“Do you want some Rudbeckia triloba? I can dig some up for you,” said my good friend Aldona Satterthwaite last week. “Of course!” I replied, since browneyed susan is one of the few rudbeckias I haven’t grown. We made a date to meet at her house. I brought her a little plant of Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blooms’ that I’d grown from rooted cuttings of my favourite hummingbird plant, and she sat me down on her perfect, socially-distanced veranda, with furniture and colourful, weatherproof carpet from Toronto’s Moss Danforth garden boutique…..
…… and gave me a piece of freshly-baked Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Coffee Cake, recipe from Smitten Kitchen. It is easily the best coffee cake I’ve ever had, but it’s merely one little item in Aldona’s big culinary repertoire. When I make her kale-blue cheese pasta, my husband now says “Didn’t we just have this?” Yes, we did. And we’re having it again because it’s the perfect mix of righteous anti-oxidant vegetable, decadent fromage bleu and carbohydrates! But I digress.
Aldona and I were born in the same year and share a love of green and growing things, not to mention food, music, travel and good gossip. I met her in 2001 when she became editor-in-chief of Canadian Gardening magazine where I’d been a freelance contributor since the first issue in 1990. Prior to that, she’d held key positions in the communication/creative departments at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. After leaving Canadian Gardening in 2009, she spent 3 years as a very engaged and well-regarded Executive Director of the Toronto Botanical Garden. In short, she’s a powerhouse… and she loves to garden.
As we ate our cake and chatted, it felt like the veranda was a leafy treehouse, thanks to the little forest in her small front garden: magnolia, chaste tree (Vitex agnus-castus) and serviceberry (Amelanchier). South-facing, it also cools the house on hot summer days.
Birds were waiting for us to finish our snack, so they could nosh on their own plump, ripe serviceberries.
After finishing my cake, I did a fast tour of Aldona’s sweet garden, heading down the stairs beside the pots of colourful begonias, which she uses in profusion.
The garden is small but jam-packed with plants in what seems at first like happy chaos, but is a very well planned orchestration of blooms. Along with a backbone of shrubs and small trees are perennials, biennials (like the R. triloba she was giving me) and self-seeding annuals like the cosmos, front, below. That pretty purple and chartreuse combination is common sage (Salvia officinalis) with ‘Worcester Gold’ bluebeard (Caryopteris x clandonensis).
Sometimes we forget that sage is a hardy perennial – and one you can nip the odd leaf from for the kitchen. Both the sage and bluebeard attract hummingbirds and bees. (That’s browneyed susan with the 3-lobed leaves.)
Spiderwort (Tradescantia virginiana) has become a little too rambunctious for Aldona, popping up here, there and everywhere.
In the main part of the front garden under the outstretched arms of the magnolia is an array of perennials with strong foliage appeal, including chartreuse Aralia cordata ‘Sun King’, upper left; variegated Solomon’s seal; ‘Gold Heart’ bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis) and various hostas. Hiding in the shadows is goatsbeard (Aruncus dioicus) with its feathery, ivory flowers.
Also hidden in the rear is a double-flowered ‘Snowflake’ oakleaf hydrangea (H. quercifolia).
Because much of June has been uncharacteristically cool, the bleeding heart still bore a few blossoms…..
…. and dainty pink columbines were still in bloom.
‘Jack Frost’ Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) had shed its tiny, blue flowers but the handsome, variegated foliage is attractive all season.
The big, starry globes of Allium cristophii are always a focal point in the June garden.
In the gravel driveway flanking the house was Aldona’s “cutting garden”: a large, galvanized stock tank, i.e. water trough planter, and assorted window-boxes and pots filled with zinnias and other annuals sprouting from seed.
The back garden is bisected by a gravel pathway….
…. and has as its charming backdrop a 1930s garage in vintage condition! It even has a bump-out for the original owner’s long sedan. Aldona has added window boxes and climbing frames for vines.
Vines blanket the fence beside a vibrant, pink sling chair and a pair of Japanese maples add a touch of elegance to the west side of the garden.
I noted a pretty Phlomis tuberosa with its lilac flowers….
…. and the first crimson blossoms of Clematis ‘Niobe’.
And at the very back of the garden, Clematis ‘Betty Corning’, that wonderful cross of C. crispa x C. viticella discovered in a garden in Albany, NY in 1932 by the plantswoman of the same name, flung her pale-purple bells here and there.
What a lovely Friday. A delightful garden, a good friend, and cake, too!
Last June, I was privileged to visit several gardens in the Denver area owned by horticultural professionals with connections to the city’s wonderful Denver Botanic Gardens. Home gardeners in the area know former Director of Horticulture Rob Proctor from his longstanding appearances on television, but he and partner David Macke have a stunning garden filled with colour, billowing borders and myriad beautiful seating areas. I wrote about their garden here. Plant collectors and alpine enthusiasts around the globe know Panayoti Kelaidis, Senior Curator and Director of Outreach for the DBG. I blogged here about the fabulous hillside garden he shares with his partner Jan Fas. Today I’m going to introduce you to the charming, plant-rich garden of DBG Curator of Native Plants and Associate Director of Horticulture Dan Johnson and his partner Tony Miles in Englewood. Let’s get off the bus and check out the heavenly “hell strip”, that bit of civic real estate formerly known as “the boulevard”. You don’t even have to go into the garden to understand that the homeowners here have some serious horticultural chops. I see penstemons, alliums, foxtail lily, columbines and so much more.
Looking the other way, there are California poppies and bearded irises… even a little pink rose!
A magenta pool of delosperma meanders through the sedum and alliums. In the background are white prickly poppies (Argemone sp).
I love a garden that bestows a gift on the street, and Dan and Tony’s garden has a spirit of ebullient generosity that makes their neighbourhood a joyous place. Verbascums, irises, alliums and opium poppies….
…..occupy a niche garden against a pretty stucco wall along the city sidewalk.
Here’s the adobe-flavoured front porch! It’s as if every cool garden accessory shop in the southwest decided to open a pop-up store here at this house in suburban Denver.
Let’s amble past the tall, blue ceramic pot with its palm, standing in its own boxwood-hedged corner….
…. and climb the steps so we can get a better look at the slumbering Medusa with her euphorbia dreadlocks and try to count all the pots on the ground and hanging from hooks….
….. containing specimens of cacti…. Hmmm, I’ve lost count. So let’s just enjoy the view and the sound of the wind-chimes and all the splashes of colour…..
…. and fine workmanship that turns a few plant hangers into a work of art.
When I visit a complex garden like this, I often wonder how much time the owners actually take to sit down and enjoy a meal or glass of wine, but this is a lovely spot…..
….. with the splash of the fountain in the container water garden nearby.
Let’s explore the front garden a little, with its mix of perennials in the shade of a big conifer…..
……and its birdhouse-toting elephants.
Our time here is so limited and we need to see the back of the garden, which is just beyond this cool arch and gate.
The back of the house is more about getting right into the garden….
…. past the corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas)….
…. and the potted agave…..
Information and communications technology is basically an extension for information technology raindogscine.com free viagra no prescription (IT). Some men ejaculate semen within one or two minutes of penetration into generic cialis in australia her genital passage. Clearly, it’s a risk to be taken cialis no prescription uk raindogscine.com seriously. However, unlike ” buy sildenafil cheap“, blueberries are cheap, readily available and able to be consumed in bulk! The beauty of blueberries in regards to maximising your sexual ability by going about as a sexual stimulator.
…. with the yuccas nearby.
What an interesting journey awaits, and we can go in a few directions. Let’s head towards the purple shed way in the back left corner.
I love this combination of foxtail lily (Eremurus) and perfectly coordinated horned poppy (probably Glaucium corniculatum, though these Denver gardeners grow some interesting glauciums).
There are several water features, big and small, in the garden. This ever-pouring bottle emptying into a shell full of marbles is so simple and lovely.
There are little points of interest on the way, like this lovely bearded iris with spiral wire sculpures….
…. that perfectly echo the airy star-of-Persia alliums (Allium cristophii).
I like this carved panel, tucked into the fence and adorned with honeysuckle.
A little further along the path, we pass a drift of orange California poppies (Eschscholzia californica) and penstemons. Note the urn water feature at the left, spilling into the small pond, which in turn spills into the larger pond below.
We come finally to the larger koi pond and its iron sculpture.
The shed walls feature artfully-screened mirrors that reflect light and the leafy garden (and some tired bloggers relaxing and enjoying the view).
There are also some very cool tentacled pots filled with succulents adorning the wall.
On the other side of the garden from the pond are beds filled with June irises, poppies and alliums and more interesting sculptures….
…. including a glass globe artfully displayed on a cool sculptural column.
One of the sad realities of a garden tour is that the day is very tightly scheduled with lots of wonderful stops along the way. If I’d had the time, I would have made my way back to Dan and Tony’s garden in better light (and with fewer of my fellow bloggers in the garden), as I did with Rob Proctor and David Macke’s garden. I feel as if I only absorbed half of what these artists have done in this colourful paradise in Englewood. But it’s time to head back to the bus, past this little shady corner filled with textural foliage plants and another sculpture.
As I walk under a conifer, I catch a flash of movement above. Looking up, I see a little wren having its lunch on the boughs.
It seems that humans aren’t the only visitors that appreciate what this lovely Colorado garden has to offer.
When I went ‘botanizing’ in Greece this autumn with the North American Rock Garden Society and guide Liberto Dario (Eleftherios Dariotis), I was delighted to be invited into a garden that evokes both the local agricultural vernacular and a romantic, rugged sense of place. Surrounded by olive-studded hillsides with the long-spined Mount Taygetus at its back and the sparkling Messenian Gulf at its feet, it represents that hard-to-achieve marriage of clean lines and pure poetry. Let’s walk down the narrow lane towards designer Katerina Georgi’s place in the Aghia Sophia area near Kardamyli.
Her home is surrounded by drystone walls which, in the Peloponnese, are a pervasive part of the landscape, defining ancient wheat terraces and stepped olive groves and marking age-old perimeters of family properties. There is just so much rock here and no need for mortar in constructing these walls, a technique called “en xiro”. Natal plum (Carissa macrocarpa) and jasmine soften the edges and perfume the air.
Come closer and you see that the drystone walls create the perfect enclosure for a raised gravel parking pad and a sexy little red car. Even here, you can see that the property – at 200 metres (656 feet) above sea level – is a series of elevation changes following the hillside from the mountain down to the seashore.
Let’s go through the lovely tile-roofed gate that frames the stepping-stone axis leading to the stone stairs of the house. The gate’s teal-blue wash is in keeping with much of the quiet blue-purple-gray-green palette in this garden, which depends more on foliage and form than flowers and colour. Nevertheless, reflecting the blues of the Ionian sea nearby, I found….
….. Ceratostigma plumbaginoides and Plumbago capensis in flower this early November day. (And when we meet her, it’s easy to see she does love blue.)
I’m quite sure most of us would take pains to line up each rectangular paver perfectly to match the next one – but how much more interesting a journey when they’re staggered ever so gently! We’ll go up the stairs to the terrace in a moment, but let’s meet Katerina Georgi first.
Born in London, she trained and worked as an interior designer for various practices before setting up her own consultancy there. After studying and working with the renowned John Brookes (1933-2018), she expanded into garden design. Since moving to Greece 26 years ago, her focus has been on the design and renovation of old, stone houses like her own and the creation of drought-tolerant Mediterranean gardens. Not surprisingly, she has played an active role in the Peloponnese Branch of the Mediterranean Garden Society here, along with her friend and our guide Liberto.
Let’s listen to him introduce Katerina and find out more from her about the garden.
As Katerina said, when she bought this house in 2009 it had no running water, sanitation or electricity. Its previous owner was a single man who lived a Spartan, solitary life: keeping goats, gathering water from a spring below the house, cooking his meals in an open fireplace and often carrying a shotgun (which did not endear him to the community). The good news? The goats had left a valuable supply of well-rotted manure which Katerina laboriously relocated to keep it from being contaminated during the building process. When I visit the guest room – the former goat shed – to have a glass of water, I am surprised to find his photo in a wall niche. Says Katerina: “I like the idea of continuity, so his photo is a link with the history of the house.”
Katerina began renovation work in the spring of 2010, excavating out the lower level of the house and using the sandstone spoil as the base for planting beds nearby and as a granular additive to poured cement to bring the paving colour and consistency closer to the stone house. You can see this treatment in the pavers of the raised terrace on the right as you enter the garden, with its small fig tree, a splash of bougainvillea……
….. and potato bush (Solanum rantonnetii).
There are carefully-chosen plants everywhere, including these grasses softening the house wall.
To the left of the gate as you enter, down a few steps and hidden behind a bower of rosemary buzzing with honey bees…..
…… and myrtle-leaved milkwort or September bush (Polygala myrtifolia)……
…… is a sheltered sitting area under a pergola with comfy teak furniture – and those stunning rock walls. Serenity is clearly the mood here. For me, the various seating areas – and there are quite a few in this garden – bring to mind Katerina’s mentor John Brookes, who himself espoused the philosophy of California landscape architect Thomas Church. “Gardens are for people.” This garden is most definitely for people, and the plants play a useful but secondary role.
It’s difficult to decide whether to climb up the house steps or head down into the garden but let’s go upstairs to the terrace around the house and get our bearings. Here we look back at the gate and driveway. I love the lushness just a few containers bring to a setting like this.
Now look south. Though I can’t make out details, I can tell you that there are a lot of olive trees on that hillside, for Kardamyli is very close to Kalamata – and if it weren’t for this region, Greek salads the world over would be very sad indeed.
Despite widespread opposition throughout the levitra for sale online U.S., Yoga Ed continues to thrive in public schools and there seems to be no definite end in sight. If it doesn’t then you have nothing to lose because the Linden Centre will gladly refund your money if you are willing to get such a life then start taking these herbal on line cialis icks.org capsules from day one. Occasionally loss of control does not mean he has the tools and the training to make the right choices thanks in no small part levitra prices to Ms. So, it is clear that ED is a sexual disorder characterized by the inability viagra ordering to attain and sustain an erection even after sexual stimulation.
Let’s walk along the terrace to the dining table. Here’s the view down the hill out over the little church of Aghia Sophia west to the sea. The church gives its name to this small village.
Summer temperatures here on the Mani Peninsula are hot so plants in pots need to be especially tough. These lovely succulents fit that bill. Gutters direct rainwater from the roof into an underground cistern; in hot periods, that water can be pumped into needy areas of the garden.
Looking down towards the garden, below, and what Katerina calls a “series of amphiteatrical steps” leading to a naturally-filtered swimming pool, we see Mediterranean plants she has selected for year-round interest and their ability to survive drought. The soil for the planting beds came largely from the level below near the old olive and fig trees. And we see how the various garden and sitting areas are informed by grid, another John Brookes tenet. As Robin Lane Fox wrote in his column eulogizing Brookes: “His drawings applied a simple ‘grid system’ to each site, basing it on proportions he found in the house or the main rooms inside. He insisted that this grid unified a garden and helped its designs to flow.”
Going down the stairs, we see another criterion Katerina looks for in plants, “…growth habit – specifically the plants’ ability to spread and soften the edges of the hard landscaping.”
To give cohesion and continuity to the design, she repeats key plants like lavender, teucrium, santolina and rosemary. Terracotta accents repeat as well.
A ‘Grassy Lassie’ aloe picks up the orange tones nicely.
Past the last cloud of blue plumbago, we’re almost down to the pool level.
I adore the hardscape treatments and the careful consideration of colour and the size of the aggregate between the pavers. They add so much to the landscape here.
Now we come to the enticing swimming pool, surrounded by figs and olive trees with the evocative Mani landscape in the background. Though it looks like a conventional pool, there is no chlorine treatment here. As Katerina says: “The pool is filtered by a skimmer (complete with its own lizard ladder), a sand filter, which fixes the phosphates, and another bio-filter which traps particles in a series of mats.” Katerina believes this system is the first of its kind in Greece.
Just another perfect detail.
The lowest terrace hews closest to the property’s origins with an old stone aloni or grain-threshing floor as the centrepiece. Says Katerina: “Clearly many years had passed since it had been used to thresh wheat and, over time, a layer of soil containing assorted bulbs had built up, so that the rock was barely visible. This excess soil was stripped off to reveal the rock, and the bulbs replanted. Thyme is gradually being introduced and this will eventually spread and fill the fissures in the bedrock.” Planting in the low part of the garden was begun in the autumn of 2014. The intention is to keep it looking natural so it blends with the landscape beyond and allows easy access for olive picking.
Viewed from the lower level, we see the aloni’s round contour mirrored in a new, curved, stone retaining wall, with new steps….
….. built on either side to connect the two levels.
And back towards the house, another perfect little seating area.
There are abundant wildflowers in spring on the lower level. When they’re in bloom, she cuts a path through them to allow circulation until they die down and the entire area can be cut back with a string-trimmer. Now, in November, cyclamen is in flower. I ask Katerina if she uses the fruit of the cactus pear tree or “fragosyka” (Opuntia ficus-indica) which we’ve seen growing wild troughout the Mani. “I don’t use the prickly pears,” she says “as I find the flavour very bland, and not worth effort of cleaning them, but one of the locals sometimes comes and picks them”. A final look around the old part of the garden with its rustic gate opening…
… and we head up the stairs. I spy a rough plank bench in a niche with French lavender nestled against it, and I think how lovely it would be to sit there on a summer’s day as the warmth of the Mani sun traps the fragrance. And I note the perfect cascading burro’s tail (Sedum morganianum) and the allium seedheads at a door, a memory from another season in a beautiful Greek garden that honours memory and celebrates place.
Perhaps this blog actually began in the 1960s in Montreal when my husband, in his 20s and fresh out of business school and in his first real job, was invited to a party given by some young women from Vancouver where he met their friend Peter Buckland. The two men would reconnect a few years later when my husband moved to Vancouver where they both worked in the financial industy. In 1974 Peter invited Doug to visit him at Boat Basin in remote Hesquiat Harbour in Clayoquot Sound on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island. Doug was invited for Peter’s “World Tidal Hockey Championship”, the fourth annual edition of a rollicking game played with friends on the sandy beach. Doug remembers meeting a little old woman who sold them eggs for breakfast. By then, Peter Buckland had known Ada Annie Lawson, aka “Cougar Annie”, for some six years, a friendship cultivated during his monthly trips to the area as an amateur prospector. Annie’s legendary life in the rainforest spanned more than 60 years and included 4 husbands (three of whom were mail order grooms she advertised for in the same paper where she ran ads for her dahlias), 11 children, a sprawling garden hacked out of mossy first-growth forest, a mail-order plant business and well-earned notoriety for being a crack shot of the cougars that terrorized her goats and whose hides brought a government bounty to supplement her sale of dahlia and gladiolus bulbs.
Cougar Annie, 1962. Photo by John Manning-Royal B.C. Museum & Archives
The award-winning 1998 book Cougar Anne’s Garden by Margaret Horsfield recounts the story of her life, from her 1888 birth in Sacramento, California to her Vancouver marriage to Scotland-born Willie Rae-Arthur, the black sheep of his family; her 1915 arrival in Hesquiat Harbour aboard SS Princess Maquinna with her opium-addicted, alcoholic husband and their three oldest children and a cow; her life as a homesteader on 117 government-deeded acres of primeval forest; her hardscrabble career as a nurserywoman and postmistress; the 1981 sale of her property to Peter Buckland; and finally her 1985 death at the age of 97. In 1987, Peter retired and moved to Boat Basin full-time.
Then again, this blog might have begun in 2016 at the Idaho Botanic Garden, when Doug relaxed with my friend, Boise garden writer Mary Ann Newcomer, while I climbed to the top of the wonderful Lewis & Clark collection for a blog I would eventually write on the garden. As they waited for me to come down, Mary Ann mentioned an award-winning story she’d written for a 2013 issue of Leaf magazine (pgs 48-59), below, about Cougar Annie’s Garden in British Columbia. Doug chuckled and told her about his friendship with Peter Buckland and that he’d actually visited the garden and met Cougar Annie more than 40 years earlier. It was a serendipitous moment, because…..
….. it led to a May 2019 Facebook message from Mary Ann asking for contact information for Peter on behalf of a California photographer named Caitlin Atkinson, who was working on a book project on wild gardens. Since we were planning an autumn trip to Vancouver Island prior to a holiday in San Francisco anyway, we did some calendar juggling and back-and-forth emailing with Peter that resulted in all four of us meeting for a night at the beautiful Long Beach Lodge in Tofino, then checking into the Atleo River Air Services office on a dock in Tofino. bright and early on October 1st
…. and finally preparing to climb into our chartered Cessna floatplane. We had been warned to keep our soft baggage to the bare minimum, and we added enough groceries for 2 days as well as a little bit of wine. We were heading to a paradise with no electricity or indoor plumbing, after all, so we knew chardonnay would be a welcome touch.
Then we were off, flying northeast on a 20-minute flight over the most spectacular scenery towards our destination 51 kilometres (32 miles) from Tofino.
The rugged west coast of Vancouver Island is the last stop on the North American continent. Here the breakers are massive, making Tofino a mecca for surfers. The temperate rainforest we were about to visit is part of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation, specifically the Hesquiat (Hesquiaht) First Nation, who have been there for some 6,000 years. Through their oral history and written Japanese records of the giant tsunami, we know that on the night of January 26, 1700, a massive 9.0 megathrust earthquake struck near Pachena Bay, not far south of Tofino. In fact, it was thought to be just the latest tectonic collision in the Cascadia Subduction Zone as the Juan de Fuca Plate pushes under the North American Plate, since it is estimated that 13 such massive earthquakes have occurred in the 6,000 years that first nations have been here. And, of course, west coasters have repeatedly been warned to prepare for the next “big one”.
In the floatplane, Mary Ann was in the middle seat with me focusing on the view….
….. while Caitlin was smiling in the back seat.
We flew over massive tracts of forest and ….
…..sandy beaches and turquoise ocean dotted with rocky islets and dark kelp beds where rivers ran into the sea.
As we approached our landing on Hesquiat Lake, I noticed the landslides on the mountain. We would learn later that these originated in previously-logged areas high above on Mt.Seghers, and during a November 2018 rainstorm had filled the lake with debris.
I made a cellphone video to remember this flight, looking out west towards the open ocean.
Peter Buckland was at the Hesquiat Lake dock waiting for us and helped take our bags and supplies up the hill to his truck parked on the gravel road.
A short drive later, he stopped and invited us to get out and walk with him on the grand tour. He would drive our bags to our overnight accommodation later. As we made our way under towering red cedars (Thuja plicata), he began by showing us his eagle woodshed, a sloped structure surmounted by the mythical bird that he designed and built.
This eagle woodshed was our first clue that though Peter had to be highly resourceful to live here with no modern conveniences, he was also an artist, a designer, a carpenter, a gardener, a chef and a quirky, funny, well-studied natural philosopher.
He pointed out the stump of a “canoe tree” that had later been felled, showing us the dugout shape at the wide base. In the lexicon of indigenous people of the west coast, this old red cedar is a culturally-modified tree (CMT).
Then he showed us the little shop building near his house featuring an in situ tree stump as its facade and door frame. All the buildings at Boat Basin, including Peter’s house, the central lodge and guest cabins, were designed by Peter, who also milled and split the lumber, primarily from old-growth windfall on the property. The larger buildings were framed by renowned west coast builder and surf legend Bruno Atkey, working with local crews and with Peter as interior finish carpenter; Peter built many of the smaller buildings himself.
Inside, we stood on a floor of mortared floor tiles made of sinuous Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia).
We made a quick pass through the house he shares with his partner, Makiko, who was away on a trip. The woodstove here was identical to the ones we’d see later in the eco-lodge on the ridge above.
Then we headed out to sit in the autumn sunshine at the beach cabin on Hesquiat Harbour. Dahlias, below, seem to have a special place here at Boat Basin because Cougar Annie sold the tubers until she was no longer able to operate her business, even peeling them by feel, rather than sight, when she became blind.
Peter’s canoe was tucked into the driftwood…..
….. and a moon snail shell (Euspira lewisii) decorated a log.
We sat nearby as Peter talked about the property, its history and geology while sipping a glass of fresh water pouring from a carved cedar flume.
Then it was time to take the boardwalk that Peter built atop Cougar Annie’s old path from the beach. I looked up and saw evergreen huckleberries (Vaccinium ovatum) creating a lacy understory to ancient cedars….
…. and down at the deer ferns and salal flanking the boardwalk.
We stopped at a massive cedar, below, and Peter pointed out how it was in line with two other huge cedars whose roots reach down to bedrock, while shorter trees around have roots in gravel sediment left behind by glaciers. “So when there’s a tsunami every five or seven hundred years, it’s not a wall of water like Japan (Fukushima), just a rising tide. The water sits for a half hour or so then it all wants to go out at once”, he says. “That’s when all the damage is done, and the trees growing in the gravel are undercut. That explains why these trees are so much older than the surrounding ones.”
Next he pointed out a fallen log acting as a nurse log for a dated 500 year-old cedar. The log fell because the tree was cut down to make a dugout canoe, evidenced by the missing portion immediately above the stump. The relationship distinguishes it as one of a few sites in North America showing physical evidence of human activity prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
Then we came to the long pergola that Peter built leading to Cougar Annie’s 5-acre garden. He designed it in a manner “to trick the eye”, making it gradually wider in the distance and altering the board size to overcome the effect of diminishing perspective. (The next day, he’d demonstrate that for me.)
When Peter bought the property from Annie, she was 93-years old, nearly blind and had not maintained the garden for a long time. He spent years using a chainsaw to reclaim the various beds and borders — like the garden below, with its driftwood whale sculpture — from the encroaching rainforest, in order to attract visitors to this heritage garden. Six lawn mowers are scattered around….
…. to mow the salal, salmonberries and Annie’s heather that now forms a rampant groundcover.
A wooden wheelbarrow was rotting into the mosses.
And there was the lovely ruin, Annie’s house, where, incredibly, she raised all those children, ran her business, and even found space for the post office counter. We would come back the next day to explore more here.
We stopped at a raised mound of heather where Annie buried three children who died as infants and two of her husbands, Willie Rae-Arthur, who drowned in 1936, and George Campbell, a reportedly abusive man who died in 1944, so the story goes, ‘while cleaning his shotgun’. Peter told us of plans by Annie’s descendants to bring her ashes up to Boat Basin next year for an interment ceremony. So confining was this life that, one by one, her children fled the homestead as soon as they were of age, except for a few sons who stayed to help their mother, one drowning tragically in Hesquiat Harbour in 1947.
Our next stop was a nearby stand of 95-year-old hemlocks. Inspired by Makiko’s tales of Japanese forests where urban people come to sweep the mossy carpets below, Peter is turning this into the Boat Basin version. As he talked, it occurred to me that our stay here in this towering rainforest perfectly embodies the Japanese concept of “forest bathing” or shinrin-yoku.
And then he smiled as he guided us towards……
Most people are scared to do this but it can save you from spending time and money looking for offline, online virus removal support options. cialis 5 mg pdxcommercial.com You can maintain erection quality for long duration and permit men developing rock-hard erections for more pleasing sexual intimacy. purchase viagra online The number of men that are seen suffering from ED to encounter symptoms of sales uk viagra depression as a result. One in 12 students experience their first sexual intercourse before age 13, and a quarter of all children (24 percent of girls and 27 percent of boys) have had sex by age 15, and many believe these estimates to be low. order cheap viagra my link
…. the Japanese-signed entrance…..
….. to his sushi table. Peter milled this astonishing 4’ wide x 5” thick x 25-foot slab out of a big yellow cedar (Cupressus nootkatensis). Imagine being invited to an omakase feast right here!
Beyond the sushi shelter is a tranquil, moss-carpeted Japanese garden, with Peter’s Shinto gates at the far end. In a 2004 article in Pacific Rim Magazine, the former curator of the David Lam Asian Garden at the University of British Columbia, the late Peter Wharton, said: “There is an Asiatic strand throughout the landscape in terms of geology and vegetation. To me it makes absolute sense both now, and even more so in the future, when I think the cultures of western Canada and the countries of the Pacific Rim will be even closer than they are now.”
As we walked on, I caught a movement in the trees and pointed my camera up, but the spotted owl had turned his head away from me, then flew quickly off.
Peter looked north to Mount Seghers on Hesquiat Lake, drawing our attention to the logging landslides on its flank. This peak played an interesting role in early exploration of the west coast of Canada, for it was noted and named on August 8, 1773 by the Spanish explorer Juan Pérez, the first European to record a sighting of Vancouver Island. From aboard his frigate Santiago, he called it Loma de San Lorenzo. Had Pérez gone ashore there rather than staying on ship and trading Spanish spoons for sea otter skins and sardines with the local Hesquiat in canoes, or had he gone ashore at Haida Gwai a few days earlier rather than greeting twenty Haida braves who paddled out in their canoes to trade gifts, there might be a very different North America now. But Juan Pérez neglected to declare the formal Act of Possession. Five years later, Captain James Cook, a veteran sea captain arrived nearby on HMS Resolution becoming the first European to sight both the east and west sides of North America. (To read more about the explorers of the west coast, including Quadra and Vancouver, have a look at The Land of Heart’s Delight: Early Maps and Charts of Vancouver Island by Michael Layland.)
Heading up towards the ridge, we stopped at Annie’s museum….
….. containing artifacts from the Boat Basin Post Office……
….. and bulb labels and Annie’s pruning saw.
As we came out into a gravel clearing, I looked down to see black bear scat filled with fruit, possibly native Pacific crabapples (Malus fusca) which turn soft in autumn.
Peter stopped at his Shake Shack to demonstrate the use of his froe or shake axe. I made a video of him making the cedar shakes that are so prevalent on the property.
This might be a good place to include a map of the property, showing where we were at that point(red arrow). Our destination now was the top of the ridge above where we would find our cabin and the central hall.
Then we set out along the boardwalk under mossy, leaning trees…..
…… past the skunk cabbages I remember so vividly from my British Columbia childhood….
…… and drifts of deer fern (Blechnum spicant).
We climbed up, up, up and I looked back down towards three staircase runs flanking a mossy rock outcrop, marvelling that this entire journey – 700 metres (2300 feet) of red cedar boardwalk – was created by one man with a vision as passionate and tenacious as the woman who had lived her for almost 70 years.
I felt small in the midst of these forest giants, standing and fallen.
Natural rises in the land were negotiated via stairways and bridges.
I looked out over the forest here and caught a glimpse of Rae Lake. Alas, I did not make it down to the lake in our time here (blame my aching knee).
I longed to have a rest in the shelter of this cedar, harvested at some point by first nations people for its bark or boards, but kept on climbing.
At one point I turned around to gaze at the miniature ecosystem that takes hold in the slowly-rotting bole of a dead red cedar.
Finally we came out into a clearing and there was the central hall, aka the lodge, aka the Temperate Rainforest Study Centre.
I loved the Boat Basin logo cutout in the heavy yellow cedar door.
And what a clever use for an old power line insulator!
Then we were inside the hall. Measuring 50′ x 50’, it is heated by a wood stove and features a well-supplied kitchen with propane appliances turned on for each visiting group during the time they are there. Flashlights, battery-powered lights and candles provide illumination.
After leading us to the top, Peter headed back down to the road to drive our supplies up by truck. We explored the hall and the outer deck and marveled at the spectacular view of the property and Hesquiat Harbour.
From here I could see red cedar, yellow cedar, amabilis fir and lodgepole pine. I’m sure there were more species in this complex forest ecosystem, so different from the monoculture second- and third-growth forests planted by the timber companies to “replace” the old-growth they cut down.
When we had our bags and groceries, Doug made us all a sandwich lunch, then we made our way up the path through the forest to our cabins. Ours was #6 – the honeymoon cabin!
There was a rusty mirror and I decided a rainforest selfie was in order.
Huckleberries and salal made me feel as if my own little garden was pure west coast!
This was the view from behind our platform bed. Not bad, eh? I quickly made up the bed with provided sheets and sleeping bag blankets and stowed our clothes on the shelf.
Further up the path from our cabin was our own “outhouse with a view”.
As I wandered back towards the central hall, I heard a familiar tapping from the forest. A hairy woodpecker was working its way up an old hemlock.
As the sky darkened, we chopped vegetables, sautéed mushrooms and barbecued steak. Peter joined us for dinner by candelight.
It had been one of the most magical of days: a very special opportunity to share a little slice of this majestic part of Canada. After washing the dishes in water heated on the woodstove, we said good night and headed up the path toward our cabins. It was time for bed.
For Tom Morrisey and Tina-May Luker, home is Lavender Hills Farm, a 25-acre property near Orillia in central Ontario, Canada.
Here, beautiful gardens….
….. and a custom-designed, bee-friendly, 2-acre tallgrass prairie meadow (seed-drilled ten years ago by their neighbors and friends Paul Jenkins and Miriam Goldberger of Wildflower Farm) supplement the natural softwood and hardwood forests and swamp that surround their farm.
Tom – who’s been a beekeeper for 40 years – tends 20 colonies at the farm, in addition to 110 colonies he manages in outyards in the region, for a total of 130 colonies. He calls himself a “sideline beekeeper”, but, of course, at one time he was a novice. He started out four decades ago working as part of the interpretive staff at a provincial park where the focus was agriculture and apple orchards. There was also a beehive under glass at the park – an observation hive – but no one on staff knew anything about bees. So Tom took a 5-day course at the University of Guelph (Ontario’s agricultural college) in order to explain to visitors the fine points about apple pollination. Later, he moved to the Orillia area and started working in adult education at a local college.
As he recalls now, he looked around at all the farms in the area and thought, “I don’t know anything about farming, but I know about beekeeping!” So he bought a couple of colonies and began keeping bees as a hobby. After working for a while in Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources, he went travelling internationally. When he returned to Canada, he met Tina-May Luker and told her he wanted a job where he could ride his bicycle to work. He knocked on the door of commercial beekeeper John Van Alten of Dutchman’s Gold Honey (and later president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association) and offered his services. Two days later, he was hired to help manage between 800-1200 hives.
When he and Tina-May moved back to the Orillia area seventeen years ago, they bought their farm and Tom began beekeeping in earnest, with 50 colonies the first year and another 50 a year later. His farm beeyard is adjacent to the tall-grass meadow and surrounded by electric fencing to deter black bears.
The remainder are situated in a half-dozen outyards within an hour’s drive, with between 10-30 hives at each location. The outyards include a commercial cranberry bog, below,……
…..and a wildflower farm. His honey house at the farm is a converted double garage several hundred feet from the beeyard and close to the driveway so the honey supers can easily be unloaded from his pickup truck after a trip to the outyards.
That brings us to one of Tom’s favorite beekeeping gadgets, and one he devised himself. “In my pickup I put a piece of plywood with a little bit of a rim around it, sort of like a picture frame, and put some loops of wire into that, and that allowed me to use straps to tie down all my frame. It’s terrific, and only cost fifty bucks for lumber.”
Tom has another favorite piece of equipment, his “Mr. Long Arm”. That’s an extendable painter’s pole at the end of which he has fashioned something like a butterfly net made of fence brace wire threaded through the seamed end of a heavy-duty plastic shopping bag. “When it’s extended its full length of twelve feet,” he says, “I can often retrieve swarms that have settled well above me in the branches near my beeyards. The bees can’t grip the smooth plastic so I just shake them out into a brood box on the ground. No more ladders for me!”
As for those swarms, he says: “You can use that whole impulse to swarm to make more colonies of bees, if you want them. If you don’t want them, then you’ve got to be very diligent to manage your colonies so they don’t get crowded.”
Tom started raising queens a few years ago and finds it an engrossing learning experience. “It’s not something a beginner usually tackles, but at some point you get enough confidence to try it, and it’s very interesting. The whole idea is to try to select bees that have the characteristics that I like working with and to give me a supply of queens early in the season when they’re very handy to have.”
In spring, his bees find willows and red maple in the plentiful swamps around one of the outyards, where thawing occurs earlier than other places. At the farm, local basswood trees (Tilia americana), below, provide a good flow and produce excellent honey about three out of five years.
Abundant staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) feeds the bees and the red fruit clusters provide the fuel for Tom’s smoker.
There’s clover and alfalfa in neighboring farm fields and birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and viper’s bugloss (Echium vulgare), below, growing wild along the country roads.
Tina-May’s borders and vegetable garden provide lots of nectar and pollen from plants like Oriental poppy (Papaver orientale), butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa), lavender (Lavandula angustifolia)……
….. and asparagus that’s gone to flower with its bright orange pollen.
In the designed meadow, masses of coreopsis give way to purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum), blazing-star (Liatris pycnostachya and L. ligulistylis). The final act, lasting from August well into October, stars the goldenrods, and Tom and Tina-May grow four species including stiff goldenrod (Solidagorigida, syn. Oligoneuron rigidum), below,
The grapefruit should be totally avoided while a person is making love. viagra professional canada Such framework gives the effect of the Kamagra, the user should be sexually stimulated to develop an erection. levitra professional samplesviagra 25mg online Unless and until you do not have a “can do” attitude bring other employees down. Obesity like issues enhances the risks of vascular disease and the signal that a heart attack is coming in the not so distant future. cheap viagra deeprootsmag.org
…. rough-leaved goldenrod (Solidago rugosa)….
…..and the very late-flowering showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa), below.
Says Tom: “Goldenrod is a good honey, very dark and somewhat strong tasting. The bees produce a bright yellow wax when they’re collecting goldenrod.” But this late flowering of the goldenrods and native asters also helps the health of the hive, as Tom explains. “There’s an expression that it’s really good to have ‘fat bees’ going into winter, meaning bees that are really well-fed. And being stimulated by a good flow of nectar and pollen allows them to make the physiological changes they need for winter. Bees in the summer, they’re flying around, they last six weeks, then they die. But in the winter, they have to sit in a hive, they don’t go out for six months, so their whole body, essentially, has to work in a different fashion.”
Most years, Tom’s colonies winter very well, with his survival rates matching or bettering the provincial average. “I make sure the bees are well fed, because that stimulates them to keep brooding up later in the season. So I feed them in the fall. And I make sure the mites are under control.” Here’s a little video* I made of Tom explaining how he checks for varroa mites. (*If you’re reading this on an android phone and cannot see the video, try switching from “mobile” to “desktop”. Not sure why that glitch occurs.)
Honey extraction begins in late July and extends well into October.
From time to time, Tom enlists the help of family members like brother-in-law Paul Campbell, seen assisting him below.
Here’s a video I made of Tom and Paul at this time in late summer moving the honey frames for extraction.
Over the years, Tom has automated his honey harvest to lighten the load, but it’s still hot, sticky, noisy work, with rock music blaring from speakers above the clatter of the hot knives of the decapping machine….
…..and the whirring of the horizontal extractor.
Here’s a video I made of the honey extraction process at Lavender Hills Farm. Because it’s hard to hear Tom over the machinery and the music, I put in a few subtitles.
Tom and Tina-May, below, are regulars at four farmers’ markets in the area….
….selling honey, mustard, honey butter, herbal soap, candles, and treats like honey straws that children love. “Farmers’ markets are a great place to get to know your customers and build a steady market for your product,” says Tom. “People want to know that you’re the beekeeper, and they want to hear stories about keeping bees, just like I’m telling stories now.”
It’s a demanding occupation with lots of tiring physical work and he gets stung “dozens of times a day, sometimes”. And the challenges are many now. “When I started,” he recalls, “There were no parasitic mites, viruses weren’t an issue, and agri-chemicals didn’t seem to be as big a factor. You could put a box of bees in the back of the farm, they’d winter all right, and you’d get a box of honey. It’s certainly changed in the past twenty years.”
One of the newest factors is small hive beetle, and though it’s been seen in the Niagara region, it hasn’t yet made it this far north. However he’s heard talk of beekeepers arranging refrigerated storage for their honey frames
But Tom is still enthralled with the whole thing. “Keeping bees is a very elemental occupation. The bees are subject to all the natural forces around them, from the plants to the weather and all the variations in between. It’s one expression of nature that you can roll up your sleeves and get right into. And that’s very enjoyable, because every year is different.”
If there’s one piece of advice he’d give to a new beekeeper, it’s this: “Get two hives, not just one, because of the chance of you either making a mistake or nature dealing you a blow that might take one of your hives, but you’ll always have another one.”
And that could be the beginning of a very long love affair.
***********
This story is a much-expanded version of an article that appeared earlier this year in a beekeeping magazine. It’s a joy to know both Tom Morrisey and Tina-May Luker, below, with me at the Gravenhurst Farmer’s Market on Lake Muskoka this summer.
