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...
Oh no, Namaqualand has no flowers! This is a big disappointment
Namaqualand, one of the world’s top landscape wonders for majestic spring flower displays, is in the grip of the worst drought in 100 years.
As a result, there are few, if any flowers. It is a total waste of time coming to Namaqualand right now to see blooms - there are none.
I spent all day scouring the landscape here with...
Check out this lovely urban oasis in downtown Vancouver
It’s surprising how many people still don’t know about the peaceful Cloister Garden tucked away between towering Cathedral Place office block and Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Vancouver. It's a gem worth discovering.
This lovely, secluded enclosed space, with its formal architectural lines, neatly clipped boxwood hedging and simple flat expanse of...
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...
How we’ve been preparing for our upcoming trip to India
In a few weeks, I will be going to India to lead a 14-day tour of mogul gardens as well as many of the iconic sites and other highlights of northern India followed by time cruising the Kerala backwaters around Alappuzha in the south.
In preparation for this tour, I’ve been suggesting that my group spend some time watching a...
Hot new perennials for my sunny border
First thing this morning, I found room for a bunch of new perennials in a sunny spot already home to some ornamental grasses and weigela and burgundy and lime green ninebark.
I put in six Coreopsis Uptick, considered the “kings of summer” and have the added appeal of being hybrids of a native North America species.
The names of the ones I planted...
Serenity of green-on-green landscaping
Green-on-green is a style of planting that aims to create an elegant landscape by putting together a variety of plants with different shades and textures of green leaves.
An example would be a low boxwood hedge in front of rhododendrons or a row of blue-green hostas in front of a hedge of Japanese holly, skimmia or sarcococca with a neatly...
10 favourite shrubs
Buddleia davidii ‘Black Knight’ (butterfly bush)
Walk into any garden and most of the plants you see come from other parts of the world. Buddleia, the butterfly bush, originates from the Sichuan and Hubei areas of China. It gets its name because it has the uncanny knack of attracting butterflies. ‘Black Knight’ is one of the most beautiful and reliable...
Collecting seed: It’s child’s play and an easy way to get dozens of free plants
Grandson Jake, 7, collecting Welsh poppy seeds
Seed-collecting is a wonderful way to get more plants for your garden for free and the best way to make sure they are evenly distributed.
This week, we collected hundreds of aquilegia seeds as well as thousands of Welsh poppy seeds...
Never tire of doing this fun project with paperwhites
I’ve been growing paperwhites in glass vases for more than 20 years.
I remember buying a bag of these amazing little bulbs for the first time to do a project with my daughter Aimee when she was about 11.
This week, I...
Next stop, Cape Town, South Africa for a 15-day tour
In September, I will be heading back to Cape Town, South Africa, to lead my second garden tour there.
In 2012, I led a tour out of Cape Town along the Garden Route, calling at Stellenbosch and Knysna on route before leaving the Western Cape to jump over to Durban and Swaziland and on to Johannesburg.
This time, we will...
New garden tours coming up and in the works for 2019
What new and upcoming garden tours do I have planned for the remainder of 2018 and into 2019?
In May, I will return to Italy for the ninth time to lead a very special Islands and Lakes Garden Tour, starting in Lugano and moving quickly to the Milanese lakes. You can see details here.
From there, we will head to Sardinia...
A little shocker for some summer fun
What’s the quirkiest plant on the shelves this spring?
It could well be the “electric daisy” (Acmella oleracea), possibly the hottest novelty plant of 2017 that also is known as the toothache plant. This also goes by the botanical name Spilanthes acmella.
It has glossy green leaves and golden, bud-like flowers with a dark red eye.
In Brazil, where it is an...
SPAIN-MOROCCO 2014
In September, 2014, we went to Spain, where we first gathered for a few days in Madrid before heading south to Toledo, Cordoba, Seville and Granada, then crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into North Africa to visit the key towns and cities of Morocco.
Early fall is the perfect time of year to be in Madrid: Not too hot during...
Garden Tour Reunion Party was a blast with lots of fun memories
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...
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...
BC garden centres still hoping for big sales
It's been a crippling spring for garden centres in Metro Vancouver. Rain, rain and more rain has kept gardeners indoors.
And exceptionally cold weather has put flowering times behind, some say by as much as a month. It is May, but it feels like early April.
Garden centres have had the worst April sales in years.
Last year, it was the opposite....
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,...
HOLLAND-ENGLAND TOUR 2012
In 2012, I hit on the idea of doing a garden tour in Holland to coincide with the huge Floriade event that is held there once every 10 years.I figured it would be a popular tour because of the appeal of Floriade but also because I intended to include a visit to the famous Dutch flower-bulb garden, the Keukenhof.
I...
Untold stories from my India trip
Here are a few untold stories from my recent India Tour, stories that for one reason or another just didn’t fit into posts I published each day.
Head injury
The first and most important untold story is about how Bev Morris, one of the women in my tour group, slipped and fell and cracked open her head when she got up...
