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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Some friends brought us a huge bouquet of gladioli the other day - four bunches containing red, purple, orange and peach ones. They were barely in flower when they arrived, but they have since started to open up and we have placed them in two tall vases and they actually look very good. In fact, the more the flowers open,...

Not sure what this has to do with gardening, except that I saw this demonstration at the Chelsea Flower Show in May and was quite amazed. Here you see artist Adrian Grey balancing a very large, heavy stone at an impossibly acute angle on another large boulder. At first, I thought he was just pretending to be a living sculpture, holding...

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...

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...

Well, it certainly looks as if the obsession with honeysuckle pillars that I caught at Powis Castle Garden in North Wales earlier this month has already taken hold in my garden. At the weekend, I installed a large 6-by-6 timber post and planted two Goldflame honeysuckles at opposite corners. I first saw these pillars used in an attractive, repetitive design at...

Here are five garden specialties that I stumbled upon while wandering around one of my favourite local nurseries, Western Independent Greenhouses, here in Burnaby. Wired hen composed of houseleeks. This is wire framed chicken is packed with different colours of hardy houseleeks (Sempervivum tectorum) also known more commonly as hens and chicks. The frame costs about $50 but it takes...

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...

Back in my garden today after five weeks away, leading garden tours in England, Wales and Ireland, and I already see how much work I need to do. There is so much morning glory. It has grown everywhere. How has it managed to get a hold so fast in such a short time. Jet-lag meant I woke early this morning and was...

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...