Trowel Talk

Howdy, folks.

The reason you haven't heard from me lately is that I've been lost. I knew where I was, but She didn't. Not that She would admit it. She just had this vague thing that I'd turn up somewhere, sooner or later.

Well, today She was poking around in the back of the Plant Shed. Don't know why - maybe the yucky weather outside had something to do with it, anyway, you'd think she'd hear my hollering, but no. After awhile, when I was down to just the occasional weak whimper, she decided to get some dried moss for something or other, and voila, there I was.But did I get a hearty welcome? Oh, no, all I got was, 'Oh, there you are.'


Then, would you believe it, she held me up to the light (the Light! I haven't seen light, to speak of, for almost 4 months) and squinted at me.


'This trowel is getting kind of short', she says. 'the whole tip is worn down to half  what it used to be'.

Well, what does she expect? Go jabbing me into rocky soil, using me to dig up rocks (actually, I'm pretty proud of my rock-prying ability....) and I'm not going to wear down? She's not so young and pointy herself, you know. Time (and rocks of course) wears us all down.


 'Guess I'll have to get a new one.' she says.




What!!! Get a NEW ONE???

Wait, maybe she's serious. I could be replaced here.


Oh, no!!! Now what do I do??????


Maybe I'll have to get 'nice'...........

Winter Walk in the Shaw Woods

Now that Winter is back, I'd like to tell you about a little snowshoeing excursion I went on last week. Funny how our minds work. Several warm days with the snow melting and all I could think about was Spring, then a good snowfall and a couple of cold nights and I'm back in Winter mode. Anyway, I went along on a short snowshoeing tour of the Shaw Woods.

The tour was a preliminary to a workshop on trail-making. I won't go into the specifics of the trail designing exercise, except to say that it is a protocol to help a group of people with diverse interests reach consensus on some of the aspects of a nature trail. It's a new and proprietary protocol developed by, among others, the Friends of Bonnechere Parks. It is called Footprints in Time, or FIT which is a wonderful name given their goals of encouraging fitness while respecting local history. I have to say the procedure seemed to work very well. At the end of the morning's work, we had a pretty good starting list of points to be made on the interpretative signage along a future FIT trail in the Shaw Woods.

But back to the snowshoeing. Here's a shot of us heading into the Woods:

The trail was pretty well packed down at the start, so we carried our snowshoes! I used the opportunity to sneak looks at people's snowshoes and the various bindings they had. My snowshoes are fine, but the bindings leave a lot to be desired. They are attached using rubber straps that just don't stay done up. The straps are too short, for one thing. I saw one system that involved a flat rubber sheet with a keyhole cut out for the boot and two long rubber arms used to tie it to the snowshoe that looked really good. Now all I have to do is find some suitable rubber.....

As you can see, it was sunny and warm . I loved the way the sun lit up the understory in the Beech/Hemlock forest. Young American Beech, Fagus grandifolia, hang on to their leaves all winter -  kind of a shabby effect when there are only a few trees, but looks perfectly reasonable in a Beech woods. I wonder why the leaves don't drop. Young Oaks do this too. Does this mean they don't go dormant the same as the more mature trees? Is it that young Beeches, like young Humans, don't want to go to bed? Some of the Beeches in this grove must be quite old as they are a good 2' diameter at the base. Large Eastern Hemlocks, Tsuga canadensis, are interspersed with the Beeches, and you can really see them in the Winter. In the summer, you don't notice them so much.

My favourite spot is the Hemlock grove. Hemlocks tower over the trail here. Stop, close your eyes, listen to the wind,  feel the cool moist air on your face. With a little imagination you are in a dense coniferous forest, a forest of 'hushed coniferous giants'.

 It works best on misty days, but you can practice.

My Hemlock Grove at home consists of one tree 10' tall and one seedling about 2' tall. There are 4 or 5 fairly large trees on my neighbour's side of the fence, but they don't look that healthy. The beaver pond must flood them most years. At least my two are higher up and safe from that. But they have a long way to go before they are a Grove!

Fallen Hemlock twig

Scented Clivia

When I opened the Plant Shed door just now I was met by a wonderful soft sweet flowery smell. The snow falling heavily outside made it all the more welcome. And what was sending out this fine fragrance? A yellow Clivia!

Describing a fragrance is difficult. All one can really do is compare it to some other fragrance.... so I'll describe it as  sweet, lightly floral, with a hint of citrus, all supported by a deep underlying note of earthiness. Sounds like a wine, doesn't it!

Describing the colour of this flower isn't much easier. It's yellow, yes, but yellow overlaid with a soft pinkish orange-y buff. The flowers are a good size, have very good texture, and are held well above the foliage. There are 14 flowers on the stem, and this for the plant's first blooming. It's one of the five plants I grew from seeds which came from South Africa described as "yellow crossed with Vico Peach". The peach parentage certainly shows.

 Altogether a very fine Clivia for my collection.

 I got the seeds three years ago through The Clivia Website, which acts as a broker for Clivia seeds. They arrived in an envelope, six large seeds loose in a plain paper envelope. The envelope looked like the end of a bad day, but the seeds were alright. All six grew but I did lose one last summer. The plant rotted off at the base, then re-rooted and grew again, then  rotted off again. Maybe it had a disease or maybe it had a weakness, anyway, it died. The others all grew like, well, like Clivias. These are vigorous plants and not hard to grow. Some people call them bulbs, but they aren't really. They are more like Leeks, but Leeks that multiply by stolons. Clivias can become very crowded in their pots and re-potting a mature Clivia can be a bit of a job. I had one, years ago, that burst it's pot. The pots were on a bench in the bedroom, enjoying the light from the big window there, and one night I heard a 'bang'. In the morning I found the Clivia on it's side on the carpet with two pot halves neatly one on each side of it. Another thing they'll do is climb out of the pot - the roots just push the plants up and out. Seedlings especially will do this, so you have to expect to re-pot them several times until they get big enough to stay down. Clivias have character!

Other sites that are fun to visit are The Clivia Society and the American Clivia Society. These are all fascinating sites to visit - so many delectable new Clivias. Here am I, excited to have some yellow ones, and the hybridizers are busy creating white ones and, yes, yes, yes! pink ones. And then there are the variegated ones.... and the miniatures (actually I may have one as one of the seedlings seems to be staying quite small).  I need to win a lottery!

Colour Inside

We gardeners are never happy, are we? We no sooner get a good covering of snow, which we've been begging for to keep the garden cosy for the winter, than we start to want colour. I found myself feeling that very much after taking Kip for a cold and snowy trudge yesterday. I could hardly wait to get into the plant shed (can't call it a greenhouse anymore, it's too dilapidated) and see if there were any flowers open.

And there were!

I have quite a few pots of Amaryllis, and while only a few apparently plan on blooming this year, one was gloriously open. This is Bolero, a medium-sized semi-double.

Such a fabulous bright scarlet! The main bulb has this stem, with 6 blooms, 4 open so far, plus a smaller one coming up fast. It is surrounded by 5 other slightly smaller bulbs, one of which is also showing a nose. I don't know why they don't all bloom at the same time - maybe they will next year. I started with 3 bulbs and now there are 6. Not too shabby.

On the other hand, most of the other 50+ Amaryllis won't be blooming this year. My guess is that  I left them growing too long in the Fall and thus they haven't had a long enough dormancy. Getting Amaryllis to re-bloom isn't quite as bad as growing Morning Glories (I know 50 ways to kill a Morning Glory) but they do have to be treated exactly right or they just don't bloom. Usually I leave them outside only until October, at which time I tell them firmly that they are going dormant, cut all the leaves off, and lie them on their sides in the back of the plant shed where it is warm and dark, but this Fall was so warm I didn't bring them in until late November. I brought them into the light in January as usual, but so far there are a lot of leaves and very few flower stalks. Guess I learned something.

Another of the Clivia seedlings is showing buds. These seeds were from a strain bred to give yellow flowers. One bloomed in the Fall, and truly was yellow. Maybe this one will be too!

Several of the orchids also have buds developing.

It may finally be cold and snowy outside, but it's warm and colourful inside!

The 'New American Garden', last part

So here's the plan.

My rock garden (rockery) will be a rocky outcrop among the trees. 

My border will be a sunny hillside clearing in the woods.

My fern garden will be a shady grove, with narrow winding paths and Spring wildflowers among the trees.

My bog and pond gardens will be the Marsh edge.

The rest of my 'garden' will be native plants spread along trails through mixed woods.

I used to worry about how to manage the change from a worked garden to a natural area, but now I will think about every planting area as being part of the surrounding woods. I will make my garden fit into the existing natural landscape.

Interestingly, it'll be a garden with no edges.

The 'New American Garden', part 2

 Hmmmm.

Now you're thinking, 'what about my garden, my rock garden, my pool garden, my Fall Border....'?
'The designed landscape should fit into the natural landscape.' Does this mean I can't have a rock garden if I live in an area the scientists call the 'Eastern Transitional Mixed Forest Region'?

No, I don't think it means that. I do think, though, that you should carefully consider whether your design might not be more successful, as a design, if you make it fit into the type of landscape natural for your area.

For example, my garden is in the woods, on a rocky ridge. It is situated on the Canadian Shield and is considered to be in the Eastern Transitional etc. etc. I could, if I had enough loose money, bring in a large bulldozer and have it flatten me a nice space, say 200 feet square. I could have topsoil brought in and spread, and I could have hedges planted all around it. Then I could make borders and beds inside the hedged area and make, if I had enough money, a mini-Sissinghurst. Just imagine that for a minute. If you were to come and visit, you'd drive through the Eastern Ontario mixed farming belt, then drive through a mixed forest, then stop at a tall green hedge. You'd go inside and find.... an English garden. But wouldn't this be silly? It might be a fun novelty, but in the end, wouldn't you step back and think, this is silly?

It makes more sense for me to try to incorporate the garden elements I want, such as a rock garden or Fall border, into the existing landscape. No hedges making 'garden rooms', which I have always thought only make sense in totally urban gardens, no straight borders with precise edges ditto, no ornate Italian garden seats. Instead, my rock garden, really more a rockery, sprawls over the natural granite and limestone outcroppings and blends into the woods. My so-called border, really a hillside, climbs in crooked terraces up into the surrounding trees. The only fairly formal area is the little herb garden between the house and the Studio and you know how formal herbs are....

I'm not saying my garden is a great success along these lines, but I think I know what I'm aiming for, and more or less how to proceed.

Actually, maybe I am having some success already. I think I've told this story before, but it's a favourite: one summer a customer and her husband came to the Studio to pick up some pottery. As they were leaving, walking down the path through the herb garden, they stopped and she told me about the husband's garden. I made suitable impressed sounds. Then she glanced around and said to me, 'Do you have a garden, dear?' Now that I think about it, that's a pretty good compliment!

The 'New American Garden', part 1

Wolfgang Oehme died last fall. Those of you who read about gardens or the art of landscaping will have run across his books, or at least mentions of them. In an article about him which I have just read, he and his partner James van Sweden, are referred to as having 'redefined the American Garden'. In obituaries and book reviews, this phrase keeps popping up.

In most cases, this 'new American Garden' is illustrated with pictures of large expanses of waving grasses. Every thing I've read about this lately concentrates on this use of grasses, and nowhere do I see a mention of what I think is really a larger lesson to be taken from their work.

Yes, they (I will say 'they, because Oehme worked with van Sweden for decades, and it is their work together that is usually referred to) did create a new garden model, one that is a welcome addition to the British model of the velvety green grass lawn surrounded by a perennial flower border surrounded by a tall green hedge. As we see it in books or pictures, it involves large expanses of waving grasses set off, often, by quite strict and rigidly controlled hard-scaping.  It is a garden model based on a cross between the natural North American prairie and the Atlantic ocean beach, and as such is indeed new.

But designing a garden is not the same as designing a landscape. What the obituaries and reviews seem to miss is that while Oehme/van Sweden did invent a new garden model, their real achievement was in then using it in their projects as a brilliant way of making the designed landscape part of the natural landscape.

To put it another way, what was new about their idea is not that it uses grasses, or that it resembles the prairie/beach. What was new is that they designed gardens to be part of the surrounding landscape. If you think of other garden styles, such as the Italian style with it's sculptures and cypresses, the French style with it's rigidly pruned shrubs, the Eastern enclosed garden, the Oriental garden.... these are all gardens in, but separated from, their surrounding landscape. Their whole point is to be comfortable, safe, prestigious spaces removed from the surrounding wild landscape. Oehme/van Sweden gardens, most of which happen to be in the mid-atlantic states, are not separate from the landscape. They are in fact a concentration of the elements of  the surrounding landscape and so lead directly into it and become part of it.

That is, I think, the real lesson landscapers should take from Oehme and van Sweden's work. The designed landscape should fit into the natural landscape. Where woodlands are the natural native condition, there should be woodland gardens. In the desert areas, xeric gardens. In small inner-city backyards, old-style English flower borders. 

(More soon....)