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Today, I am delighted to announced the official launch of my 15-day Ireland Grand Circle Tour.It will start in Dublin on Oct. 1 and circle around the picturesque south coast and along the sensational west coast and up to Northern Ireland, Derry, Belfast and out to the Giant’s Causeway before returning to Dublin. We will be staying in excellent hotels including a...

We've done 32 garden tours over the past 10 years. It's been great fun. We have had many, many party times with friends on trips. It has been a blast! Here's to the happy memories. Love and happiness to you all. Steve and Loraine Lyme Regis Venice Whiskey tasting, Dublin Ricks Aix rn Provence Spain Italy The Harp Pub, London France London Japan

The recent devastating dam disaster in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil, made me think back to our visit to the region in 2013 to see Inhotim, the fabulous garden/art complex, located in the same area as the dam, just a short distance from Belo Horizonte. Dam disaster in Minas Gervais, Brazi

My garden tour to Southern England and the Channel Islands of Jersey, Guernsey and Sark began in London on May 14. It was my 30th garden tour and the seventh one to England.  Enjoying a pint in the Churchill Arms in Kensington after just arriving in London In the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, I had no concerns about travelling mask-free...

Just to get those creative juices flowing as you step into the garden this spring and think, hey, what can I do that is new and fun and different. Here are a few silly, serious, fun and quirky ideas to make you think outside the box. Cup of alliums. Okay, too late to plant alliums, but how about a big jug of...

Some years ago, I was invited to see the Beaty Museum of Biodiversity on the University of B.C. campus.  I never got there, but I always regretted not making more of an effort. This week, Spring Break, I decided to remedy that and visit the museum with my grandchildren, Maya and Banks.

It’s been a few months since I stopped working at the Vancouver Sun after 38 years - although it was closer to 50 years in journalism as I started in newspapers in 1968 in England - but I still get asked the same question all the time: How do you like retirement? My answer is somewhat complicated. First, I have...

When I got this fabulous echeveria Blue Rose hanging basket the other day from WIG nursery in Burnaby, Alfred Kwan, the owner, advised me to cut off the flower stalks. "The beauty is in the colour and shape of the echeveria rosettes,” he insisted. “The flowers are a bit of a distraction.” The red flowers with their yellow tips are not...

In 2017, I visited Ireland with friends, after being in England’s Lake District and North Wales.From Dublin, we went down the east coast to Wexford and Waterford, seeing some fabulous gardens on the way.It was a glorious adventure. The gardens of Ireland are simply fantastic, far better than I ever imagined. I am still talking today about how wonderful...

What did Darwin, Dickens, Monet, Bronte and Van Gogh all have in common? Well, they all had the chance to listen to the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven and see a play by Shakespeare and see a painting by Rembrandt. I feel even luckier to have been born this end of history’s timeline when we have antibiotics, classics at our...

It’s been ages since I last saw my friends Lambert and Marjanne Vrijmoed, owners of Free Spirit Nursery on 32nd Avenue in Langley. I’m not sure why we haven’t seen more of each other over the past few years. I guess other things have been pressing in and we were away when they were here and they were away when...

Pleaching is a clever technique that involves twining together the branches of a row of closely planted trees to create a stylish, formal hedge-on-stilts. It’s not something you see here in Canada or even in the U.S. much. But in Holland, and especially in France, you see it everywhere. Some of the best examples I’ve seen include rows of pleached chestnuts in...

Oh my, time once again to put the garden to bed for winter. Kew has mighty forklifts to place heavy citrus box planters into storage. But I have my own heavy-lifting apparatus - my son, Peter, who comes, without complaining every October, to help me lift heavy pots of tender plants into their winter quarters where they will be protected...

I have been agonizing over what to do with a space in the garden that has become an eyesore since a large Clematis montana growing over a Viburnum Summer Snowflake collapsed and died over winter. The viburnum had grown into a small tree and the clematis had scrambled into it and smothered it, creating a beautiful canopy of flowers in...

Our next garden tour adventure will be to Southern England and the Channel Islands from May 14 to 27, 2023.Many people have already booked a spot on this tour but there is still time for you to sign on if you'd like to join us. The hotels have agreed to save space for extra guests, but there is, naturally, a...

My 15-day Ireland Grand Circle Tour was inspired by the desire to see more of Ireland - the parts we missed on our first Ireland tour in 2017.Seven years ago, we visited beautiful gardens in Dublin including Cork House, Knockrose and Tyrellstown as well as some of the finest gardens outside of the capital such as Powerscourt and Mount...

It’s not at all unusual for gardeners to grow old and discover they are unable to take care of their garden as well as they would like. It’s a sad but common eventuality. And what often happens is that such gardens - even very beautiful ones that have taken years and years...

Laskett, the garden of Sir Roy Strong The decision to visit a garden is an important one. It's a commitment that starts deep in the soul, I believe, and it's a decision that is then manifested by the eventual physical walk to the garden. The process of getting...

The Garden Tours Reunion Party on Sept 2 - a celebration of the 22 garden tours I have led over the past nine years - was a big success. Eight-two people attended the event at the Shadbolt Centre at Deer Lake in Burnaby, next door to one of the nicest gardens in the Lower Mainland, Century Garden. The Cory Weeds Trio...

Our last few days in Berlin were spent visiting Museum Island in the centre of the city.We also took the train to Charlottenburg Palace on the outskirts of Berlin and also enjoyed an open-top boat ride on the Spree River.On Museum Island, we visited the Pergamon Panorama, a 360-degree multi-media presentation designed to take you back 1,900 years to...