Finding my way home to the October Country

Well, it's been six WEEKS since I've updated here, but in my defence, life has been crazily busy, mores than usual. Between adopting three kittens that became five kittens, travelling around to various events, working on some interesting projects for clients, and trying to do some home and yard improvements, there hasn't been much spare time for writing blog posts. And now suddenly, it's October, and that happened very quickly. Unfortunately, it's been a rainy October so far, as two large weather systems dump a drenching on the province. It's good for the gardens, but a little hard to get anything done.

There is still a gratifyingly large number of plants in bloom in my garden, partly because I do manage to sneak time to deadhead, and partly because I've planted with fallscaping beauty in mind. The 'Sungold' buddleia in the top photo is in its second year of life here, highly unusual for butterfly bushes of any colour but especially of the delightful golden-yellow cultivar. My Japanese anemones have settled in very well here, being planted where they have decent drainage, and they continue to bloom like crazy.

Lotsa August Colour & Heading to New Brunswick

What a wonderful few days I had on the road, talking gardens with fellow enthusiasts, photographing plants, cheering on fellow gardeners...thanks to my gracious hosts for their many kindnesses and generosity of spirit. We had great attendance at the talks and seminars, and as always, I think I learned as much as or more than those who came to the events. Tuesday I head out to New Brunswick, and I'll have more to say about that shortly.

My mantra in these dog days of August, as many people know, is that we CAN have plenty of colour as we go through late summer and into autumn. The photos in this blog post were all taken today, in my gardens. Above is part of the coneflower garden, but all of the garden is looking pretty enthusiastic. Perhaps there are a few weeds, but we'll declare those pollinator plants and carry on.

Astrantia 'Lola' is in the background of this photo, and I did cut back all the dried flowers, the better to encourage more bloom and show off the richly coloured 'Beaujolais Bonnets' scabiosa and 'Jade Frost' eryngium. 

So Tuesday morning I head out first thing to catch the Digby-Saint John Ferry, which is always a great trip.  I love taking the ferry every chance possible; the ship is lovely, the crew knowledgable and pleasant (I've been up on the bridge on one crossing, and had a great time). After landing in Saint John, I will hustle off to Fredericton, or more accurately, Lincoln, to visit Scott's Nursery, which I profiled in the most recent issue of Saltscapes magazine. I'll be at Scott's from 130-330, and hope to see some of my New Brunswick gardening friends there. Plus of course we ALL know there will be plants I can't live without, won't there? I'd better sell some books so I can afford plants without dipping into the grocery fund. Tee hee. 

When Yellow isn't, and On the Road Again (soon)

Once again I am madly charging along trying to catch up with the rest of the blogosphere, and have been absent without leave. Or is that without Leaf? In truth, between plenty of work, some family matters, mostly quite pleasant but time consuming, new kittens, and other entertainments, it's just a very full time of year. There's way more social media to follow now than there was even two years ago, and there's no way I can keep up with all of it, so I don't even try. I do read blogs but don't comment too much because I often read them at night in bed on my iPad, and I dislike typing on that. I don't have those 20-year old flexible thumbs...

The next two weeks are busy, and I do mean busy, as I combine book sales with garden talks and article research. This week, Thursday sees me doing a morning Talk, Tea, and Walk at the Carmichael Stewart Museum in New Glasgow, 11 am-130 pm. I'm looking forward to this especially because it's a fundraiser for the Museum, so I hope we have a good turnout.

After I leave New Glasgow, I'm off to the Other Island, Cape Breton Island. Hugely looking forward to that as well, because I'll be doing two events at The Bayside Garden Centre and Farmer's Market in beautiful Whycocomagh. (If you don't know how to say that name, you should come visit and we'll teach you). Friday, I'll be at the Farmers Market with several other authors, and we'll all be reading from (or talking from, in my case) our books and doing sales and signings to coincide with the grand opening of the Market. Saturday, I'm scheduled to do one or two seminars on "Never too late to plant!" and hopefully doing more book sales and signings.

Next week, I'm going to be in New Brunswick from Tuesday-Friday, doing assorted events at several of my favourite nurseries. I'll be at Scotts Nursery in Fredericton on Tuesday; Kingsbrae Garden on Thursday, and Corn Hill Nursery near Petitcodiac on Friday. I'll have more to say about these this coming weekend.

So, now what's all this about when yellow isn't? Well, we all know what yellow looks like, right? It's not a colour that's easily mistaken for another colour. That soft yellow rose in the top photo is definitely yellow, whereas you might find it more challenging to describe the Rudbeckia in the photo above. (It's called 'Cherry Brandy', by the way, but that doesn't help you to determine the shade it is.)

Sometimes flowers are named with a description. This hemerocallis (daylily) is called 'Sweet Hot Chocolate', and despite the challenge in photographing some daylily colours, I think it's pretty well named. It doesn't smell of chocolate the way chocolate cosmos does, but oh well.

This spider daylily is as yet unnamed, and is described as being green. Even with the wonky colour of one of my monitors, I don't see anything green about it. However, this is also its first year to bloom so who knows what it will look like in a year or two.

There are several varieties of true lilies in this photo, including 'Golden Splendour' trumpet lily, one of my favourites, and 'Tom Pouce' oriental, which is sort of yellow and has a yellow throat. Pretty much as advertised.

Now, I have no idea who this fragrant, splendid oriental lily is, but I can assure you it is NOT Yelloween, which is what I bought it to be. Neither are any of the other bulbs that I planted as Yelloween. Now that's not the end of the world, because I never met a fragrant lily I didn't love, but still...I believe sometimes I'm cursed when it comes to yellow.

This is a yellow tiger lily that was here when we moved here. It has multiplied over the years and is a very pretty yellow shade. Again, it's pretty hard to mistake yellow for any other colour.

Now, if you've been a reader of Bloomingwriter for a couple of years or so, you know there are certain things that thwart me. One of them of course is goutweed, which we should just all say no to. The other is my inability to get yellow hollyhocks in my garden. The only way so far I've succeeded is to plant a metal sculpture of one. Even that isn't quite yellow.

People take pity on me, send me seeds, give me plants. Last year, my friend Lee Dickie at Briar Patch Nursery in Berwick took pity on me and gave me two plants, one supposed to be yellow, the other red. She had them labeled, and I planted them carefully, marked where I planted them, and waited for this year to arrive. I anticipated finally, FINALLY having a yellow flowered hollyhock in the garden.

This spring, one of them had succumbed to the weather. The label said it was the red one. I was okay with that. The other was healthy and vigourous. I started to hope. Until today, when I went out and discovered THIS...

This is not yellow.

Not even close.

I know when I'm defeated. I'd better not see ONE yellow hollyhock on my travels over the next two weeks. Not one. :-)

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?

Talking and Writing and All Things Plants

Like the old Jackson Browne song, I'm pretty much "running on empty" these past few weeks. It's been madly busy as I've been working like a maniac on the book, plus beating the garden into submission, plus been on the road giving talks, plus being on the road visiting nurseries and garden centres and friends. Everything has to do with plants at this time of year. I talk about them, write about them, read about them, take their photos, sigh over other people's photos of them, swap stories with others about their plants, work with them, flop in the grass and stare at them happily. I'm quite plant-obsessed.

Happily, lots and lots of people share this obsession. Like the Friends of the Garden at NSAC, who tend to the magnificent Rock Garden on the campus. I've written about this garden before, and will do so again. I was there this morning in between taking photos of someone for one client and heading off to Pictou County to give a talk to a group of like-minded plant addicts. It was grey and cold and threatening to rain, but I didn't care. The spring gentians were in bloom. More on the Garden in the next few days. After I catch up on some sleep. I hope.
In New Glasgow this afternoon, I went with a friend to West River Greenhouses after my talk. Though I had sternly told myself I wasn't buying any more plants until I got some of what is at home planted, it didn't quite work out that way. This photo doesn't do this Calluna 'Spring Torch' justice, but I took it tonight in my kitchen with my little camera. The spring foliage is green with new growth in orange, pink, gold...I nearly went into orbit when I saw it. Naturally, I had to have it. I do promise a better photo in the sunlight with some (hopefully) fairly accurate colour.
And the colour is somewhat off on this zonal geranium too, but I had to show it to you. It's called 'Vancouver Centennial' and when I read about it somewhere recently, I knew I'd be very, very happy to make its acquaintance. It looks like it's singing 'O Canada' rather than 'I Believe'; it's a plant for all Canadians, with those maple-leaf like leaves. I don't even care if it blooms. It's just seriously cool.
And speaking of seriously cool--and seriously generous and wonderful--look at this watercolour painting that the members of the Highland Garden Club in Pictou County presented to me this afternoon after my talk! I LOVE it: it's by local (Pictou County) artist Lyn Sue Wice, and it and the handmade card they gave me with it just made me warm all over. Gardeners are such generous souls! The thing about giving talks, or about writing about plants, is that I learn so much from others who share their experiences, wisdom, plants and more with me. And that's the joy of sharing this obsession for green growing things with so, so many people.

That's it for today...I'm truly running on empty and plan to spend Sunday sleeping in, allowing LongSuffering Spouse to cook me breakfast, ignoring the phone and email for the day, and then puttering in the garden if the weather is good and in the greenhouse if it's not. Maybe I'll even put together a bloom day post, only slightly late. I hope everyone has a lovely restful happy day, exploring your own happy plant obsessions.

'Cross the Wide Missouri

Day one in Kansas City, Missouri, and I gotta say, this is a very, very pretty city. But first, I gotta give props to United Airlines, because I had two of the best flights i've ever had today, both on United or its affiliates. Both left on schedule. Neither was full. Both landed on schedule, and my luggage made it from Halifax to Dulles, Washington to KC with me. So take THAT, Air Canada, where i've never had a really good flight experience!

My buddy Angie picked me up at the airport, and despite the fact that both of us had been up all night (she's a babynurse, and i left home at 0200 for an 0600 flight), we went right into action with seeing what the city has to offer. The first stop was the Acadia Steamboat Museum. The Acadia hit a tree snag in the Missouri back in 1856 and sank, with the loss of only one life but with the loss of its entire cargo of supplies for communities downriver from its point of origin.


Over 130 years later, five enterprising men unearthed the Acadia's remains--and her cargo--from a cornfield where the Missouri had formerly tracked. The entire list of inventory still has not all been put on display, 20 years after it was first unearthed. Dishes, ironworks, fabrics and leather goods, and many other supplies were found and salvaged and put into the museum that bears the steamer's name today.


There were many bottles of preserves, and one of the adventurous discoverers of this cache actually sampled some of the preserves (twenty years ago) and found them to be quite palateable).


The only casualty of the ship's sinking was a mule, the remains of which have become something of a mascot to the museum and its staff. And you'll love the humour that they nicknamed the mule 'Lawrence."


The afternoon found us at the recently opened National World War 1 Museum and the Liberty Memorial. Being a proud Canadian, I know my own country's role in that first terrible war quite well, and while the US didn't enter the battle until 1917, their participation certainly helped to revive the exhausted Allies and turn the tide to victory. I didn't take many photos in the museum, content instead to wander among the exhibits and films and static displays and just pay silent homage to the dead, of that war and of others since then.

But the 217 foot tall tower really caught my breath and my admiration. Dedicated in 1926 five years after its initial commissioning, the limestone tower is flanked by two sphinxes, "Memory" and "Future". You go up in an elevator then walk up another 40 or steps to the observation area, where you get a 360 degree view of the city skyline.


Though it was hot and hazy today, there were several impressions that really caught me. One, the greenness of the city. My friend says that they've had above average rainfall this summer so that things are not so sere and brown as they might normally be. Lots of trees and shrubs, flowering containers, ornamental grasses and of course, the fountains that I'll be writing about in future posts. Gardens look well tended, though we'll inspect them more closely tomorrow.

This is the greensward leading up to the memorial, as viewed from the top of the memorial.

I'm not an architecture buff, and can't tell one style too much from another (I recognize they're different but not so much what is georgian or what is art deco.) But I was completely fascinated by some of the older buildings we saw in the downtown core, many of which have been exquisitely restored or are being restored.



There are some wonderful newer buildings too, and they fit well with the historical buildings. One that caught my eye today was all shiny mirrored glass, reflecting a classically styled older building in its facade. I didn't get a photo as we were zipping down a street at the time, but tomorrow after some rest and a change in footwear, we'll go exploring properly. And yes, I'll take a photo of the Sprint Centre. And yes, for those who are wondering...I'm going to both concerts at this venue. This is David Cook's hometown, after all, and it's going to be incredible. Happy (early) birthday to me!