The Very Historic Gardens...A Nova Scotia Must-see

While western and southerly parts of North America are beginning to relax into their anticipation of spring's arrival, SOME of us are still getting bludgeoned with winter weather. As we shoulder yet another winter storm of snow-rain-sleet-snail-whatever out of the sky, I thought we could use an escape from it all. So let's go to one of the most beautiful places in Nova Scotia: Annapolis Royal Historic Gardens.

The Gardens were established 30 years ago on a 17 acre parcel of land overlooking the tidal Annapolis River, adjoining an area first settled in 1605 by the French explorer Sieur de Mons and cartographer Samuel de Champlain. The community originally named Port Royal was variously occupied by the French and the British for over a century until the latter finally took it for the last time and renamed the settlement Annapolis Royal in honour of then-monarch Queen Anne. 

The official "I wrote a book and it's in stores now" post

As many people who hang around with me on Facebook, Twitter, or in real life know, last year one of my projects was to write a book for Nimbus Publishing of Halifax. That book, Plants for Atlantic Gardens, is in stores now throughout the region, including independent local stores like The Box of Delights in Wolfville, on Amazon.ca, and will be in the US in a couple of months time. Hopefully, it will inspire you enough that you'll want to buy it. But you could also win a book...keep reading for the details.

Green flowers give me hope for spring...eventually.

Arghhhhhhhh!  As this winter of unending snow continues to bring still MORE snow to us beleaguered Nova Scotians, we cope in different ways, don't we? Some flee to warmer climates for a few days or weeks of sunlight, beaches, but I'm not wired that way. I need sunlight and green, yes, but not traffic and travel headaches.

I was in the city the other day to pick up a couple boxes of my new book to sell at various locales, and took a copy in to my friend, florist par excellence Neville MacKay of My Mother's Bloomers. He, in return, had made up a bouquet for me to celebrate this new arrival. Of green flowers, which are one of my favourite delights, indoors and out.

Private and Public Sanctuaries of the Heart : A book review and giveaway of Sanctuary

Sanctuary: The Story of Naturalist Mary Majka by Deborah Carr. Goose Lane, 19.95 pb.

Author Deborah Carr had known Mary Majka for 15 years when she embarked on a series of interviews with the naturalist in 2003, having been endlessly fascinated and entertained by the older woman’s energy, dedication to nature, and tales of her past. “I felt compelled to write her biography,” she says, and although daunted by the task, the first-time author but seasoned freelancer worried that if someone didn’t begin catching Mary’s life story, it would disappear like the migrating shorebirds around their homes in Albert County, New Brunswick.

From afternoon chats and much research comes the tenderly written and hugely inspiring Sanctuary: The Story of Naturalist Mary Majka, a biographical jaunt that takes readers on a journey spanning decades, continents, wars and resettlement.

Majka, daughter of Polish nobility and long-ago immigrant to Canada, has in her 87 years lived a life that reads like a fairy tale, complete with handsome princes and monsters. In her case, the handsome prince was her husband Mike, to whom she was married for over 50 years; the monster was the specter of World War II, which saw her separated from her surviving family members and imprisoned in a work camp while still a teenager.

Chocolate and Wine and Romance for Valentine's Day

Well, it's Valentine's Day once again, and I'm here to offer a gardener's point of view on what makes for a happy sweetheart. In a word (or three): chocolate, wine, and plants= romance for a gardener! 

I'm a big fan of good quality dark chocolate (Hershey's waxy crap need not apply) but I'm also very fond of chocolate flowers and foliage in the garden, so for your viewing pleasure I offer some delightful, and very low-calorie, chocolate plants. 

Among my favourite perennials are foxgloves, and Digitalis parviflora 'Milk Chocolate' is a definite star. The flower spikes and individual florets are nowhere near the size of the standard species, but they're such a lovely unique colour. Last year, my plants began seeding themselves a little bit, and I've promised one plant to my friend Alice, so as to share the love around.

A Little Midwinter Miscellany

Most of the time, I don't mind winter. I really don't. It's an important part of life in much of North America, and it's crucial for both the garden and the gardener. It's a time for plants to rest, and gardeners to look back at what we have done in the past, and look ahead at what we plan for the future. It's a good season for catching up on our reading.

However...the past two weeks have been a bit much, and this week in particular has been so over the top as to be absurd. We are not just blanketed in snow: we are quilted, duveted, down-comfortered and Arctic-sleepingbagged with the stuff. It's not just a few inches deep--it's a few FEET deep. As in this drift, which is well over four feet tall and extends across the back of the garden.

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday: The Keeping of Bees...

“The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.” Henry David Thoreau

Oh, Deer. The Curse of Many Gardeners.

There are several questions that garden writers get over and over again, and try to answer with varying degrees of success. “How do I keep deer from eating my…?” is the most often, and most plaintively-asked question. You can fill in the blanks as to what they’re eating, depending on the season: rhododendrons, holly, thuja and yew in winter; tulips and crocus in spring; daylilies, hosta, roses, daylilies vegetables, tree and berry fruits, and a host of other tasty options in summer. They’re voracious. And they’re not going away any time soon.

Winterless-post: favourite perennials

As we stagger through the seemingly interminable ordeal that is winter in Nova Scotia, it’s sometimes hard to remember what our yards looked like when it was sweet summer. While this seems to have been a particularly long and gruesome winter, we’ll make it through to spring again soon. I keep telling myself the pulmonaria will be blooming before we know it,

This is the time of year when plant breeders begin ramping up the excitement by unleashing scores of new cultivars on a gardening public eager to try different plants. I’m as keen to experiment as anyone, but I also have plants that are such proven performers in our garden, I’d never think about casting them out in favour of some sweet new thing with a fancy plant patent and complex name. Many of us love to push the zone by trying plants that aren’t reliably hardy, but we also like to grow plants that come back reliably, year after year, like dear friends. That doesn’t mean they won’t, occasionally fail to thrive or even expire, but no plant is foolproof unless it’s plastic.

Submitted for your approval, some of my favourite perennials.

5 years of Blooming Fun...

Life is always entertainingly busy around these parts. Right after the holidays, people came back to work, looked at their calendars, and freaked out about the time, and bombarded me with “we need to get this done” statements. Those sorts of announcements  don’t bother me at all, as I like to be busy, but I’ve been so busy that I plumb missed my own blogaversary.

Somehow, I thought it was at the end of the month, not two weeks ago. Whoops. Well, at least it wasn’t my own anniversary, a birthday or something else of import.

Introducing...my first paphiopedilum orchid bloom

Patience is a virtue when it comes to dealing with certain plants. I present to you, Paphiopedilum 'Limerick x Hillsvale x Cherokee', a splendid young ladyslipper orchid that I purchased last March during the annual orchid show and sale held by the Orchid Society of Nova Scotia at Acadia University's Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens.

The orchid fancier who sold the plant to me told me it would take a year or so for it to get around to flowering. I was quite all right with that--having more than enough plants in the house, there is always something blooming here.

Not-so Wordless Wednesday: Wondrous Winter Wings

One of the best parts of winter is the arrival of the snow buntings, also known as 'snowbirds'. These charming little songbirds are a very good excuse for me to hide behind a curtain in the house, trying to photograph them through snow- and salt-splashed windows. (It was far too cold the past couple of days to go outside and hang around trying to stalk these little guys.)

Snow buntings prefer open ground, and you will see drifts of them along roadsides, in farm fields, or large open spaces like we have at our property. They are not often seen in cities, for obvious reasons. Neither am I, though, so I can relate to them. They're also really, REALLY skittish, so I was pleased to get as decent shots as I did. They land on the west side of our barn roof, and start working their way up to the peak...

Cats and poisonous plants, part one: Indoors

An off the cuff Twitter conversation with a friend of mine the other day prompted me to create a public service post for my cat-loving readers. She hadn't known that so many plants, both those grown indoors and those in our gardens, are toxic to cats. I've written about this before, but it bears bringing to other cat-loving plant people's attention on a regular basis.

Cats do like to get into things, although usually those are food-related items such as cans of soup. Yes, this is Mungus. If someone is doing something bad in our house, it's usually Mungus.

Coaxing Spring with Flowering Twigs

Welcome to winter in Nova Scotia, part the 83rd. After some lovely snowfalls and brisk cold...it's pouring rain outside. Yuck. In desperation to cheer us all up, I suggest that when it stops raining (or whatever it's doing where you live,) we all go outside and cut some twigs off flowering shrubs and bring them indoors to force. Wouldn't it be nice to have a couple sprigs of Chaenomeles (quince) flowering indoors in February?

Bursting with indoor colour for Bloom Day

I don't do a post for every Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, mostly because I don't like to follow memes every time they run. But in the bleak midwinter, we need an outburst of colour to cheer our souls, and I have to say my house is blooming happy right now. Let's lead off with those tropical-looking darlings, members of the hibiscus family. I have two young, vigourously growing plants, both of which are flowering right now. This porange (pink-orange) beauty is one of my favourite indoor plants.

Hibiscus are well suited to growing as houseplants for most of us. They like it a little warmer than some varieties, so at this time of year I move mine out of my office (the coolest room in the house, unless I run a heater) and to the sunniest, draft-free spots. They don't like soggy feet but need to be watered regularly, especially this time of year. I draw off a watering can full of water and leave it set all day before I water the hibiscus, and this keeps them from getting shock to their roots.

Skywatch Friday: After the Snow

The first serious, get-down-and-boogie snowstorm came along on Wednesday, with nearly a foot of snow blanketing everything and creating wonderful snow-art, ranging from dustings on asclepias pods to drifts in some of the borders. Hey, if we are going to have winter, we might as well have snow, to protect those hellebore buds from the vagaries of temperature shifts so that they will bloom when spring comes!

A heavy snowfall accompanied with impressive winds tends to make everything look new, interesting and fresh. Although the grey skies tend to make for a bit of a monochromatic Skywatch Friday, things are serene and relaxing as I walk around the property.

Wordless Wednesday: Sleepy kitty, sleepy hellebore buds, sleepy teasels

In the Pink, the colour of happiness

One thing about snowy winter days: they sort of remove most of the colour from the natural world, swathing everything in purest white and turning other shades to somber, yet tranquil, darkness. Browns, greys, blacks, shadows. While the landscapes are soothing on such days, our hearts yearn for colour, especially in our quiet gardens.

Here again we turn to gardening in the mind's eye, remembering sundrenched days when the gardens blazed forth with a rainbow of colours, across the spectrum.

Apparently it's not enough to have a plant of the year, person of the year, song of the year...there's also a colour of the year, as selected by Pantone. This year, the colour is called Honeysuckle, and is an interesting shade of pink. I'm not a colour theorist, and I'm not necessarily a huge fan of pink, except where flowers are concerned. Our friend Joey of The Village Voice calls pink The Colour of Happiness, and I can certainly agree with her there--as I agree with her on most things having to do with the garden!

My favourite pink flowers are the annual and perennial poppies, which flaunt their colours throughout the summer, providing bees with pollen and me with plenty of delight watching the shows.

When I am able to cajole hollyhocks into blooming, they're never yellow, the colour I long for in hollyhocks. Oh no...they're always some shade of pink, or in this case, verging on fuchsia.

This pink gerbera is about as close as I can get to the 'honeysuckle pink' shade that Pantone has decreed this year's colour. What I want to know is, is this supposed to be a colour to decorate our homes with? Wear on clothing? Ummmm...I like it just fine in the garden, or in the house as a flowering plant, but that's the limit.

Last summer was the first in a few years that I was unable to find these most excellent African daisies, or venidium, anywhere at my favourite local nurseries. This plant has a metallic sheen to its flowers, which I've had in red, orange, and this lovely pink shade, and hope to find again this year.

Pink seems to be a polarizing colour, in part because it has been politicized for a certain disease, but aside from that it's a colour many people have a strong opinion about. What about you? Does pink have a prime position in your perennial preferences? Or do you push pink into the past, preferring pastels or pungent purples?

Okay, I admit it. Been working too hard, and insomnia is making me slightly giddy. Enjoy the pink petals, friends, and I'll return after I catch up my work and my sleep!

Bouncing over book news and other Friday Fun

Writing a book is kind of like planting a tree, or maybe more like doing winter-sowing; you put in a bunch of work, then there's a lull, while you're busy doing other things, and then suddenly it's spring and the seedlings are germinating or the tree is leafing out.

That's where I'm at right now. Last year, I worked for months on the manuscript for my second book, Plants for Atlantic Gardens, and it was a huge effort made easier by having wise fellow gardening and writing friends who I could turn to. Then there was a lull while my fabulous editor did his magic, then another flurry of work for me, then another lull. Well, those lulls were occupied by other things like other work obligations, so really, the time flew past.

The garden of indoors...Phalaenopsis orchids

If there is a more perfect cure for winter (other than a trip somewhere warm) than orchids, I don't know what that would be. For those of you who think you can't grow orchids at your house, I'm here to tell you: if you can grow a simple African violet, a Christmas cactus, a philodendron, you can grow phalaenopsis, or moth orchids.

Trust me on this. I have about a dozen, in myriad shades and shapes and yes, even sizes. When I first became intrigued by these graceful, long blooming and elegant plants, they tended to come in only a couple of colours, white and magenta, at least locally. They were also very expensive. Today, things have changed quite dramatically!