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!).

Focusing on Foliage (mostly)

Like many of you, I definitely need more hours in the day. I'm into the last month or so of mad panic before my book deadline plus regular work plus the gardens, and oh yes, the weather is NOT cooperating. Wind, wind, wind and more wind. Still, I work inside like a maniac for a few hours, gird up my loins and go out in the wind to do battle until it drives me nearly around the bend. Hopefully, the weather stabilizes a bit, SOON, please and thank you.

Despite my needing to do a LOT of weeding and still some dividing and moving, things are looking quite well. There are many plants in bloom, some of which will surprise those of you in decidedly warmer climates. These 'Spring Green' tulips are just coming into their own, and I still have other tulips in bloom here and there around the gardens.

We who are primarily landscape gardeners (as opposed to kitchen/food gardeners) get very excited and happy over flowers, of course. But I have been gently stressing the need to focus on foliage as well as blooms. Flowers are great, but they come and go, and if you have a perennial border where most everything blooms at the same time and has unexciting, lance-leafed foliage, it's understandable if you think you've got nothing much going on. But when you remember to add plants with interesting foliage into the mix, there's always a great show happening.

Happily for us, plant breeders have been developing great plants with marvelous foliage as well as cool blooms. I'm going to show you just a few things from my garden, many of which are new to the garden this year for one reason or another. Above is the tiarella 'Pink Skyrocket'. If you google this plant looking for images, you'll find plenty of focus on the flowers, but I think the foliage is just as attractive.

My favourite Jacob's ladder, hands down, is Polemonium 'Stairway to Heaven'. Mind you, I have 'Purple Rain' as well as 'Snow and Sapphires', but the foliage of this one just gets to me. In the early spring, I posted a photo that really showed off the new colours in emerging foliage; now, some six weeks later, it's still a stunner, though less there's less pink in the leaves.

This is a new-to-me Pennisetum, or purple fountain grass, 'Fireworks'. The pennisetums usually aren't hardy here, but I gave one to a friend of mine to see if he can overwinter it. Mine are currently in pots, and I don't care if they even put up flowers later in the season. The foliage is great enough.

My friend Rob Baldwin is determined to convince me that I can grow a Japanese maple or two or six on my property. This is a seedling he grew of 'Osakazuki', which is normally a green one with coral/pink colour in its new growth and amazing fall colour. We're interested to see whether this will turn more green as the season progresses. Oh, and if I can overwinter it or not. Speaking of Rob, he now has a blog for his business, Baldwin Nurseries; I'm looking after it for the time being, and it's a work in progress, of course, but please do come and visit.

I like the juxtaposition of the somewhat climate-delicate Japanese maple with this particular specimen of Labrador tea, Ledum groenlandicum (or Rhododendron groenlandicum, depending on which taxonomist you listen to). This is from seed collected on our trip to Labrador in 2007 with Dick Steele; however, it's from plants growing just over the border in Quebec at Blanc Sablon, where the ferry from Newfoundland comes across. My buddy climbed a rocky, wind-scoured cliff to collect seed from the Labrador tea clinging to a very sparse soil, while I sat in the car holding our place in the ferry queue and had 14 conniption fits waiting for him to come down off the hill, preferably in one piece. I'm not awfully worried about THIS marvelous native plant overwintering in my garden, given what its parent plant was growing in.

Jubilation! I finally found a nice pot of Aster lateriflorus 'Lady in Black'! I've been looking for it for several years, as (ahem) I inadvertently dug mine up a few years back, thinking it was a wild, weedy species. Also known as the calico aster, this has tiny dainty flowers in late summer, but it's the foliage and flower buds that rock my socks. I will be marking its presence VERY carefully, so as not to lose it again.
I haven't planted 'Lady in Black' yet, and I might just plant her behind Campanula 'Dickson's Gold' just to make another one of those striking black-and-gold foliage displays that I'm very fond of.

Ferns, of course, do not flower. They don't have to. Even the regular ostrich fern makes me extremely happy, but the Japanese painted ferns are, in a word, exquisite. This is a crested form, Pictum-Applecourt', and as you can see the ends of some of the frond pinnae are crested or tasseled-looking. I only have a couple of cultivars of athyriums, but I can certainly see getting more of them in the future.

From the cool-shade environs of the ferns, we bounce over into the hot and dry rock garden where most of my sedums and sempervivums hang out, along with a few flowering things like several spurges, a lewisia, and prairie-crocus, pulsatilla, which is just wrapping up its bloom session. Although I love the flowers on the various sedums, I've mentioned before that I really wouldn't care if mine ever bloomed, just because I love their foliage so much. You can see a wee bit of 'Angelina' on the left-hand side of the phot0; then there's 'Frosty Morn' and 'Purple Emperor clumping sedums, and in the bottom left-hand corner, a semp I just got from Jane at Woodlands and Meadows, 'Sir William Lawrence.'

This is a new-to-me creeping sedum, 'Coral Reef'. The foliage is, in a word, gorgeous. I've just planted it and am waiting to see if putting it into the ground changes its colour much, as sometimes happens with plants that have been in containers for a while.

I have a number of sempervivums, most of which I don't know the names of, either because they were sold merely as semps, or they've got NOID/Lost Label syndrome. This one is seriously cool, because the babies are like little beachballs that roll down off the hen and take root in the soil. It tickles me to look at it. Some might say I'm easily amused. I'm okay with that.

Okay, fellow plant geeks, here's a mystery for you. The same day as I got 'Lady in Black' aster, I got my greedy little hands on Astilbe Color Flash Lime. And there was another astilbe with gold foliage at that nursery, and all of the pots of that particular one were mislabeled as a thalictrum. This is that mystery plant, settled into the shade garden alongside other astilbes, actaeas, trolliuses and thalictrums. I actually wrote to Tesselar, the breeders of Color Flash Lime, sending them a photo of this plant and wondering if it was the same one, just mislabeled. I heard back from them saying they thought the foliage was too gold in colour to be their cultivar, but to track it when it flowered. So, I hand it over to you: has anyone heard of any other astilbes with golden foliage? Is this perhaps just a Color Flash that has reacted to soil pH, or fertilizers, or cold, and gone more gold? Any ideas? I love a good mystery....

Extraordinary Light, Petals and Feathers

There's nothing like a computer disaster to throw one's carefully organized work schedule right out the window. And unlike those Gen Xers and Yers (Is that a word) whose dexterity with texting on phone keyboards is phenomenal, I'm not much of one for writing using only my thumbs. So I've fallen way behind with reading blogs, posting to my own, and so on. To say nothing of my own work. Happily, my period of being electronically unhorsed is over and tomorrow is a holiday, meaning I can do a marathon of catching up.

Being in electronic pergatory for a few days didn't deter me from poking around the gardens, stalking flowers and feathers and foliage with my cameras--when it wasn't too windy, or too foggy, or too late in the day. The other night, things just conspired together to work rather nicely, and I spent some time looking at leaves with sunlight filtering through, as with the katsura foliage above.

In probably all of the rest of Nova Scotia, the shadbush (Amelanchier) has finished flowering--mine, however, is just at the peak of its bloom. This is one of my favourite native species, and for those who like a large shrub/small tree with three strong seasons of interest, the amelanchier is an exquisite choice. Bronze foliage in spring, dainty white flowers that turn into tasty purple-blue fruit (if you get to them before the birds do), great fall colour--what's not to love?

Another native that does my heart good, this one a perennial--Solomon's seal, Polygonatum. The hummingbirds love this perennial, which spreads slowly to form elegant colonies. At least, it spreads slowly in my garden--I would actually not complain if it picked up the pace a little!

Many of you ooohed and ahhhed over my photo of the opening flower on my tree peony; they're such ephemeral beauties, as tonight, the petals are beginning to drop from my plant. This is supposed to be 'Kinkaku', which has flowers rather coppery coloured and similar to the nonstop begonia 'Fire'. This isn't Kinkaku; possibly it's High Noon? Any ideas? (It came mislabeled from the nursery, so it's a mystery to us. )

Proving that biggest flowers aren't necessarily the best, the charming blooms of my tiny epimedium 'Lilafee' have now opened. I hope this one spreads like gangbusters, because as I wrote in an earlier post, I'm crazy about epimediums, and 'Lilafee' is small-but-mightily beautiful.

My cushion spurges are erupting into their full glory as well. Above is 'Lacey', one I've had for four or five years now. I love its cool bicolour foliage against the acid yellow flowers and bracts.

And this is 'Bonfire', and it's puzzling me somewhat. At both my mother's and at another friend's, this plant has a lot more golden-orange to its flowers than does mine, which is as you can see distinctly avid yellow against the purple lower foliage. Maybe it's a soil acidity thing; maybe mine is just so newly opened whereas the others have been open longer. I'm going to watch, because I'm curious that way.

Five years ago, I bought this spring flowering perennial sweet pea from Lloyd Mapplebeck in Truro--I believe the correct name is Lathyrus vernus. It's not fragrant, it doesn't want to be divided (having that typical legume tap root) but hummingbirds zip to it and it makes a happy burst of purple-blue in my front garden.

There are a lot of courting songbirds (and other birds) in our gardens these days, although we don't think we've seen this Rose breasted grosbeak's mate yet. He certainly does enjoy our feeders, though!

Last Sunday, the male hummingbirds arrived, and demanded we get our feeders up for them, STAT! We happily did that, and they've been feasting at the feeders as well as on spring blooms since then. We saw the first females on Thursday, so we can expect lots of aerial displays, acrobatics, squeaking and battles as the courting and family making goes into high gear.

Spring is such a perfect season. Even when it's windy, or foggy. I hope all of you are enjoying spring as much as I am. Most days, that is.

Urgent Plant-Seeking Madness: Do you have this Condition?

In my previous post I mentioned how the initial signs of Urgent Plant Seeking Madness (UPSM) were upon me, as witnessed by my foray out on Saturday "just for a look" and my return home with the car packed with plants. Ooops.

Others of you have commented that you've also been stricken--or smitten--with this condition. You may have it and not even be aware of it, or you may already be in the full-blown condition. In the interest of public (garden bloggers) health, I thought I'd offer a reprise of a post I did several years ago, with some additions and of course shiny new photos. Gotta have more pretty pictures, don't we?

UPSM affects a broad spectrum of individuals. It’s closely related to Urgent Plant HUNTING Madness, which is a less-known form that causes botanists, nursery operators, garden writers, and other plant enthusiasts to go off on forays to exotic locales such as the Himalayas, outer Mongolia, central Africa, and Newfoundland and Labrador. UPHM sufferers should have bumperstickers on the backs of their vehicles that say, “I brake for interesting plants”.

There is no known cure for either affliction, other than a change of seasons, or an exhausted bank account. Even an overflowing garden doesn't cure the situation. You'll figure out ways to make more beds. Who needs boring ol' lawn, anyway?




Here are the warning signs of UPSM:

1. All winter you’ve been salivating over blog posts, catalogues, websites and magazines, learning about new plants.

2. You’ve got a list longer than your regular grocery list of ‘Must Have’ plants.

3. You can’t pass by a nursery, garden centre, or even a bigbox asphalt ‘garden centre’ without going in. Just. For. A. Look.

4. You come out of said business with at least one garden-related item. Probably more like six or seventeen. Or two dozen. Or so.

5. You carry a tote box, plastic trunk liner, spade and bucket with you wherever you go.

6. You find the need to have to go run errands far more often. No matter that the price of gas is approaching that of a dentist appointment. There are plants to be checked out!


7. Your grocery budget takes a dip towards hamburger helper, peanut butter, and canned soup.

8. You start parking your vehicle around the back of the house, so as to unload your ‘groceries for the garden’ (as my friend Flora and HER long-suffering spouse call these outings) more conveniently (and out of view of your long-suffering spouse, who’s getting tired of peanut butter sandwiches and hamburger helper).

9. An enormous queue of new acquisitions lines itself up along your walkway in your dooryard (That’s Maritimer-speak for driveway/walkway/front yard), or your holding bed, or your greenhouse. Or your kitchen. We do what we gotta do to protect those new little darlings.

10. Despite that enormous queue, you continue to suffer from UPSM and to seek out nurseries, plant sales, yardsales with plants, garden centres, plant giveaways…

11. The first thing your longsuffering spouse says to you when you come home from an expedition is “Where are you going to plant THAT?” The second thing, of course, is “what are we having for supper? Not MORE hamburger helper!”

12. You blithely say, "Oh, that's been here for years!" when confronted about the new magnolia or Japanese maple or plot of hellebores or three dozen Osteospermums that have suddenly appeared in your yard. You change the subject to, "When are you going fishing, dear?" or some such diversionary tactic.

13. You plan Sunday drives/family outings so that they'll accidentally go past nurseries. And then, well, since you're in the area, you need to stop in. Just. for. a. minute.

14. While longsuffering spouse drives, you scan roadsides for houses with tables of plants for sale, even though you KNOW they'll mostly be stuff you already have. And damned ol' goutweed.

15. You make up excuses to go off by yourself for drives. Just to do some thinking, you know. (and because you don't want to waste valuable vehicle space with other family members.)

You can’t wait for the next trip so you can do it all again!

Sustainability and a bloomingwriter's garden

The weather decided to cooperate somewhat this weekend so I got to spend a good deal of time out in the gardens, puttering and thinking. I spent some of my time thinking about what it means to live sustainably. The words have changed somewhat over the years, but the sentiments remain the same. We talk a great deal about sustainable living today, and many of us practice such a lifestyle in as many ways as we possibly can. Mine begins, not surprisingly, with the garden.

In order to best understand my own philosophy about gardening, come along with me on a time trip. It’s the late 1970s at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College where I am a student, one of the first big wave of female students with an interest in that discipline. That was no problem. What WAS a problem, at least to a few of us, was the spectre of Agribusiness and Big Chemical that was being touted as the cure for all of agriculture’s woes. Get bigger! Specialize in one or two crops or livestock types! Put the chemicals to your soil: chemical fertilizers, chemical herbicides, growth regulators, pesticides, fumigants…they’d all make you better, more productive farmers! Never mind what they might do to the environment, and to beneficial creatures like frogs and bees...

Now…for those of you who are young’uns in the sustainable movement, bear in mind we’re visiting a time about 15 years after Silent Spring had been published. I read Rachel Carson’s plea for our environment in my mid-teens, not terribly long before heading off to college. Some of what Carson wrote stuck in my head, and I worried about what pesticides were doing—to plants, to animals, to insects, to the environment…to us.

So being a curious student, I questioned. I also wondered about lots of other things, mostly to do with plants—especially after calculus prevented me from going further with my dreams of becoming a vet, and I switched to plant science. I wrote papers for various courses on subjects that weren’t exactly conventional. Herbs. Edible wild plants. Biological control of plant pathogens. Organic gardening.

Remember, this is the late seventies—Organic Gardening magazine had been around for several decades, but many people thought that ‘going organic’ was something done only by the long-haired hippy set, the draft dodgers who came up to Canada, the college dropouts, the granola set fleeing urban sprawl…all those scary things that didn’t conform to the American—or the Canadian—dream.

So you can well imagine, when I stuck my hand up in plant pathology class and asked the provincial weed inspector (who was guest lecturing and going on about spraying weeds with 2, 4D) why we don’t try alternative, organic means of weed control…I was looked at like some sort of traitor. Anaethema! Why do all that hard work when a simple spray would take care of all those nasty weeds for us? He expounded and postulated, ranted and raved while also chainsmoking his way through the lecture…

I noticed his obituary in the newspaper, about a decade later if memory serves right. Cancer. So it goes.


Being stubborn as well as curious, I stuck to my organic guns, and fortunately I had intelligent professors who, although they might teach a lot of chemical solutions, also acknowledged that there were other ways. I graduated with honours, and sallied forth to the Annapolis Valley, prepared to go work in a greenhouse…

…where we fumigated the ground before planting, fed everything hydroponically with a grand concoction of fertilizers and fungicides, sprayed hideous insecticides that made me sick to my stomach…and I lasted there four months before quitting. I worked on several farms before leaving agriculture behind as a career—but always gardened whenever I had a place with even a postage-stamp yard. If no yard, the gardening was of the indoor variety.



Flash forward to today, thirty years later. I write about gardening, sometimes about agricultural issues, and still live in the Annapolis Valley, or rather on the North Mountain that bounds the Valley. We have seven acres here, pasture, trees, pond, wildflowers, native shrubs and trees, plus assorted gardens. I garden mostly organically—I HAVE resorted to glyphosate on occasion while battling the bane of my gardening existence, the evil bad goutweed (Aegopodium podegraria), but the rest of my repertoire for dealing with garden pests is organic: water for aphids, laissez-faire for just about everything else. Nature brings most things into balance, and if my hostas get slug holes or my phlox some powdery mildew, tough. The hummingbirds and bees are much more important to me than a photo-shoot-ready landscape.

However, I am not a horto-saint: I don’t buy only organic soil, or plants only from organic nurseries, or eat only organic, free-range, vegan food. As much as I disliked the hard-line chemicals-will-save-us approach of the 70s (and later), I also dislike the enviro-nazis who are strident and morally superior to us mere mortals. That might be fine if you are either living on the street, or off your daddy’s trust account, but most of us are trying to make a living and be as good people as we possibly can.

I do think most people want to be good stewards and live sustainable lives. Maybe that means recycling plastic bags and pots, not completely eliminating their use; eating local food, even conventionally grown, because we know the producers and how they produce their food. Maybe we haven’t all abandoned growing lawns yet; but lots of us are developing more wild spaces that can be habitats for other creatures.

Our property is rich in plant and animal diversity—plenty of birds, reptiles and amphibians, insects (primarily beneficial, in my worldview) and all kinds of plants: natives and naturalized, heirlooms and hybrids. It’s not a Martha-Stewart-perfect yard or property: some of the hoity horts might think it ugly at times, and the really snooty designer types would likely look down their noses because it WASN’T planned by one of them. But it is a living, healthy property. A sustainable one.

We have monarch butterflies hatching out every summer. Ducks and redwinged blackbirds, nest around our pond, swallows in our barn, assorted other songbirds around the property. Our wild pond wouldn’t be brimming with frogs if we used chemicals to take the ‘weeds’ out of the pasture or make the plants grow faster or kill the ‘pests’ on roses, phlox, tomatoes, hostas.


We can’t all achieve sustainable sainthood overnight. But every step we take is a help to our world. So my wish for this coming Earth Day is that each of you do what you can to help the environment, when you can. Try gardening with fewer chemicals, or no chemicals at all. Instead of thinking your lawn must be perfectly cut turfgrass in order to be right, let the clovers grow, and let it grow a little longer. Recycle your plant pots—some nurseries can take them, others can’t—and if you can’t make a compost heap, try digging little holes in the garden and dumping some of your vegetative organic matter into them as mini-compost spots. Plant a tree: if not on your property, donate one to a public park, a schoolground, some other greenspace that can be shared by all.

But most importantly? Bloom where you’re planted, and enjoy your sustainably-growing garden, be it a multi-thousand dollar landscaped job or three pots of scarlet geraniums on a windowsill.

This is my post for Jan Thanks4Today’s “Garden Bloggers Sustainable Living Earth Day Celebration.” The deadline for entries is fast approaching: you have just over a week left to get your entry in. So please check out Jan’s webpage, and write a post to celebrate the upcoming Earth Day—you could win an awesome prize, and more importantly, inspire others to try living more sustainably too!

Travels and Adventures and Seedlings

Got anything on this weekend coming? Maybe you'd like to pop down to the Harrison Lewis Centre in East Port L'Hebert for the 'Tree-dy Saturday' seedling exchange/sale. You can find out more about the Centre at their website, and I will tell you more about it in the not-too-distant future. I haven't been there yet, and won't get there this weekend because of a previous commitment, namely a talk at Bunchberry Nurseries in Upper Clements for the Magnolia festival, as mentioned before. 

I haven't updated for a few days and haven't been visiting many blogs this past week or so but with rather good reasons. First, this past weekend, I was away in beautiful St. Andrews, New Brunswick, for Charlotte County Blooms, an annual event that takes in gardeners from the local area. I'd been invited to speak here several years in a row, but it's always been the same weekend as Saltscapes Expo. This year, they changed the date, and I was sooooo happy to come to one of my favourite Maritime communities. 

The morning speaker was the inspiring and affable Betty Kennett of Hampton, NB, and she entertained and educated the crowd of 200+ gardening enthusiasts. In the afternoon, it was my turn to (hopefully) be entertaining and educational too. What a LOT of hard work put in by everyone who organized this fabulous event, and by all the exhibitors at the trade shore part of the day. My garden hat is off to them all. 

This young artist creates fabulous sculptures from wood: from Celtic designs to pea pods! His work is gorgeous, although I don't think I'd put it outdoors in my garden. I'd have it in my office where I could always look at it while I was working, regardless of the season. 

Longsuffering spouse went with me to St. Andrews, which was awesome because he got to drive on this rather long trip, while the weary gardener, garden writer and editor slept. And we were put up by wonderfully gracious and friendly hosts at their home, Tatterscot, right on the main street in St. Andrews...

Where their back yard is actually their front yard because it looks out on the sea. And I mean RIGHT. On. The. Sea. Well, the lower Bay of Fundy, and to be exact Passamaquoddy Bay, the lower end of my own Bay of Fundy. So they know all about gardening by the sea, and they do it very well. 

This photo was taken at mostly low tide, and I don't have a good photo with me of what the scene would look like at high tide...because most of my photos are back home in Scotts Bay with my external hard drive. I'm in Liverpool again. 

Well, I'm in Liverpool a lot these days. Because I took on a new challenge a while back, and now am editing three magazines for DvL Publishing; Rural Delivery, Atlantic Beef, and Atlantic Forestry. It's a lot of work, but a lot of fun too. I've been privileged to write for Dirk van Loon a good deal over the past number of years-and in fact, he published the first thing I ever had published, a story that was in Atlantic Horse & Pony (where I'm now contributing editor) back in 1990. It's pretty cool. Car's getting quite a bit of mileage, and Spunky is cranky when I'm away, but I'm loving the new challenge.

The goutweed is the only downside, as it's getting out of hand in my garden on the days I'm away. Anyone got a cure for that? We won't be giving away any at the Tree-dy Saturday, however!

Whispers of Spring in Pine Grove

A few housekeeping observations, if I may; I've been unable to do much blogreading or commenting this week because the place I've been staying at night has not-very-speedy internet. Better than dialup, but not much. So I'll play catchup this weekend. Also, these photos are from my iPhone, since I didn't have my real camera with me yesterday. Hence they couldn't be focused or corrected for exposure, for obvious reasons. My iPhone is awesome as phone, iPod, mail client, webbrowser, etc. As camera...not so much. 

I smelled it yesterday when I came out of the place where I stay while on my project in Liverpool. A warmer hint on the air, a sweetness in the salt tang of the Atlantic at my feet. Come lunch time, even though wearing the wrong shoes for the trip, I jumped in the car and went to Pine Grove.

Pine Grove is this exquisite jewel of a pocket wilderness in Milton, just outside of Liverpool. It's owned and maintained by BowaterMersey, a timber and paper company located in Brooklyn and a large employer in Queens and Lunenburg counties. They have four pocket wildernesses, some quite large, in southwestern Nova Scotia. Pine Grove is one of my favourite places to go, with its mature pine forest, quiet trails, and waterways. 

There's still a bit of snow in the more shaded parts of the forest grove, but most of it is long gone, as it is from most of the south shore. 

There's still ice in the pond, but it's disappearing quickly; another few days of mild, SPRINGLIKE weather should take it away completely. The ducks swimming in the water, and walking on the ice, didn't seem too concerned by any of it, or by my presence. 

Can you see the ducks, at the open end of the ice? (IPhone camera also has no zoom capabilities. It is what it is. )

In less than a month, that ridge at the far end of the waterway will be ablaze with colour, as the PJM and Ramapo rhododendrons and azaleas burst into bloom. Liverpool and Queens county are about a zone warmer than the Fundy hill where I live, so they're a few weeks ahead of me. Which is rather wonderful, because I'll get a dose of spring on days that I'm here, and it'll help me cope with the toying-with-our-affections that is April in Scotts Bay. 

There's this wonderful grove of ornamentals planted by Captain Dick Steele of Bayport Plant Farm, including a host of magnolias and some rather choice evergreens. The magnolias will begin blooming in about six weeks, I'm guessing. We'll see how far off I am. 

Before I even got up the little knoll into this grove, I could smell this hamamelis on the air. And I have to tell you, the joy that suffused my heart was amazing. You'd have sworn I won the lottery, I was so happy. 

I could have happily stayed here for the afternoon, roaming around the paths, sitting in contemplation of buds and catkins and birdsong. But duty called and I tore myself away and headed back to my wordsmithing. 

But I'll be back to Pine Grove on many days over the coming weeks, because this is a piece of pastoral tranquility that everyone should share. Next time, I'll bring my real camera, I promise. Likewise, I promise to catch up with some of you over the next few days.