Category Archives: Miscellaneous

FACEBOOK: Invasion of the Profile Snatchers

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I have been replaced on Facebook. Cancelled. Subsumed.

It took a week for the bad guys to knock me down and keep me down. I fought tooth-and-nail.  I emailed “support@fb” repeatedly and got no support, or even an acknowledgement. I tried various “recover your account” methods, and found two strange profiles linked to my account, but was stymied when I tried to go further with the unhelpful bots. I wrote passionate snail-mail letters to people in high places at Meta here in Canada, and ultimately to people in law enforcement and to Meta headquarters at …. wait for it… One Hacker Way in Menlo Park, CA. But in the end the criminals won. They became “me”.  On Facebook, though it still looks like “me”, below, I am now really a guy with a Nigerian country code on his Apple iPhone who changed my password and other details on my account, then proceeded to hit up tons of my friends with messages about various scams involving rebates and grants and other ways of making easy money that no reasonably sane person would fall for. Or would they?

In a careless moment, on Sunday May 7th at around 4:40 pm, I fell for one of those cons. I saw on my news feed that a Toronto friend was seeking help because she thought she’d been hacked. Someone suggested in the comments on her post that she change her Friend settings to be private, but she said she didn’t know how.  I commented with a screen grab showing her where the settings were and almost immediately a message popped up on Messenger from “her” saying it didn’t work that way on “her” phone and could I help her with a recovery code that Facebook would email  me. I was dubious and thought about it for a moment, but what harm could it do to give her a code? The email did come from Facebook and in the Subject line on my Inbox, it gave the code, so I dutifully messaged “her” the number.

What I didn’t realize was that I was not talking to my friend on Messenger, and it likely wasn’t even her page anymore.  But now look at what was in the body of Facebook’s email “below the fold” as they say in the newspaper business, once I opened it up fully.  The email was asking me if I wanted to change MY OWN password. It wasn’t for the benefit of any friend – it was the key to unlock my account, and I gave it away without realizing it.   I consider myself fairly skeptical and tech-savvy, but I didn’t see any of that coming.  Needless to say, (and I’ve worked with site developers online in the past) the code should NOT have been in the subject line. It should have been nested within the body so the recipient has a chance to see what is about to happen. As one friend said, we lose our rational brain when someone needs our help. Lesson learned.

Several minutes later, I got another email from Facebook asking if I’d changed my phone number to the Jackson, Mississippi one with the Nigerian country code that they showed me. Needless to say, I said it wasn’t.  At that point, I had to email them proof of i.d. so I sent a copy of my passport.  Three minutes later, they emailed again saying my password had been changed by that phone number.  Hackers know they have to act very fast. Now the Catch-22 was in motion: i.e. you have to know your current password to change to a new one, and since I didn’t know what the criminals had used, I was stuck.  I could no longer open my page on my phone or iPad but by some strange quirk, I was still able to open it on my desktop on Chrome, because I’d never logged out. So I could still post photos on my desktop and did so a few times, hoping they had been kicked off. But soon I got emails from friends about spam on Messenger and I was able to look at that via my desktop. There were loads of messages to friends… I don’t know how many but I’m guessing it was in the several dozens or up to a hundred…. showing that “I” was sending out spam messages and even audio calls about ELF rebates, grants, and other nonsense.  These have gone out in two waves, including today, when a friend in the Bronx emailed me a screen grab of the very same con-game I fell for last week. Only mine featured better grammar. Before I was locked out, I went into Messenger and apologized to all the people who’d received messages and who hadn’t yet blocked me or deleted the conversations; I told them to ignore the request, as it hadn’t come from me. My lovely friends were understanding, but eventually I lost the ability to reassure them since what was happening was not reassuring at all.

******

I joined Facebook in January 2010, part of the growing movement to social media. In professional seminars I attended as a freelance writer/photographer in the early 2000s, consultants urged us to “Get on Social Media!! Gather followers! Ask them questions to generate feedback!”   I was never very good at that, had never taken part in chat rooms, but when I finally complied and signed up on Facebook I realized how much fun it was to have this growing community of like-minded folks.  Facebook became my ‘water cooler’, my ‘recess’ (with breaks taken too many times each day!)  Part of why I enjoyed it so much was that I’ve always loved “words with pictures”; it dictated the course of my career. So I especially loved making my cover and profile photos, which I eventually posted in my personal photo library on the cloud.

Of the 2800+ friends I gathered from around the gardening world on Facebook, I managed to meet several “IRL” (in real life) over the years.  On a 2014 trip to California, I met one of the leading native plant proponents based in Sonoma and we shared a lovely dinner with our spouses.  Planning a 2018 trip to Oregon, I put out a bulletin on my page that I was going to be in Seattle and Portland and would love to see my virtual friends for a picnic at the University of Washington (that’s me in the middle with David, Mary, Rebecca and Sue)…..

…… and a few days later at a favourite Portland nursery.  It was such fun to see fellow gardeners Ann, Vanessa, Kate and Patricia in the flesh! It made my life and career much richer.

In 2019, a happy set of Facebook-related events resulted in a shared small plane charter to the wild rainforest of the west coast of Vancouver Island with Mary Anne and Caitlin for a two-day stay in Cougar Annie’s Garden.

A few months later, I was meeting my dear Facebook friend Liberto in Athens “IRL” for the first time, as he hosted a botanical tour of Greece. That trip resulted in a very comprehensive blog about Greek flora — and music!

Liberto was the smartest part of my Facebook puzzle years 2013-15, when I designed tough anagram picture puzzles that tested my friends’ plant identification skills and anagram-solving talent. The solution to the one below is ‘California Dreaming’ (on such a winter’s day, get it?)  I wrote a blog about those fun puzzles.

Because I photograph plants for my stock library, I also became an administrator of a Facebook site called Plant Idents with more than 7.7K members.  As of this week, since I’m locked out of my Facebook account by criminals, the other admins are working without my help.

For seven months in 2011-12, I wrote a daily poem to accompany a photo I took on a one-mile walk and posted them on Facebook – I called them Walking Time Rhymes.  This was from November 25, 2011 in Vancouver. My mom would die less than 3 months later, so this particular rainy walk and rhyme was precious to me. 

And through Facebook, I met a group of very special friends and like-minded garden communicators who organize yearly tours called the Garden Bloggers’ Fling.  This lovely garden was in Denver in 2018, below. This September, we’ll meet in Philadelphia.  Our wonderful tour host Karl lost his own Facebook page to hackers, along with thousands of curated photos from his garden travels throughout the world.  We will have much to talk about together.  

Though I’m gone from Facebook for the moment, I’m pushing hard to get my page back. But like Hansel and Gretel, I’ve left some crumbs in the FB forest in the form of three sets of unique hashtags I made over the years. My friends who have enjoyed my pollinator posts….

…fairy crowns…..

…. and my blogs featuring music and related gardening concepts will likely know what they are.  The hashtag for social media was invented by a smart young man named Chris Messina, an open-source advocate who was kind enough to drop me a note saying he’d lost his own page once to hackers so he knew how stressful it can be. If you live by social media, you can die by it as well. I’m hoping I’m only seriously wounded, but not fatally. Fingers crossed.  

POSTSCRIPT: I set up a new Facebook page on July 13th. If you get a friend request from a woman who looks like this, it’s really “me”.

My Covid Journal

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The end of March 2023 marks 3 full years of dealing with a contagion that rocked the world in a way that no disease had since 1919 and the Spanish flu. As of today, the World Health Organization reports that 8,830,881 people died of Covid 19, a figure that almost certainly understates reality, given that many nations were not keeping statistics, or simply not reporting them to outside sources. I was reminded of this as I looked through my photo folders since March 2020, noting all the ways, big and small, that it touched us. This is my Covid journal.

March 14, 2020 – Covid has now been recognized in Canada for two weeks and the newspaper is starting to issue public service announcements.

March 17, 2020 – On St. Patrick’s Day, when I am supposed to receive my new left knee (elective surgery was cancelled by our provincial government), I listen instead to our Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland speak on behalf of the nation’s Covid Committee.

March 21, 2020 – The first day of spring and the newspapers echo our thoughts, for we are indeed “alone together” “in uncharted territory”. By now, we are watching daily t.v. reports by provincial health ministers somberly reading out Covid-19 statistics, including deaths, mostly in nursing homes at the outset.

March 24, 2020 – As people of a certain age, we are encouraged to stay home and stay safe. Instead, our 40-something son brings us groceries. And we wash everything down with rubbing alcohol! Honestly! Could Covid come in on our Raisin Bran?

March 26, 2020 – My apples have never been so clean, even though we doubt that they are spreading Covid.

March 31 2020 – People are encouraged to show the love in our front windows, so children passing by don’t feel so forsaken. I can’t help adding voices….

April 7, 2020 – It feels more real when Boris Johnson is sent to the ICU with Covid. It will be a few years before we learn that his own carelessness around Covid helps bring him down.

April 8, 2020 – Our civic government goes into overdrive protecting its citizens, and the park parking lot at the end of our street is closed. You can still walk in, mind you, but the dog-walkers have no place to leave their cars.

April 10, 2020 – People are getting decked out in masks and I can’t resist doing my own Lawrence of Arabia take on the newest disease control measure.

April 10, 2020 – A family birthday party is held outdoors. The new normal.

April 21, 2020 – Doug’s exercise club is closed, as are gyms all over the city. It will eventually declare bankruptcy. But Doug makes do in the living room, being careful with his golf club.

April 21, 2020 – A neighbour is sewing masks on her machine for visitors to local hospitals. I ask if I can buy a few and she gives them to me free, refusing my offer.

May 2, 2020 – Spring has sprung and people have been walking past my garden since the very first snowdrop. They seem desperate to have some touchstone, the normalcy of the seasons changing. From the porch, I chat with these women who have been photographing the spring bulb parade.

May 6, 2020 – Sourdough baking has taken the nation by storm, and a friend drops off a warm loaf on my doorstep.

May 7, 2020 – The front garden is bursting with color. Such a comfort.

May 8, 2020 – As friends sign up for no-contact grocery shopping services, we weigh how we should be buying our food. Just at the right time, we see an ad for a 100km local farms offer and pick up our order at a parking lot nearby.

May 9, 2020 – People are starting to have cabin fever, and friends call to ask us to take a walk with them. I love that the trilliums are in bloom in this spot overlooking a Toronto ravine.

May 10, 2020 – It’s Mother’s Day and my two youngest sons and future daughter-in-law celebrate my day with me on the front porch. Mimosas!

May 16, 2020 – I’m not sure now about the 46 ways we were going to change. Did we tick them all off? Or did we just tick off people who learned to hate poor Anthony Fauci in the U.S.?

May 18, 2020 – Everybody is growing seeds at home, it seems, since nurseries are effectively shuttered. I order soil from Amazon (!) and get into the act on the window seat of a 3rd floor bedroom, with the rare Petunia exserta and a marigold that Linnaeus and Rudbeck were said to have grown in Sweden.

May 19, 2020 – Our neighbourhood grocery store is allowed to open with a strict limit of customers inside at any one time. The handsome security guard outside (left) keeps count, ensures we’re masked and makes us clean our hands with the sanitary gel. The employee at right beyond the new social-distancing floor tape wears full-face protection.

May 31, 2020 – We watch our first-ever Zoom memorial service, for a dear friend, all the way from Santa Barbara.

Sept. 29, 2020 – I burst out laughing one day as I look at my lipsticks, and think that Revlon and l’Oreal are going to be badly affected when they can’t sell lipstick to mask-wearing women.

Oct. 31, 2020 – Halloween comes and Dracula and the jack are wearing masks.

Nov. 1, 2020 – On the 1st of November, I begin a 5-month ‘Covid project’ to distract myself through the winter. I call it #janetsdailypollinator. This is the saffron crocus (C. sativus) which I photographed in the town of Krokos in Greece. Little do I know that it won’t be the only winter that Covid visits.

Nov. 13, 2020 – Given we can’t go to restaurants anymore, we get into a rhythm of ordering each week from a local restaurant. Our favourite is halibut-and-fries from Zee Grill, a seafood fixture in our neighbourhood.

Dec. 5, 2020 – My brother, sister-in-law and nephew come to visit but we don’t go into the house – so we do a portrait in the driveway.

Dec. 24, 2020 – We are so fortunate to have our house on Lake Muskoka. It’s just three of us for Xmas eve, but we decorate our oak totem like it’s a fresh-cut balsam fir.

Jan. 14, 2021 – It’s a new year but with a spike in cases and deaths, the province institutes serious isolation rules. They even use the emergency system to drive it home.

Jan. 18, 2021 – My special order of home-sewn masks arrive and of course there’s a floral motif.

March 7, 2021 – The grandkids arrive for a March break visit and they stay outside (mostly) because who wants to give nana and poppa Covid?

March 7, 2021 – It feels weird to have a picnic on the cold front sidewalk, but we do. I feel such sympathy for my daughter and son-in-law who both work at home. Now they have 3 kids ‘attending school’ via their little tablets on the dining room table. But at least they have a back yard with trees, unlike all the kids who live in apartments and are in isolation with no schoolyard in which to play.

March 11, 2021 – Thanks to a dear friend who dropped sourdough starter in a jar on my front porch, I’ve made my first loaves – with olives! (The fad doesn’t last with me – I don’t want to be a slave to yeast. But I take up focaccia instead!)

March 31, 2021 – I wrap up my 5-month daily pollinator project and make a giant montage.

April 2, 2021 – Vaccination #1 at Sunnybrook Hospital less than a mile from home. #2 would be Moderna two months later.

April 12, 2021 – The news remains dire with the 3rd wave.

April 13, 2021 – The spring garden is in bloom and I have a crazy idea. Instead of creating a bouquet with the blossoms, I make a floral tiara. I decide it’s going to be called a ‘fairy crown’.

By the end of the fairy crown project, there will be 30 versions. In 2022, I’ll do a blog for each one, celebrating the flowers and garden chapter that made each possible.

April 16, 2021 – It’s our 44th anniversary – and we celebrate with take-out from Zee Grill.

June 12, 2021 – Barber shops and hair salons are closed so darling Lena, my daughter’s hairdresser, comes to the backyard and does open-air cuts – including one for poppa.

Nov. 16, 2021 – It’s been a while since I was on a plane but I take the opportunity of a reduction in cases and isolation measures to fly to Vancouver to visit my brother and sister. The mask is hard to get used to for 5+ hours but that’s the rule now.

Feb. 11, 2022 – Almost after the fact, a giant anti-mask and anti-vaccine policy protest convoy is organized by truckers and sympathizers from across Canada and ends up closing down our capital city Ottawa. It goes on for days and days as the protesters call for the prime minister to step down — while honking horns day and night in the 18-wheelers that block the streets around the parliament buildings. It is surreal. And people are fed up.

Feb. 18, 2022 – Things get serious when the government uses the Emergency Act to seize assets of the protestors and give the cops extra powers to end the protest.

May 27, 2022 – By now, all the Covid test kits that were handed out to companies are gathering dust on shelves. My local greengrocer throws one in with my order as a bonus.

June 12, 2022 – My niece Lily Frost is a singer and single mom who hasn’t had many gigs for 2 years so I invite her and her band to perform a concert for my neighbours and family. It is a perfect day, the band is sizzling hot and such fun.

Lily and her band Thelonius Monk give a wonderful performance for 2 hours.

Aug. 31, 2022 – On the last day of August, we fly from Toronto to Edinburgh, below, on the first leg of what will be a memorable trip. Masks are mandatory in the airport and on the plane, but when we line up at customs in Edinburgh, not one person is wearing a mask. Days later, we leave for 5 days in Florence before celebrating our son Jon’s beautiful wedding to Marta in the Tuscan hills. After that, we take part in a wine tour of Sicily that lasts until the end of September. It feels almost… almost… like things are returning to normal.

It’s been a remarkable three years. As of now, I am the only one in my family (along with the grandkids) who hasn’t had Covid. Yet. But it’s still flying around and finding people who thought they’d dodged it completely. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll have to add a postscript to this journal. In the meantime, another spring has arrived, reluctantly, with snowflakes, and I’m ready to get back into the garden!

POSTSCRIPT: On June 9th, in the middle of a much-anticipated garden tour in England, I tested positive for Covid and had to depart the tour. Fortunately, I have a son living in London and he could take in his poor mom and make her tea and soup. But I was sad to miss the last wonderful gardens.

Burned by Feedburner

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Dear E-mail subscribers:

If you haven’t heard from me in a while, it’s not because I haven’t been writing my blog. It’s because my subscription email service Feedburner, which has send out my blog emails for the past 8 years, was finally closed down in mid-July by their owner Google. So I’m experimenting a little because I want you to receive my blog in your inbox, obviously, but I don’t want you to be bothered by advertising from commercial services.


In the meantime, I’ve been very busy – mostly keeping up with my year of fairy crowns. These are links to the blogs you’ve missed on www.thepaintboxgarden.com:

July 25 – The Hummingbird Photo Studio

July 30 – May at Chanticleer Garden – Part 2

August 1 – Fairy Crown #16 – A Czech-German-All American Blackeyed Susan

August 5 – Fairy Crown #17 – Beebalm & Yellow Daisies at the Lake

August 7 – Fairy Crown #18 – Russian Sage & Blazing Stars

August 10 – Fairy Crown #19 – My Fruitful Life – reflections on a big birthday

August 19 – Fairy Crown #20 – Cup Plant, Joe Pye & Ironweed

Under Western Skies…. and Facebook

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I once wrote book reviews for a gardening magazine. I told the editor, my friend, that I wanted her assurance that if I found fault with a book, I would be free to state that. She agreed, but I’m not sure the publisher felt the same way since books promoted in popular magazines always get a lift in sales, and that’s just a good business relationship to cultivate.  But if I’d been given ‘Under Western Skies’ to review it would have been a 5-star rave, even if I hadn’t been thanked in the book acknowledgements.  And to think… it’s all because of Facebook.

Let me back up a bit. I’ve been a Facebook member for almost 12 years. Apart from old friends, neighbours and family, pretty much all my 2700+ ‘friends’ community shares with me a love of gardening in some form.  Writers, photographers, nursery owners, garden designers, plant breeders, active enthusiasts – they hail from all over North America and Europe and New Zealand, too.  But it was a chance conversation in the Idaho Botanical Garden in September 2016 between my husband Doug and Boise garden writer/radio host Mary Ann Newcomer that put in motion a sweet event that happened three years later.  We were heading home from visiting friends in Sun Valley via Boise and a pre-arranged meet-up with Mary Ann, one of those Facebook friends I’d never ‘met’ in real life (or IRL as they say on FB) but I’d ‘known’ virtually since 2014.  After touring much of the garden (you can read my blog on Idaho Botanical Garden here), I decided to meander to the top of the wonderful Lewis & Clark Trail snapping shots of the Plants of the Canyons, below, while Doug and Mary Ann relaxed at a lower level.

During their conversation, Mary Ann mentioned writing a story in 2013 for Leaf magazine about a famous British Columbia garden, Cougar Annie’s Garden, below (photo by Janis Nicolay).  I had once told her that Doug and Peter Buckland, who now owns the garden via the Boat Basin Foundation, had been good friends since the 1960s.  In fact, Doug remembered meeting Cougar Annie herself on a visit decades earlier.   

And that is how, a few years later in May 2019, Mary Ann contacted us to say a California photographer named Caitlin Atkinson was interested in photographing Cougar Annie’s Garden for a book project she had developed. As it happened, Doug and I were finalizing the details of an early autumn trip that would take us to see family in British Columbia before flying to San Francisco– and Peter had long wanted me to visit the garden. To make a long story short, the stars aligned, and in early October we met in Tofino and chartered a small plane to fly us 20 minutes north to the garden.

Doug sat in front with the pilot; Mary Ann had her phone out to make sure….

… she captured some of the stunning landscape of Clayoquot Sound below….

…. and Caitlin sat in the rear.

Just a few hours later, luggage stowed in our rustic rainforest cabins, Peter was giving us a tour of the property…..

…. that included Cougar Annie’s house….

…. and explaining the significance of logging zones in the first growth forests on the mountain slopes nearby.

We went our separate ways and met late in the afternoon in the Great Hall of the Temperate Rainforest Study Centre.

The property is completely off the grid with minimal propane use for cooking and washing up, so dinner in the hall was by candelight.

The next day, Peter toured us along the Walk of the Ancients, showing us 700-year old red cedars and “canoe trees” carved out by First Nations people.  Beyond the inner history and relatively recent saga of Cougar Annie’s Garden, this ancient forest seemed to me to be Peter’s real story, his love and appreciation evident in his understanding of its ecology….

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…. and the 2300 feet of hand-hewn cedar shake boardwalk, below, on which we trekked through giant trees to reach our cabins. To say it was a life-changing two days seems trite, but it was.  And I felt compelled to write my impressions in a 2-part blog which you can find beginning here.

Throughout those two days in early October 2019, Caitlin disappeared with her camera and we would only see her at dinner.  Her images and Jennifer Jewell’s words (Jennifer is well-known for her NPR radio show and podcast ‘Cultivating Place’) comprise the last story in the book and do Cougar Annie’s Garden at Boat Basin and Peter Buckland great justice.

The Rest of the Book

The book’s subtitle is Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast, and it spotlights 36 such gardens from the Southwest, Southern California, Northern California, the Intermountain West and the Pacific Northwest.  In the Southwest section, there are sophisticated desert gardens in Phoenix and stunning wildflower gardens in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Santa Fe. But I was delighted to turn the page to find the Albuquerque garden of my New Mexico Facebook friend, landscape designer Hunter Ten Broeck and his wife Barb featured. Caitlin’s photos brought his garden, developed through xeriscaping principles reflected in his company’s name, WaterWise Landscapes, to life. 

In the Southern California section, I was absorbed by the story of tech executive Dennis Mudd whose mountain biking in the hills near San Diego inspired him to research the endemic native plants near his Poway home and ultimately restore nature to his garden, telling Jennifer Jewell “I’m living in a truly interconnected web of life.”.  But it was while reading the story of landscape architect David Godshall’s Edendale Garden in Echo Park in Los Angeles that I did a double take, seeing the name of a dear Toronto friend mentioned. As Jennifer wrote: “Reading City Form and Natural Process: Towards a New Urban Vernacular by Michael Hough taught him that most standard landscaping supports almost no life, a ‘searing’ revelation.”  I interviewed Michael Hough (1928-2013) over many months 26 years ago for a magazine profile, accompanying him to his Environmental Studies classes; tagging along on site visits with his students; visiting his ecological landscape designs; sharing a glass of wine in his garden; and listening to him talk about his regeneration plan for the Don River, below, one of Toronto’s three watersheds.  

In the Northern California section, it was a delight to come upon ‘Sebastopol Local Love Story’, featuring the garden of my friend, native plant specialist Phil Van Soelen and his wife Mary Killian. When we were planning a trip to the Bay area and wine country in spring 2014, Phil suggested we build on our Facebook relationship and meet “IRL” and that’s what we did, visiting him in the lovely garden he then had, below, within sight of the garden Mary owned behind him, to which he moved in 2015. Caitlin’s photos feature some of their fabulous native plantings. Later we went for dinner, two Facebook pals and their spouses getting to know each other better.

That week we also visited Phil at California Flora Nursery, which he opened with Sherrie Althouse in 1981. It was a rainy morning in Sonoma, but I’m so happy we got to see him in his element there, since he sold the nursery a few years ago.

In the gardens of the Intermountain West, Mary Ann Newcomer’s Boise garden is featured, as well as the Idaho Botanical Garden.  Renowned Colorado designer Lauren Springer’s name pops up in a few gardens in this section, most prominently in the Niwot, Colorado garden of Mary and Larry Scripter. Once again, Facebook and the Garden Bloggers group I joined through it, allowed me to visit the Scripter garden on a Denver trip a few years ago and it was a pleasure to be reminded in Caitlin’s photos of their enchanating prairie meadow garden overlooking their extensive hayfields and the Rocky Mountains. This is a garden I meant to blog about, but never quite got around to. So here is my photo of Mary and Larry, as accompaniment to the piece in the book.

I found Lauren Springer’s famous breadseed poppy Papaver somniferum ‘Lauren’s Grape’ growing there, too.

In the Pacific Northwest section of the book, Harborton Hill, the lush Portland garden of my Facebook pal Bob Hyland and his partner Andrew Beckman is featured. I also met Bob “IRL” in 2018 when I visited his shop Contained Exuberance, adjacent to Portland’s famous nursery Xera Plants. He’s in the photo below flanked by Xera’s co-owners, Paul Bonine and Greg Shepherd.

That was the day I also met a gaggle of Facebook gardening friends ‘in the flesh’, including from left below, Ann Amato, Vanessa Gardner Nagle, me, Kate Bryant and Patricia Cunningham.

Facebook friend Evan Bean’s plant-rich garden near Washington’s Mount St. Helens is featured in this section, as is the Indianola garden of Nancy Heckler, also a Facebook friend. Prominent in this section is the renowned Heronswood Garden on the Kitsap Peninsula. I saw Heronswood in September 2005, when I picked up my mom and drove south from Vancouver, white-knuckling the freeway winding through Seattle towards the Bainbridge Ferry, on a garden-viewing adventure.  Founded in 1987 by plant explorer Dan Hinkley and his partner, architect Robert Jones, Heronswood had been sold by then to Burpee Plants and was being managed by Dan, whom I photographed below (on his birthday). But, as Jennifer Jewell writes of what was a dark chapter in west coast horticulture: “By 2006, the Burpee company had declared bankruptcy and stopped maintaining the property.” The garden fell into disrepair until 2012, when it was purchased at auction by the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe. Today, Dan Hinkley is director and the garden is managed by the Port Gamble S’Klallam Foundation, with Joan Garrow as Executive Director. Caitlin’s photos capture its great beauty and the groundbreaking horticulture for which Heronswood has always been known.

The Pacific Northwest section ends fittingly in Canada with Cougar Annie’s Garden at Boat Basin. Have I been dropping names in this blog? Oh yes, I certainly have, and also celebrating the many wonderful relationships I’ve made through Facebook. We are all reminded constantly how bad social media is; how it manipulates our lives. Perhaps, but I have a different view: it is the quicksilver that flows throughout the world, connecting passionate gardeners who would never have found each other without it.

So, is this an unbiased review? Of course not. Buy the book! Give it to a friend or family member on the west coast and inspire them with these 36 spectacular gardens and gardeners of the golden west.  Oh, and Merry Christmas!

Into the May Woods Once Again

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On Victoria Day weekend, with almost two warm weeks having elapsed since my first May wildflower foray into the woods flanking the dirt road near our cottage on Lake Muskoka, near Torrance, Ontario I was curious to see what else had come into bloom.  This time, knowing the blackflies and mosquitoes would be active, I came prepared with a Coghlan’s head net for my hat.  What a lifesaver that was!

As I left our place on the Page’s Point peninsula, I noticed the sand cherry in flower down by the shore. Prunus pumila is a plant not only of sandy shores along the Great Lakes, but of smaller lakes, too. It also emerges from soil in granite outcrops, like Lake Muskoka.

Spring bees love the sand cherry flowers. This is an andrena mining bee.

Lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) were in flower, too. Fingers crossed for sufficient rain to produce fruit.

I also noticed the rather subtle flowers of limber honeysuckle (Lonicera dioica), another Muskoka native.

Further down the path was a little stand of gaywings, aka fringed milkwort (Polygala paucifolia).

Back on the dirt road, hepatica, spring beauty and dogtooth violet were all finished, but I found some sweet little downy yellow violets (V. pubescens) in the grassy centre of a neighbour’s driveway.

Wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) was now in full bloom.

False Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum) was just about to flower…..

…. .and across the road, little starflower was becoming used to its new name, Lysimachia borealis (formerly Trientalis).

I stepped down into the wetland on either side of the road to get a better look at the violet that my Field Botanists of Ontario Facebook page had identified for me in my last blog. You can see it in the mud under the emerging royal ferns (Osmunda regalis var. spectabilis). It’s called Macloskey’s violet or small white violet (Viola macloskeyi) and is native to much of northeast N. America. This is when I really appreciated my bug veil!

Here’s a close-up look at the violet.

In the wetland on the opposite side of the road, cinnamon ferns (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) had mostly unfurled since my last visit.

There were masses of Macloskey’s violets here too, but what was that white flower at the edge of the swale?

It was wild calla or water arum (Calla palustris) – my first time seeing this lovely marginal aquatic plant.

Wild calla bears the spathe-and-spadix floral arrangement typical of the Arum family (Araceae). According to the Illinois Wildflowers site: “The spadix has mostly perfect (bisexual) flowers… These small flowers are densely arranged across the entire surface of the spadix and they are numerous. Each perfect flower has a green ovoid pistil that is surrounded at its base by 6-9 white stamens”. Flies are its principal pollinators. After flowering ends, the spathe and spadix both turn green. As fruit develops, it turns bright-red.

I actually made a little video of my foray into the wet areas and you can hear the mosquitoes in the blue violet segment, as well as the lovely Muskoka birds. It ends with the chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) further up the dirt road.

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The chokecherries had just been in bud two weeks earlier, but were now in full flower….

….. and hosting native bees as well as this little beetle.

In the woods, beaked hazel (Corylus cornuta) had leafed out.

Eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) grew here and there on shallow soil atop rock outcrops.

I saw exactly one rock harlequin (Capnoides sempervirens) but it was difficult to capture with my cellphone so I’ve added a camera closeup from a previous spring behind our own cottage.

And of course loads of wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana).

The forest floor under this sugar maple seedling (Acer saccharum) was thickly carpeted with the leaves of countless species still awaiting their time to shine – or perhaps never rising at all, but merely part of the great fabric of nature here.

There were also seedling oaks, both red oak (Quercus rubra) and white oak (Quercus alba). The latter, in this neck of the woods, never seems to get bigger than a small scrubby tree.

Those oak photos were the last ones I made for 30 minutes because I got turned around and lost in the woods. It was only for a half-hour, but it felt like hours. I climbed over and under downed trees and came to hemlock stands and fairly high cliffs, beyond which lay… more forest. Since it was mid-afternoon, I followed the sun, thinking I needed to go south – but I was in fact walking more west than south.  Nothing looked familiar – I was really lost, and getting thirsty in the heat!   Feeling a growing sense of panic, I called my husband Doug back at the cottage. “You need to veer left as you’re looking at the sun to find the dirt road,” he said. Within 10 minutes I started to recognize some of the plants I’d seen earlier and then I heard the voices of children and saw the roof of a truck heading down the dirt road. Whew!  Next time I won’t wander without taking water and leaving a trail of cookie crumbs! (Note to self: also get compass and GPS apps on phone.)  The arrows below with our cottage marked in red approximate my wanderings.

When I got back to the dirt road, I found the first instar of the gypsy moth caterpillars that will  ravage our Muskoka oak and pine trees this summer. Very tiny, it was crawling up the leaf of striped maple or moose maple (Acer pensylvancum) which was also sporting its pendant green flowers. Some of my readers will recall my 2020 blog A Gypsy Moth Summer on Lake Muskoka in which I described how I used a homemade oil spray to kill the egg masses.

Heading back to the cottage, I found maple-leaf viburnum (V. acerifolium) in bud…..

….. and a few trilliums that had not yet withered in the unseasonal May heat. And I had learned a few valuable lessons about going into the Muskoka bush alone!

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If you want to read about my meadow gardens in Muskoka, have a look at this blog from 2017, Muskoka Wild – Gardening in Cottage Country.