World Cup soccer and gardening. It’s a great combination
My time these days is divided between two activities - watching World Cup soccer and doing garden projects. It's a pleasant mix.
In the garden, I decided to try growing Thunbergia alata, the Black-eyed Susan vine, up a metal spiral inside a plain terra-cotta container.
It already looks quite good and I am hoping the vine will eventually scramble to the...
Sorry but ants are not allowed to run willy-nilly in my garden
Killing creatures is not something I ever like to do. At heart, I like to think of myself as a man who wouldn't harm a fly.
I capture moths by hand or by using a glass or napkin whenever they find their way into the kitchen. Then, I release them gently back outside.
Slugs, if ever I catch them slithering...
Exercise your right to an easy morning work out
I know exercise is important. These days I'm content to walk the dog or go for a swim or a bike ride. That's about it.
My days of jogging and playing soccer are over. Not that I lack energy, but I know I don't have the same muscle strength to support knees and ankles and hips from being injured from...
Goodbye The Vancouver Sun
April 21 was my last day at The Vancouver Sun, after 38 years, 26 spent writing gardening stories. My last column was in the paper April 22.
Today I'm thinking back over the 26 years of my career as a garden writer and remembering all the lovely gardens I have seen and fun times I've had interviewing talented gardeners.
HOW IT...
ITALY CRUISE TOUR 2009
In 2009, when I was working for The Vancouver Sun as the garden columnist and New Homes editor, my publisher called me into his office and asked if I would like to take a group of people around gardens in Italy.
At Padua Botanical Garden
My response was...
JAPAN 2014
In April, 2014, I took 42 people on a 14-day tour of Japan, starting out in Tokyo and ending in Kyoto, visiting many famous gardens and cultural highlights along the way.Our flight to Tokyo was historic since it was one of All Nippon Airways’ new direct flights from Vancouver to Tokyo’s Haneda airport.
Great gardens were the main focus and...
I’ve always had a soft spot for well-clipped boxwood
I've always been partial to clipped boxwood. I'm English, but that is not the reason. You will find beautiful trimmed boxwood in many Dutch, French and Belgian gardens as well as Japanese and Italians garden. They all make bold use of boxwood and use it to great effect in their exquisite gardens.
Three’s company: Fibonacci knew all along it would add up
Who knows why things always seem to look better when they are arranged in threes.
I always tell people it has to do with Fibonacci numbers. Fibonacci was the 12th century Italian mathematician who figured out that a certain sequence of numbers somehow mirrors patterns that happen naturally in nature.
The numbers are 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21,...
Rejoice! My favourite tool was lost and now it is found
I love my garden tools. But there is one I love more than all the rest - my beautiful, multi-functional, never tarnishing, never deteriorating, never diminishing six-in-one hand-trowel.
I love, love, love it. And I’ve had it for years and years and years. So you’ll understand my alarm, my despair, my devastation when I stepped out into the garden...
Into gardens of New Delhi and on to Chandigarh
We came to India for many reasons. Most of us wanted to get a more intimate, personal, first-hand experience of the country rather than relying on what we had read or been told by others.
However, many of us came with some negative expectations. We had accepted that we were likely to find streets crowded, after all we were well...
SOUTHERN FRANCE 2013
Once the Southern Italy came to a happy conclusion in Catania, Sicily, we flew to Aix-en-Province to get ready for our next tour, one from Provence to the Cote d’Azure.
With a few advance days in Aix to prepare for the tour, we managed to see a few sights, such as Cezanne’s studio, and pausing for a cafe latte on...
I see a plain fence and I wanted it painted black
My friend Rob Cannings and his wife, Joan, have a fabulous garden in Victoria. They have been working on it for many years.
It is special not just because of the wonderful variety of plants with different shapes and textures and sizes but also because it is a very dragonfly friendly garden.
But there’s a reason for that. Rob is...
Putting the garden to bed for winter and I need help
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...
Look what can happen when you go to Point Roberts to see beautiful gardens
Over the years I’ve had a lot of fun going to visit private gardens on special tours organized by Point Roberts Garden Club.
One of the most memorable was in 2014 when I ended up meeting Dave and Jenny Stumpo for the first time.
They have a beautiful garden overlooking the ocean. At that time, their garden was full of ornamental...
Clever way to create an elegant privacy screen
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...
Can you repeat that – it looks so good, just keep doing it
Visual repetition always catches my eye. I love it when it is done well. In the garden, it is a very clever way to create rhythm and add impact.
On Beatty Street in Vancouver this week, I found this repetitive planting of variegated Carex ‘Ice Dance’ grasses used in a series of rectangular concrete planters placed to divide the...
Chelsea Flower Show 2017
Chelsea Flower Show, the classiest garden show in the world, will be held this year from May 23-27 on the famous Chelsea Hospital site next to the River Thames in London.
You can find out all about it and how to get tickets at the Royal Horticultural Society site.
Call it quirky or eccentric, but this all looks like fun to me
Quirkiness is defined as something “peculiar” or “unexpected” although I have always tended to interpret it as harmless, mostly humorous, eccentricity.
Growing up in England, I found people were invariably labelled "eccentric" for being a little unusual, odd, different or peculiar.
Eccentric was the word people chose to describe you if you did or said things that were unexpected...
All for the love of a beautiful, clipped hedge
Every year, Daniel Truong and Nina Nguyen come to my garden to clip hedges. They do a wonderful job, shearing, clipping, trimming and shaping cedar and boxwood hedges, leaving them with super-straight lines, razor-sharp corners and wonderfully flat and even sides and tops.
Daniel and Nina pick up every last shred of clippings, so there is never a mess at...
ITALY 2015 No. 2
On Sept 26, I arrived back in Venice for the second Italy - Puglia Tour after the first of the two back-to-back tours concluded in Ostuni, Puglia.
It was a strange feeling arriving back in Venice to start the same tour again. But there were differences.
Firstly, we were not in the same hotel. This time we were located on Calle...
