Heartfelt thanks to EVERYONE who came out (well, almost)

I'm back! Amazingly, after the assorted cold, wet weather we had in May and June, I didn't expect we'd have three fantastic days for our Open Garden event. But we did! The sun shone, it was warm (and at times, downright HOT) from  the time we started on Friday until the last car left late Sunday afternoon.

There was plenty to see, from the drifts of perennials like 'Lola' astrantia,

The roses all popped on cue, providing colour and fragrance (this photo was taken in the fog on Monday evening!).

Other People's Gardens: Flora's seaside dream

Since I haven't had a chance to do one of these posts for a while, how about a visit to one of those wonderful, perfect gardens: You know the kind I mean, Other People's Gardens. To my mind, everyone else's garden IS perfect, and a teaching exercise, and a joy. This time, we're going to my friend Flora's garden, not far from Yarmouth, NS.

Flora's garden is sort of like mine in that it is challenged by living near the sea--wind and salt spray are a fact of life in Sandford. Her back garden is surrounded by a fence that acts as something of a windbreak, although if things were as wild this weekend at her place as at ours, she'd need a fence 20 feet high to buffet the wind.

This garden is steadily evoloving and growing and changing with each year. Flora swears every year that she's not buying/accepting any new plants this year, but none of us believe her...and all of us help to feed her habit. She enjoys a mixture of old fashioned garden varieties as well as newer ones, and is quick to share with others. I now have a young Deutzia 'Codsall Pink' compliments of Flora.

I love to watch Flora's garden changing with the seasons. From the eruption of the bulbs every spring, to the blooming of her many roses and other flowering shrubs, to the changing of foliage colour in the trees, this is a garden with the art of 4-season interest totally mastered.

Some areas of the garden shimmer with cool pastels in perenials, grasses, and shrubs like the beautiful rose cascading beside the barn.

Other areas are warm with rich hot colours in helenium, astilbe, phlox and foxgloves.

From Flora, I learned that we can move plants regularly til we find a place that really suits them. She laughingly says they get bored looking at the same sights all the time, and appreciate a change. I use this for an explanation when I decide to move plants. Works every time.

This garden has something fascinating to look at everywhere you look, from low-growing heucheras and hostas to the tall, elegant lilies.

Lilies do very well in Flora's garden. Well, everything seems to do very well in her garden.

The fountain sings its soothing song all day, a perfect counterpoint to the birdsong and the bees feasting in blooms around the garden.

It's entirely possible that I am slightly jealous over this wonderful blue hydrangea. It's a beauty, as is the pink one, and the huge, enthusiastic whiteflowered climbing hydrangea.

Cascades of roses tumble from shrubs and ramblers all around the back garden.

Flora's garden is a little warmer than mine, so she has some things come into bloom a couple of weeks earlier than I do, like her various tall phloxes...

But like in my garden, the cool sea air means that blooms also last much longer. Her aconitums are magnificent.

Flora's garden is a rich mixture of flower colours and shapes, foliage textures and sizes. It's a living, joyful place, and one of my favourite gardens. It's a garden of joy, which is just what a garden should be--and its bounty has been shared around most of the county, and beyond. For after all, gardens are best when they are shared with other gardeners, aren't they?

Drifts in the garden...Other People's Gardens.

It can be said that I read too many blogs and websites when I can't remember who coined the term OPG (Other People's Gardens) so that I can't give them proper credit here. Let's just rest assured that when I remember, or when that person pokes me to remind me, I'll make the correction.

Anyway. The point is that I love visiting Other People's Gardens almost as much as I love puttering in my own. If you scooped up a dozen people from around the province--or a hundred from around the blogosphere--we might grow some of the same plants but interpret how to plant them in very different ways.



A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit the garden of a woman I've corresponded with intermittently over the past number of years. For a while we had lost touch with one another, but I actually met Betty back in the spring, and finally got to visit her garden in mid August.

In a word, Betty's garden is spectacular. She lives in a rural spot and has plenty of space, and actually began building the garden long before she moved there to a permanent dwelling. She used to have a small travel trailer on the site, where she camped out to do her gardening, while working and living in another community.

When you have plenty of room, you can create broad, sweeping gardenscapes of colour, texture, form...and Betty has done that masterfully here. She has the art of creating 'drifts' down to a fine science, incorporating wildflowers, perennials, ornamental grasses, shrubs and even some annuals into this (to my mind) perfectly created garden.

She uses a huge variety of perennials, including many with colourful foliage, such as 'Golden Jubilee' agastache, which has become one of my favourite perennials for its long bloom period as well as its luminous foliage.

She also has a wickedly fun sense of humour, with amusing and charming bits of garden art and other accents throughout the property. How do you like her 'lawn chair', made of sods?

Of course there would have to be a photo of one of her several drifts of coneflowers. This garden is awash with colour, and also with life, with bees buzzing through the flowers, butterflies winging around on the mild summer breeze, and birds chattering in the shrubs and trees.


Long perennial borders incorporate plenty of new cultivars along with old fashioned favourites and more than a few native plants.

For example, her bed of chicory both delighted and caused great envy in me. She laughingly said some people ask her why she's growing 'weeds' (chicory grows along the roadsides throughout several counties in Nova Scotia). I understand perfectly. Pale blue flowers, wildly attractive to pollinators...what's not to like? (My chicory drift has a long long way to go to be as fun as this).

Betty has several perennials that I love but that don't do well for me. In a photo above, there's an impressive drift of Gaura, which is often best used as an annual or tender perennial in our province. But Betty has good drainage and other conditions that suit it, and it has come back beautifully for her. She also has several fine plantings of various balloon flowers, which I have given up on. They're late breaking dormancy here, and I've probably dug them up half a dozen times, thinking they were weeds or dead. So I just enjoy other people's balloons now.

I was delighted to see a big drift of Mexican hat, Ratibida, another type of coneflower, in one of Betty's borders. She also has a lot of perennial grasses, but most of them were just preparing to put up flowerheads, so as I've lamented before, they're a challenge to photograph well and look appealing.

Some people get intimidated or even discouraged by visiting OPGs. I do not. I love to see what other people are doing with their plantings, how they cope with weather or other growing challenges, what they like for plants...it's a treat and a joy for me to visit gardens like Betty's, and I plan to put up more posts of OPGs in the coming weeks.

What about you? What happens when you visit OPGs? What's the best inspiration you've taken away from visiting a fellow gardener?