so now I do at least one container in red and white, for the Canadian flag, or Red, white, blue and a splash of yellow, for the Acadian flag.


Don't forget foliage is a really important part of great containers, both in terms of colour and texture. Of course I've gotten fond of the brilliant sweet potato vines in their fiesta colours, and the newer coleus (despite their new genus name which sounds like sneezing) but there are a host of other intriguing plants, including Helichrysum (especially, for me, the Lime/lemon-lime types), begonias, Swedish ivies, oxalis and lysimachias. My favourite lysimachia is the deliciously named 'Walkabout Sunset', but the only photo I could find is below, with the container in the very back, full of nemesia I grew from seed and an orange callibrachoa that I loved. If time permits this week and I can find some of the missing photos (don't ask...), I'll do a second post on interesting annuals. Hopefully I'll discover some new annuals this year (or some old ones) that also make me happy. If spring ever comes, that is...

Containing yer gardening enthusiasms Part 2: Tips for Success

Last time, I promised we’d have a chat about some tips for container successes, so here we go:

Containers: You can use just about anything you want for containers, and people do! I’ve seen wonderful planters made with old shoes, tea kettles, vases, baskets, purses, as well as the dizzying array of containers that are actually designed for plants. The main thing to make sure of is that they have drainage holes. Don’t bother with the ‘layer of crushed gravel’ or other supposed helpful options for drainage: if Jeff Gillman says that this doesn’t work, that’s plenty good enough for me. A pot shard over large drainage holes will keep the soil from coming out the bottom, but that’s all I bother with. If you buy a fabulous container that is lacking drainage holes, you can either drill holes in it (with the proper drill and bit) or do what I do: plant into a slightly smaller, plastic container with drainage holes in it, and slip that into the more ornate planter. Larger containers are heavier, but they have more room for multiple plants. I'm very partial to terra cotta, and to brightly coloured, glazed pottery containers in a variety of shapes and sizes.


Soil: use the best quality potting medium you can afford. You can make up your own mediums or purchase pre-made, but one thing I don’t recommend is using garden soil. Not only is it full of weed seeds and living creatures that might not appreciate life in a container, it’s generally heavier which makes containers that much harder to move around. You can make up good potting medium using a mixture of screened compost, sand, peatmoss or peat substitute (I’m not weighing in today on the peat argument) and perlite or vermiculite.

Watering: This is definitely one of the secrets to container success: making sure that you don’t let your containers dry out. This means watering daily, in most cases, depending on the time of year and the climate. Come autumn, when the plants have slowed down growing and days are cooler, you might not have to water daily; it just depends. Grouping containers together helps to keep moisture in the containers so you might not have to water quite so often. Some gardeners recommend adding those moisture-holding crystals, but they’ve been shown not to be particularly useful, so I don’t bother with them anymore.

Fertilizing: You can mix slow release fertilizer, organic or otherwise, into your potting mixture before planting, but you’ll still need to fertilize later in the season. I usually toss bonemeal and seaweed meal into my container mixtures along with some compost, and then water with liquid seaweed fertilizer once every two weeks. When you do fertilize, make sure that you have watered the plants well before fertilizing, or you can burn your plants roots.

Plant selection and care: as hard as it is to do, the theory goes that we’re supposed to select young, healthy plants that aren’t yet blooming for our containers and gardens. The theory makes sense, of course: plants that aren’t yet blooming tend to settle in to new conditions (whether in gardens or containers) because they aren’t focusing their energy onto creating flowers and seed. But when we’re starved for colour, it’s hard not to buy the plants that are already putting up flowers, isn’t it? Well, you’ll really thank yourself if you do buy plants that aren’t yet flowering, or if you disbud those that are forming flowers. Trust me on this. Within a couple of weeks, those new plants will have settled in and be flowering nicely. This is where it helps to have a greenhouse or other place to hold your containers for a couple of weeks while you are waiting. And you can always buy or create a couple of planters already in flower, just to help you get through the early weeks. I’ve been known to do that, too.


Deadheading is vital for prolonged bloom; after all, annuals are programmed to flower, set seed, and die, so if we prevent them from setting seed, they’ll keep flowering, determined to have their progeny live on after them. While you’re deadheading, you might also remember to cut container plants back a bit every week or so to encourage a new flush of growth and keep your plants looking lush and healthy. Somewhere, someone told me to use think thirds: cut back a third of a plant to a third of its height every three weeks. I might not get the every three weeks part right, but I remember to trim plants a third at a time, and they seem to do quite well. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Next time: some tempting plants I love in containers. But first, since it's now St. Patrick's Day, at least in Nova Scotia...

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day--Orchids to get through Farch

As we lurch, mutter and whimper through the interminable days of the latter part of Farch, some of us have finally hit the bloomin' wall, so to speak. You've seen my one outdoor 'bloom' in my previous post; I've shared most of the indoor blossoms with you in the past few months (and most of them are still, remarkably, blooming. But this time of year is most assuredly the dark night of the Nova Scotian gardener's soul, because it's still a bit early to start many seeds, unless you have a heated greenhouse, the houseplants are looking a bit spent, and since we're supposed to have more of the white stuff outside over the next couple of days...whatever on earth is a garden blogger supposed to present for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day?


Well, thanks to the local orchid growers, all is not lost. As they did last year, the Valley orchid enthusiasts had a show and sale at Acadia University's KC Irving Environmental Sciences Centre, in the wonderful conservatory. And while the weather didn't cooperate in providing brilliant sunlight like last year, it was still wonderful to see the exotic, exquisite blooms of orchids, and talk to plant people who were equally longing for spring.


Let me stress: none of these are mine. I have exactly ONE orchid (still resisting); a phaelenopsis which has resisted my attempts to kill it, and I am going to invest in another one or two one of these days. Just not yet.


There are a few things that really annoy me (plastic siding, tacky garden geegaws from Wallyworld, canned peas) and one of the things that irks me most is when people paw at other peoples' plants. I wouldn't touch any of these plants without their owners right there to bless that, not even to turn a pot or look at a label. This all goes back to one day years ago when I had picked out a lovely sanguinaria in bloom at a nursery I like and was heading to the cashier with it. This dumb-as-a-stump customer ahead of me turned and looked at my plant, said, "Ohhhhh, isn't that pretty", grabbed at the flower...which promptly dropped most of its petals. If looks could kill... So at this display, I craned my neck and peeked between leaves and sprays of flowers, looking for labels if they weren't clearly showing, but I wouldn't move stems or leaves to take photos of the names. These are some plants that I did manage to get the names of. Meet SLC 'Frolic'; SLC, I have learned, stands for Sophrolaeliocattleya...whew! Are orchid breeders related to plant taxonomists? Say that name five times quickly!


Ah, this is easier. Zygocolax 'Judith Phillips', anyone?


Bealara marfitch 'Howard's Dream' had several large sprays of most marvelous blooms.


I think this may have been my favourite, or at least in the top three: IBLC 'Lone Pine'. Isn't she lovely?


And this is Laelia Santa Barbara Sunset 'Showtime', another of my top three favourites.


This moody looking beauty is Lycaste 'Terry Kennedy'. I find that the really fluorescent and the really deep colours are the ones I like best.


A nice basket of orchids...I would have happily bought that and taken it home, except it wasn't for sale, not surprisingly.


I've also discovered I really like cymbidiums and this will probably be the species I try next. This elegant beauty is Cymbidium 'Pelleas Merah'.


This Cymb. 'Bold as Brass Flash' brought me to a halt. It smelled divine, though not overwhelmingly so, and the colour just said spring, spring, spring. This rounds out my top three.


On the other hand, this Crackerjack Midnight Magic cymbidium was deeply mysterious and also one that was fragrant, at least I think that was where the scent came from. The plant was a little taller than me, and I wouldn't haul the spray down to smell it, like one rude woman did.

Since we need a bit of a colour shakeup, here's Phragmipedium besseae,


Rounding out our romp through the orchid display is Cymbidium 'Lipper Leo', easily the most floriferous of the collection. I stayed in there for two hours, talking to some of the enthusiasts I know, and to others who were lured out with the promise of spring. We all told ourselves and each other we'd make it through winter, and we will. Displays like this are like instant sunshine to a gardener's soul, aren't they?

Buds, Mud, and Power Outages

While our up and down weather continues, I found things yesterday that gave me great hope. A little stroll around the squishy-in-places, frozen-solid-in-places yard showed that the parts that have emerged from the snowdrifts do know what they're supposed to do. Yes, I know it's not the most beautiful flower image you've ever seen. But it's a plant sprout--maybe a snowdrop, maybe puschkinia, maybe crocus or iris reticulata--and it's up and ALIVE! Whoo Hooo! Even though Farch has yet many tricks to play on us, weatherwise, this brave shoot reminded me that we'll make it.


I was even more excited to find that Hamamelis 'Diana' was opening its buds, letting the long, tentacle like petals of its flowers shake out slowly. These remind me of the pompoms we used as cheerleaders in high school, as they look very much like crumpled, folded tissue paper. The fact that 'Diane' is flowering suggests to me that I ought to take to the woods and see if our native hamamelis is flowering or not--you can usually smell its flowers in the woods before you ever locate the modest looking flowers and twigs.


I spent some time watching my ham-horse, Leggo-my-Eggo, who doesn't care if it's muddy, or windy, or cold, so long as he has hay to munch on and his donkey to tease. It was especially poignant watching these two happy, if muddy, fat and fuzzy creatures, given that I'm currently working on a story about an appalling case of animal cruelty in Alberta. Thank heavens that the SPCA was able to execute a search and seizure--there will be a happy ending, eventually, for many of the horses and other animals they rescued. For the many dead animals, it came too late--but I am so glad the SPCA was able to get in, and that so many have come forward to help with the animals' recovery.

I'm running a bit behind, as last night we had an abrupt and tedious power outage here which went on until into this morning. This would not normally bother me even one iota. However, at the time I was downloading the upgrade for my MacBook Pro's operating system, and it was in mid install (directly while downloading, near as I can tell) when the power went out. Including, of course, the Internet. So this morning I had to do a complete reinstall of my operating system, which always takes time. With deadlines up the wazoo and research to do, I haven't been able to comment back to posts, or visit others, or even check my email until a couple of hours ago. So if you've been expecting to hear from me, it'll be soon. After I get a decent sleep, that is. And I'll get to the next container posting by the weekend, if nothing else goes awry here. It's acting like Friday the 13, not Thursday...

Containing yer gardening enthusiasms: Containers, Pt 1.

Long before I can plant annuals out in our gardens, I’m busy in our little greenhouse making up ‘instant gardens’. Gleefully, I select a variety of flowering and foliage plants, usually annuals, and pot them in interesting planters, ranging from old wooden fruit baskets to clay strawberry jars to exciting new metal containers. One day I’ll check these planters and decide it’s time to move them outdoors to the steps, to the deck, to areas needing a burst of colour, and we’ll have extra floral display while the spring perennials die down and the later perennials and planted-out annuals are coming into their own. Container gardening is wonderful!


We often refer to our containers as "Port-a-plants', because I trundle some of them around the yard on a regular basis, moving them into different sunny or shaded areas, spots where perennials or bulbs have finished and I want a little burst of colour, or (ahem) even to disguise something that doesn't look great, like the ripening foliage of bulbs or a floundering perennial or shrub that I'm giving a bit more time to before it joins the great compost heap in the sky. Yes, I have plants that expire, not being a perfect gardener. As I tell others if they lament a lost plant, a dead plant is just a new hole to plant something else in.


Containers are great for people with limited space, and you can really make the most of what you have for gardening areas if you also go vertical. I have a few hanging baskets that I like quite well, (none of them the dreaded white or green plastic variety), but I also mount pots or containers on walls, posts, railings, and anywhere else that I think needs a little brightening up.


This little design was done at the Landscape and Hort program at our local community college a few years ago, and I really, REALLY like it. It's all about the foliage, in this case, with nice textures and colours set off by the terracotta planters, and that whimsical clay sculpture. The lattice work screens off an unsightly area, in this case part of the greenhouse which was actually more displays, but it's a simple and effective structure for a garden, too.


While there are some things that do give me great challenge with gardening, I do containers really, really well. My secrets? One is our weather, which I swear has a lot to do with it--not a lot of scorching heat, some fog to keep things moist, and long, lovely autumns; last year a couple of containers were still blooming when snow arrived on Remembrance Day, November 11, as we'd had a couple of frosts but not enough to dampen the really tough plants. But the other secrets aren't really secrets: choosing the right plants, the right potting medium; watering and fertilizing regularly (I use seaweed fertilizer once weekly during a watering) and deadheading and cutting back faithfully. I'll talk more about that in coming posts, as well as giving some plants that I wouldn't be without in my containers.

Redwings, Robins and RAIN!

Well, what do you know? For a change, we didn't get belted with snow, but with a most impressive rainstorm instead. I haven't heard yet how other parts of the Maritimes have fared--both the Internet and satellite went out for a while last night, naturally--but here we had rain all day yesterday, and then last night it got down to serious business with major drownpours and of course wind lashing it all around--AND thunder and lightning to add to the festivities. Surprisingly, there's no flooding around here, and there aren't even ponds laying around in the yard--the ground is apparently more thawed than we realized and absorbed a lot of the melt and the rainwater, which is a surprise.

There are welcome surprises here this morning, though. When I came downstairs, bleary eyed and time-confused (though I'm glad to have Daylight Saving Time here), hubby had my coffee poured, the waffles warm in the iron, and the Bakeapple syrup ready for me. And he was gleeful. "Look outside!" He told me happily. "The redwings are back."


(Google image, photog unknown)
And so they are. Well, one big bright male is, anyway--I haven't gone down to the pond to see whether there are more, but there will be. They come to our feeders to eat seeds, but as spring comes on they'll eat a lot of insects too, as well as wild seeds (remember those wild plants I talked about last post?)

Our pond is a wild area, with lots of cattails, sedges and reeds, and assorted other native plants, including alders. Yes, alders. I welcome them by the pond, because they hold the soil in place and also act as filters for groundwater, as well as being habitat havens for all kinds of wildlife. The pond isn't deep, and we've talked about digging it out at one end because it's silted in quite heavily, but I worry about disturbing the myriad frogs, beneficial insects, salamanders, birds and other creatures that make the pond and surroundings their home.

While we were excitedly celebrating the arrival of redwings, something caught my eye further back in the yard. There's a distinctive way that some birds move, and before I even found my glasses so I could see clearly, I realized what it was. An American robin. In fact, a few of them, bop bop bopping across the grass in search of tasty tidbits.

It's a grey, dreary day here today, and suddenly, that doesn't matter one bit. The bird populations are changing, and a walk around the squishy property showed me that yes, the willow branches are brightening in colour, buds are swelling a bit on some shrubs, and oh, look at those green perennial weeds. (yes, I have weeds that I DON'T want, too.) It's almost time to start PlantWatching, looking for those first harbingers of true, rather than calendar, spring. As I wrote in my column in the Chronicle Herald this morning, Spring WILL eventually remember where we live. And we'll make it through. All of us, whether we're in La Ronge, Sask, or Tampa, Florida or hanging on to the windswept Fundy shoreline.

And even though it's snowing again, now, and I can't see to the bottom of the pasture. We will get through.

Pollinating our future, part 1

Every single day, I learn something new about gardening, about plants and birds and other myriad creatures, by reading through the scores of blogs that are among my favourites. One of the people I hold in highest esteem in the garden-blogging world is Wild Flora, of Wild Gardening. Flora is a passionate promoter of wildlife-friendly gardens and native plants. She is gently passionate, getting her message across about these things without being strident or didactic. We talk regularly and I read and reread her blog postings faithfully, and we even met, last spring (she also lives in Nova Scotia) and traded native plants. I brought her red trillium (Trillium erectum) and Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum communtatum) from our garden, and she brought me wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) which is a true bee and hummingbird magnet.

Over the past few months, we’ve talked back and forth about a variety of subjects, including pollinators, particularly bees. Even before the fuss began last year about Colony Collapse Disorder, we were both thinking a lot about native bees. Honeybees are not native to North America, and while they’re incredibly important for pollinating a huge number of food crops (and other plants), native bees and other pollinators also perform these important tasks.


Wild Flora put me on to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, where I happily began learning more—but also learning things that alarmed me, about the decline in native pollinators from a host of reasons. Habitat destruction, excessive use of pesticides, possible disease from introduced bumble bee species…while some research has been done, there’s lots more to learn.

Ours is a very bee-friendly property. I’ve always gleefully welcomed the sight of honeybees from a local beekeeper’s boxes, bouncing from flower to flower, but what I love best are the fat, fuzzy, happy-sounding bumble bees. I’ve been stung exactly once in nine years here, and that’s because I walked on one in the clover—and felt very sad for it. Not being allergic to bees or other hymenopterans (order Hymenoptera includes bees, wasps, sawflies and ants), I don’t work in fear in the garden, and I’m quite inclined to follow bees around with my camera, trying to get good photos of them as they go about their business.

By accident last summer, I took several photos of one of the bees that is in decline—the yellow-banded bumble bee, Bombus terricola. I didn’t know what species it was at the time, I just like bees. Earlier this winter Sarina of Xerces confirmed the identification after Flora and I puzzled over it. I was delighted, but also became more determined to do what I can to promote awareness of the plight of native bees, and do what I can to help them.

I’m not an absolutist in most things. I’m a mostly organic gardener (about 99 44/100 %) and use a mixture of native and hybrid plants. Our property is a Monarch Waystation, we feed the birds, don’t spray chemicals (even organic ones), and I encourage plants that are good for all kinds of pollinators. Like nettles, and goldenrod, thistles and even dandelions. Our ‘lawn’ is full of clover and dandelions, and every time I watch a pollen-laden bee rise from a clover blossom or a dandelion flower, I smile.

So while you’ll see a host of cool hybrids here at Sunflower Hill, you’ll also see other plants that won’t grace the front cover of too many glossy gardening magazines. But that’s okay. I hear our happy bees, and like Yeats in his bee-loud glade, I find peace, ‘dropping slow’ on me with a sound of hope. This is just one garden. But there are many who share these concerns, and do what we can to help.

Garden Blogger's Geography Project: Wrapup Pt 2!

Nothing like supper and a nap to renew one's energy, is there? If we had a prize for "most entertainingly original" post, I think it would have to go to Ottawa Hortiphilia for the highly amusing poem at the beginning of OH's post about our nation's capital city. It's a lovely city, if somewhat challenging for gardeners. Our friend Kylie writes movingly about her part of Ohio on a regular basis, but it's always a treat to read anything she posts from her little acre. Gloria writes about Chicago and the waters that define her fair city over at Pollinators-welcome, her wildlife-friendly blog plot, while thanks to Beckie I learned that Royal, Illinois, got its name from a sign on a railcar advertising baking powder.

The award for blogger-living-closest-to-bloomingwriter would be Nancy at Soliloquey, living 45 minutes from here in the next county, while Shady Gardener in Iowa has the best blog title I've come across yet: "Does everything grow better in my neighbor's Yard?" Gisela at Guildwood, near Toronto, showed us another side of Toronto that is far superior to what the tourist brochures and city hype provide. And the two sisters, Apple and Countrygirl, who garden at the end of Lake Ontario in upstate New York, entice us with castles and parks and friends' gardens to visit.

Historiana has taught me a lot about her plot in Kentucky with her musings, and she currently has a wonderful photo of a daffodil on her sidebar with the exhortation to "Think Spring, People!" Amen, fellow gardener! I bet it's fun doing Veg Plotting in Chippenham with two such affable looking felines as Jess and Skimble to help out. Jim, who gardens in Buffalo, New York, gets the gotcha-award for having Spunky Boomerang get up and bump the monitor: I usually have my volume shut off when writing, so didn't know about the bird songs on his front page. There are a lot of New York state gardeners participating in our meme, as Kerri lives in upstate New York in a region with the delightful name of Central Leatherstocking! The trolls under bridges had better watch out for those Weed Whacking Wenches out in Seattle--they sound like my kinda gardeners, for sure.

Are we there yet? Nope. Bathroom break, and then we're back!

Kris wrote a lovely and moving love story about Rhode Island's Blithewold, a beautiful garden I hope to visit in the not too far future. Another place I hope to see soon is the only province in Canada I've not been to: Saskatchewan, home of Larry's Sherwood Greenhouses but also of bloggin' bud Kate, both in Regina. Rather different from not-so-flat Nova Scotia, but beautiful nonetheless. We had a Bliss-ful experience visiting Yolanda and the Bliss Team's home in Dinteloord, Netherlands, returning to North America to bask in the warmth of another of the Austin Bloggers, Annie at The Transplantable Rose. Since we were sunning ourselves anyway, it was a quick trip down to the Tampa area of Florida to visit Meems at Hoe and Shovel, then skipped back over to Texas to visit Brenda in the Piney Woods of Tyler, in the Lone Star state. Needing a little drier heat, we skipped over to Phoenix in Arizona for a visit with Garden Djinn, where I learned that monsoons in the Sonoran dessert are called haboobs. We're having a Fundy Haboob here tonight, with a drownpour of mild, spring-scented rain, for what it's worth. From there, we headed back north a bit, to central Indiana and Robin's Nesting Place, where we got to enjoy both her fun writing and some utterly exquisite photography.

One of the joyous things about these meme has been getting to meet new-to-me bloggers, including the erudite and definitely amusing Benjamin Vogt of the Deep Middle, in Nebraska. Deciding it was time to skip across the ocean again, we sailed over to Giekau in Germany for a visit with Corinna at her Paradise Found, then caught the red-eye to Melbourne Australia for a visit at From Little Things, where I got sidetracked by the Italian lavender farm.

I could have stayed there permanently, but the cats needed feeding so it was back across the pond and touchdown at Garden Fool's plot near New York City. Since we were in the neighbourhood, so to speak, we skipped over to Lissa's home in Saratoga Springs and took a horse for a gallop down a track. (I did this once, with a retired racehorse while I was a student at Ag College, because the track was right next door to the barn...whoo hooo!) Entangled claims to be geographically challenged, but I'm link challenged, obviously, because I read the post, commented on it....and lost the link somewhere until today. And last but never least, we have a highly entertaining post from Sue Swift, in Milan, Italy, who's longing to be elsewhere.

Well...we've logged a lot of e-air-miles over the past month, and judging by your comments, had a lot of fun learning about our gardening neighbours near and far. I realized it wasn't going to be easy to pick a favourite post, as they're all my favourites...so I just cut up some pieces of paper, wrote each blogger's name on one, and put them all in my gardening hat. The random winner of a copy of The Atlantic Gardener's Greenbook is Frances at Faire Garden. Congratulations, Frances!

If I were independently wealthy, I'd send a copy of my book to each of you. Unfortunately, I can't quite go that far, so I've created a special badge/award for each of you who participated. Now you can all claim to have your very own Meconopsis, or blue poppy! A little story about this: this image is on my business cards, and was created by my uncle Don, a commercial artist in Virginia. So I have utterly unique business cards, and you now share something with a gardener and writer in Nova Scotia, wherever you are. Just right click to save it to your desktop and post on your blog with my admiration for your hard work. (is this better than an "A", Kylee?)

(Edit in the morning: I've made a smaller version, which I was having trouble with last night. Try this is that one is too big for you!)

Again, congratulations and my heartfelt thanks to all of you, and here's hoping we soon see spring wherever we garden. (Except of course for you in the southern Hemisphere, who are waiting for autumn!)

Garden Blogger's Geography Project: The Wrap-Up Post, Pt 1.

One thing I've learned since we initiated this blog project is that my weather trails a day or two behind some of my US gardening friends. The ice storm you received in the past couple of days is lashing us right now, although the gale-force winds are keeping ice formation down somewhat. Yesterday we enjoyed the mild spell you had several days ago, so I anxiously await reports of fairer weather from Kylee, Layanee, Sandy, Robin, et al.

According to my calculations, there have been 60 garden bloggers take part in the Geography Project, from right across the world. We've had posts from New York and the Netherlands, from the chill reaches of Saskatchewan to the balmy south of Florida, Texas and California; from Sweden to Ontario, Poland to South Africa, and from winter-weary Chicago to the summer-enjoying Australians and South Africans. My gardenin' hat is off to each and every one of you.

I'm going to keep the list of posts along the left column for a while, until such time as I figure out a way to give it a separate page (which may mean moving to another blogging host, ouch. Not this week, not while rebuilding a monthly project I've done for more than ten years in QuarkXpress and now have to move to InDesign. ) And if you haven't checked out some of them, I urge you to do so. Some are hilariously funny (like the always amusing John, aka Wiseacre, and our almost late Sue in Italy. Each one of them teaches us something new about the world we live in--and in many cases, causes us to look at our own part of the world with new eyes. As Annie in Austin commented in the last post,

Jodi, at first your project seemed like another fun garden blogger meme - especially when so many of you were trapped in winter - but as the entries piled up I realized this project was a better reflection of the kinds of worlds we live in than one finds in ordinary magazine articles.
Your correspondents weren't reporters writing about some new-to-them location after a visit and some drinks and dinners out - these were written by people whose lives are invested in the places where they live. It was still fun, but in combination, the posts have weight.

I couldn't have said it better, Annie, so I won't even try!

Because there are so many participants, I've divided the roundup into two posts, and I'll announce the winner and a special award at the end of the second post.

Thanks to David at kipili.com, I now know that Berowra is a suburb of Sydney, Australia, while Irena's Roots Run Deep in Toronto, Canada, where her post gave me a new appreciation for our country's largest city. Pam at Digging files her post about Austin under the topic Keep Austin Weird (which really, really makes me wish I could attend Spring Fling!) and Margaret tends her growing passion, which includes removing exotic invasives in favour of native plants, in Sydney AUSTralia. (do you suppose they're related, these two places? Both are on my must-visit lists!)

You would laugh if you could see me working on this post. I have two monitors, so one is open in Firefox, where I'm writing this post, and the other has about ten tabs open in Safari, as I visit and re-read each posting and collect the link. Though she was ridding herself of the epatoozies in Florida, Carolyn told us about her Sweet Home Chicago, which I think should be the site of a garden bloggers spring fling too. Because we have a collection of passionate gardeners in the Chicago area, and I learned a lot about the so-called Windy City from her gardening compadres, including Mr. McGregor's Daughter, who not only told us about the Snow Sculpting Competition, but also gave us a filmology look at the Chicago area in a second, really unique post. Then Linette, from southwest Ohio told us about her 19 acres of gardening bliss near Dayton, and tempted me with talk of Arboreta. Away in the southern Continent again, Blotanical's own guru, Stuart Robinson, told us about Busselton, home of the nearly 2 km long jetty. (It would become driftwood here in our tide, Stuart!

One of our more northerly participants would be Rosengeranium in Uppsala, Sweden, where she gardens indoors with great zeal and enthusiasm. She's quite a distance (as I can figure it) from Katarina in Gothenburg, where there's a botanical garden but Katarina's garden looks pretty impressive, too! How about living below sealevel, like Top Veg does on the well named Sunk Island in the United Kingdom? That would be pretty nervewracking for me, who likes to live above the water. Cows outnumber people in St, Lawrence county, New York, where John at Wiseacre tends his nursery and his fun new blog.

May Dreams Gardener Carol gave us top ten reasons why we'd love gardening in Indianapolis, and I'd have to agree with her. Jean shared some secrets of a southwest Georgia seed-scatterer, tempting me with the thoughts of things blooming yearround. Theresa, who gardens in Merida, Mexico, has different gardening challenges from her home state of Northern California, but she's accepted the challenges with enthusiasm. There are a lot of gardens I want to visit one day, and one would be Frances' Faire Garden, in southeast Tennessee (but I don't want to visit during Tornado season!)

I still haven't calculated just how many people from various provinces and states participated, but New York has its share of garden bloggers and homework presenters, including Sarah, who lives in Rochester, New York, where there are plenty of garden-themed places to visit and activities to do. Debi claims to live in the middle of nowhere, Alabama, but it sounds like a pretty nice place to live and http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifgarden, plus she and a friend started the , and that's a fine project! Anna has been keeping us entertained with her adventures, but also celebrating her North Carolina roots and the importance of family.

Our only Caribbean contribution comes from Nicole, born and raised in the islands in the sun. It's quite different from Gina, who tends her not-so-skinny garden in Forest Park near Chicago, which she observes needs to improve its rating on the green-o-meter. Lisa at Greenbow lives in Vincennes, Indiana which has French inspirations in its history and great agricultural connections. Janie in Texas told us about life in the gulf coast area where they garden yearround...sigh...while Vonlafin gardens in Lafayette, Indiana, and through her I learned how close her part of Indiana is to Chicago.

Another Sydney, Australia gardener, Chookie chimed in with links about her geography and climate from earlier posts, but also talked about an unsual shrub, the downy wattle, which sounds rather like a Shakespearean insult. Gardenista, on the other hand, is in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, way north of Kate in Regina, and in USA zone 2a but she sure manages to grow some great plants in her gardens. Crafty Gardener, who has several websites, gardens near Belleville, Ontario, is another gardener I'd dearly love to visit because of the great interest in seeds and seedpods as well as what's obviously a glorious garden. Carol (Cabs) lives in Amherst, the Massachusetts one rather than the Nova Scotian town, and it's a lovely rolling area near several colleges boasting great gardens.The ever enthusiastic Joy in Kingston wrote several posts about her city, (I've gone past it on the train en route to Toronto a couple of times) while Ross posted to us about Durban, Kwazulu Natal in sourthern Africa and tempted us with pictures of incredible plants, warm ocean waters and very handsome architecture. Looks pretty different, but no less beautiful and interesting, than Ewa's lovely communities in Poland. What a global community we garden bloggers are!

Whew....I need a bit of a break. I'll post the rest later tonight!

The Attack of the Dreaded Farch, redux

It's so nice to realize that we're not alone in our winter malaise, isn't it? Thanks to all of you who have offered kind wishes on my crappy knee, and to those who are enduring the plague of this winter, too. It would seem, from reading blogs the past day or so, that we here in NS are trailing at least a day behind our fellow northern gardening bloggers, as we had a nice (but cold) day yesterday and a nice (and very mild day today)...and are currently waiting to be clobbered by an ice storm, which some of you have had.

We don't know whether to laugh or cry, do we? Despite my harrumphing, my inclination is to find humour in among the rantings. I was reduced to giggles yesterday when I saw this sign in Kentville, so I pulled over, grabbed my camera, and went back to capture it. I think it sums up winterweariness really, really well, don't you?

Batten down the hatches, friends...despite our best wishes, we ain't quite out of the weatherwoods yet. But at least we can draw on delightful plants such as this to cheer our souls. And the clocks go ahead in a few days too. We'll get there from here.

March madness, Watering Zen, and Gold stars for all!

This has been one of those weekends...First, let's begin with the weather. March did not come in like a lion OR a lamb. It came in like the Tasmanian devil from Bugs Bunny, a roaring, whirling, screeching maelstrom. Like many of you, we got clobbered with yet another snowstorm, which began yesterday and finally spent itself sometime this afternoon. Except the wind has been blowing pretty well banshee-speed since sometime last night. Crankily, I have refused to go outside all weekend, leaving LSS to do the outside chores: but in my defence, that's mostly because the crud in my knee grabbed hold and made even walking across the room difficult and very painful the past couple of days. While I'm used to chronic pain because of the ever-tiresome plague of fibromyalgia, this is more acute and makes me crabby.

And as sometimes happens when the weather goes absurd, our Internet connection became slow as March molasses, so while I could get people's comments approved and add any late homework, much of the time reading blogs and commenting was a bit more challenging. I also haven't commented back on my own posts to all your lovely comments over the past few posts. Suffice it to say I've read and enjoyed every one of them, and appreciate all the feedback you give, and for those who are new to visiting, I'll return the visit soon!


For all of you who have done posts for Garden Bloggers Geography Project, well done! If you haven't gotten your post done yet, or if it's not appearing on the lefthand column, just send it along between now and Wednesday evening. That gives you an extension, and me time to read again through all the posts that have come in already, and do a roundup post. In the meantime, you all deserve gold stars for your efforts, because they have been fascinating, entertaining, at times very amusing, and always informative.


Since I couldn't do much of anything else this weekend, I spent a great deal of time working: handling deadlines, doing research, cleaning up my office AND my harddrive (shudder!) and reading both for work and for pleasure. One of the for pleasure reads I've been savouring of late is Matthew Cohen's Zen of Watering Your Garden. Matt is a family physician who has gardened for more than fifty years, and who spent four years creating this lovely book of exquisite photographs and thoughts. Those four years have been well spent, because the result is a perfect gem of a garden-contemplation book.

In his foreword, Matt says he has two goals:

The first is to provide an experience which nurtures the reader's relationship with things that grow in the earth--and in the soul...My second goal is to inspire my readers to engage the garden in its own integrity and power. I use aphorisms, poetry, and other insightful observations--most found and some original--as companions to the plants in the photographs and as guides to the reader.

Every person needs a time and place to escape the troubles of the world around us, including the troubles that clutter our minds. Matt told me that he realized while hand-watering his Tallahassee, Florida, gardens that he felt a Zen-like experience--inner peace and clearing of the mind. While he says his is not a Zen garden as such, nor does he claim to be an ardent student of Zen, he finds a calm and spiritual connection while watering--the sound of the water, the smell of water caressing the plants, the play of light on water droplets on perfect flowers or cool green leaves.

"A garden can be anywhere something grows and is cared for," Matt writes, and this is so very true. Our gardens might be sprawling rural plots or a few clustered pots of flowers on a balcony. They may be meticulously groomed suburban landscapes or indoor gardens grown for food or pleasure. While Matt's favourite plants are orchids, specifically Laeliinae, with camellias, native plants and trees also tugging his gardening heart, the plant photographs in Zen of Watering Your Garden cover a wide spectrum, and each photo is beautifully matched to a text. Here, blades of grass are dusted with frost, while the accompanying text is a quote by Gretel Ehrlich. "Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons." Here, a pond with koi in it shimmers besides words from Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "Yes, as everyone knows, mediation and water are wedded forever."
Beside a striking potted bonsai, a quote by Lao Tzu: "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished."

I asked if Matt had a favourite poem or aphorism in the book, and he pointed to me one by his 83-year-old father, Stanley Cohen. Beside a photograph of Gerbera daisies glistening with water droplets, his dad's words:

Watering, drooping leaves become alive,
Colourfull petals awake and thrive.
Sponging roots absorb and flourish
For the many seasons they will nourish.

I like this soothing little book of words and garden images very much--so much so that I keep it on my office desk, to help calm a cluttered mind when deadlines and emails and photos that need sorting and more deadlines and other commitments and a messy messy desk threaten to catch me up and away...I remind myself, as Lao Tzu said, that nature doesn't hurry, yet everything is accomplished.


This reminds me that while winter is not hurrying to leave, all things will work their way through. The mounds of snow will soon melt, the spring bulbs will smile skyward and leaves will open with a flourish, and all will be well again.

The Attack of the Dreaded Farch

Carolyn Gail of Sweet Home and Garden Chicago started us off with Garden Bloggers Muse Day a while back, and I"ve been contemplating whether to post today or tomorrow. Since in most years this would be March 1st, I figure today is as good a time as any.

“April,” we are told by the great poet TS Eliot in his epic poem The Waste Land, “is the cruelest month, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

Much as I love Eliot, he’s all wet on this one. That’s because he never endured the interminable attack of the dreaded Farch in Nova Scotia.

Farch, you say? What the heck is a Farch?

Farch is what some people know better as the months of February and March. But because they are interminable, obnoxious, and downright unpleasant, I tend to roll them into one loooonnnnnggggg month and call it Farch. And I like it just about as much as I like goutweed (and people KNOW how much I detest that justly-maligned plant.) This year, of course, Farch is even longer, thanks to today being a Leap Day. Like Carol at May Dreams Garden says, it would be nicer to have that extra day at a nicer time of the year, although those of us in the southern Hemisphere probably think that an extra late-summer day is just fine.

We've had the full meal deal of winter weather tantrums in the past couple of months, that's for sure. I don’t mind the cold or the snow. It’s the grey. Grey skies, grey landscapes, grey pavement and heaps of grey snow, more grey skies. Days the sun is out, no matter if it’s 40 below, I’m okay with it. But I’m starting to get impatient to be grubbing in the dirt, bringing home new ‘groceries for the garden’ in the form of plants and more plants and accents and garden art and mushroom compost...pruning and cleaning up and making new beds and hardening off seedlings and doing all those other wonderful things that we do.

It's still too early to plant most seedlings indoors here, because they can't be transplanted outside until at least May, unless I decide to put something in the greenhouse for supplemental heat. I did sow a bunch of catgrass, to keep the cat-children from chewing on my houseplants. And while I didn't get that azalea I talked about, the orchid show is tomorrow and Sunday, and we do plan to trek into Halifax for a bit of that. So who knows what might get to come home with us?

And despite reading all kinds of other blogs, I'm just beginning to feel really bludgeoned by the weather. I want to see this sight in my own garden.


I'd even welcome seeing this, snow and all:


Of course, I’ve been pushing back the greys by keeping busy with work, reading all kinds of new books, browsing through catalogues and magazines and websites, and tending the plants here in the house. They tell me that spring will come, as they’ve started to wake up from their resting period and put on new growth. And if it weren't for all of you posting about your gardening adventures or plans, and taking part in the Garden Bloggers Geography Project, I'd be even more winter-beaten. Thanks to all of you who have done posts for the project, and I'll be doing a wrapup over the weekend.

Okay, you've talked me out of being gloomy. Maybe we’re only midway through Farch. But just writing about gardening makes me realize that soon it will be time to be outside getting ready for another season’s floral promises and memories. And tomatoes.