Tag Archives: gardening

Fairy Crown #10-June Blues

Posted on by
Reply

My tenth fairy crown for June 10th created at the cottage on Lake Muskoka features an array of flowers picked from my meadows and wildish garden beds. If it’s a little quiet-looking, that’s because it’s still very green in the meadows, and the plants that predominate, such as lupines and blue false indigo (Baptisia australis) are, well, solemnly blue.  Along with those two, my crown has golden Alexanders (Zizia aurea), white nannyberry flowers (Viburnum lentago), white oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum superbum) and the tiny pink flowers of black huckleberry (Gaylussacia baccata). And, in an effort to reflect the bad with the good, there are some caterpillar-chewed oak leaves, courtesy of the spongy moth (LDD or gypsy moth) caterpillars.

In fact, it’s a time of year I think of as ‘June blues’; in reality, it’s more lavender-purple, but it’s remarkable that so many plants with similar flower color bloom simultaneously. I fashioned a bouquet one June, setting the finished product in the meadows where the lupines grow. In it were the lupines as well as false blue indigo (Baptisia australis), blue flag iris (Iris versicolor), pale lilac showy penstemon (Penstemon grandiflorus) and a few of my “weeds”, oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) and buttercups (Ranunculus repens).

I grew the lupines from seed – a fairly complex operation that involved soaking the seed in warm water for 24 hours, then planting them in my sandy, acidic soil in a spot at the bottom of a slope that stays damp all the time. Fortunately, it worked and plants that were carefully transplanted and kept watered the first year have self-sown successive generations of new lupines that are very drought-tolerant. This is how they looked in the first few years, though now the big prairie species in the meadow have elbowed them to the margins. Though marketed as the eastern native wild lupine, L. perennis, my plants were in fact likely hybrids with L. polyphyllus from the west coast.  

Nevertheless, they attract numerous queen bumble bees seeking to provision their nests in spring. 

There is something so enticing about lupine flowers, so I like to focus on them with my camera to see what might be hanging out there, whether spiders….

…. or baby grasshoppers. 

Blue false indigo (Baptisia australis) is a North American native plant whose pea-like flowers resemble those of lupine. 

Bushy, it grows to about 4 feet (1.2 m) and is happy in my gravelly, sandy soil on a slope that gathers a little moisture. In autumn, the foliage turns an amazing gunmetal-gray and the seedpods shake with a noise like a rattlesnake’s tail. Its common name derives from its use by Native Americans and settlers as a substitute dye plant for true indigo (Indigofera tinctoria).  So far, it has spread very slowly nearby.

Bumble bees and many other native bees are very fond of Baptisia australis.

If I admitted to liking a plant that is on every state and province’s invasive plant list, I would get into trouble. So I’ll just say that since oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) is on every Muskoka highway margin and dots the old fields in the area, I don’t mind at all if it pops up here too.

It cannot compete with my prairie grasses and perennials in the meadows, but it likes to hang out in spots of unplanted earth and at the edge of the path in front of the cottage, along with weedy buttercups (Ranunculus repens).  There’s a childhood memory of oxeye daisies. I remember sitting in the hayfield across the street from my house in Victoria, British Columbia, pulling the white petals from the flowers as I recited “he loves me, he loves me not” – and, of course, being delighted when I sat with a sad, petal-free flower convinced the boy across the street was my Prince Charming. Buttercups were part of my childhood too; we’d hold them under each other’s chin to see if we liked butter. Yes, butter.  There were no grownups around to tell us it wasn’t the predictive ability of a flower, but the reflective quality of its shiny yellow petals to create this magic.

Sometimes the oxeye daisies pop up near the lupines.

Native hoverflies, short-tongued bees and butterflies often visit the daisies as well.   

But path-cutting through the meadows – a necessity in early summer – quickly makes compost of the weedy buttercups and oxeye daisies… until next year.

I grew my golden alexanders (Zizia aurea) from seed and though quite particular about adequate soil moisture and a location out of hot sun, they are self-sowing here and there.  A short-lived native perennial from the carrot family, they prefer moist prairies and open woodland and are a host plant for black swallowtail caterpillars.

Though nannyberry (Viburnum lentago) is native to woodland in much of the northeast, I planted it behind the cottage in a spot with moist soil where it is shaded during the hottest part of the day.

Each spring, it bears clusters of white flowers that the bees adore, producing dark-blue summer fruit that the birds eagerly consume. Multi-stemmed, it grows to about 15 feet tall (4.6 m) and 10 feet (3 m) wide with glossy leaves (you can see them on my crown) that turn bright red in autumn.

There is a tiny sprig of pink, lantern-shaped flowers sticking up from the top of my fairy crown; they belong to black huckleberry (Gaylussacia baccata), a native shrub that grows near the lakeshore where its roots are periodically saturated with water from spring floods. Bumble bees nectar in the flowers, and in August….

…… the shrubs yield dark-blue berries that are sweet, though a little seedy. 

Finally, my crown bears a few oak leaves with and chewed edges.  I made it at the beginning of June 2021, when gypsy moths, aka spongy moths or LDD moths (Lymantria dispar dispar) were beginning to consume the red and white oaks, white pines and many other plants on our hillside…..

….. including my beautiful nannyberry.

It was a devastating and historic predation; by mid-July, the woodlands in our region looked like February, so bare were the deciduous tree branches, below.  (You can read last year’s saga with the gypsy moths on my blog here.)

But abundant summer rainfall nurtured the tree roots and they leafed out again with full canopies in August, though the moths laid abundant eggs on our poor trees once again. This year, we’re in a wait-and-see mode, given our cold days this past winter and the chance that a virus might decimate their population. But I sprayed all the egg masses I could reach on the oaks and pines on our acre a week ago, using my homemade cooking-oil-and-soap spray. Fingers crossed.

But let’s not leave on a sad note.  Here is my deconstructed #10 crown, with its familiar components:  lupine, blue false indigo, oxeye daisy and black huckleberry flowers. And here’s to June!

**********

Here are all my fairy crowns to date:
#1 – Spring Awakening
#2 – Little Blossoms for Easter
#3 – The Perfume of Hyacinths
#4 – Spring Bulb Extravaganza
#5 – A Crabapple Requiem
#6 – Shady Lady
#7 – Columbines & Wild Strawberries on Lake Muskoka
#8 – Lilac, Dogwood & Alliums
#9 – Borrowed Scenery & an Azalea for Mom

Fairy Crown #9 – Borrowed Scenery & an Azalea for Mom

Posted on by
2

My crown for June 5th was simple and a little bride-like – or so my friends told me. It consists of two flowers only:  palest-pink beautybush (Kolkwitzia amabilis) and azalea ‘White Cascade’ (Rhododendron hybrid).

The Japanese have a special word for the view in the distance, the landscape framed by your property, the elements that exist outside your own space: they call it shakkei.  For most of us, our borrowed scenery is not a distant mountain range or a bucolic meadow rolling to the ocean, but the plants and trees growing in properties adjacent to our own gardens.

My shakkei is a pair of large beautybushes (Kolkwizia amabilis) belonging to my neighbour Claudette that cascade over my own fence and dominate the view along my side garden path, sometimes in late May but usually in early-mid June.

I thought Claudette — my neighbour for 39 years and a former French teacher — should be photographed for this blog with one of the progeny of her original shrub, and she kindly obliged.  Merci beaucoups, madame.

Beautybush is often called ‘old-fashioned’ but I rarely see it in residential gardens, or botanical gardens, for that matter, which is a shame because it is a majestic shrub in bloom. A member of the honeysuckle family and a cousin to weigela, it typically grows to 10 feet tall (3 m) with a vase-shaped, arching habit that you can see in my photos. Here it is in my friend Rob Proctor’s fabulous garden in Denver, which I blogged about a few years ago.

I love the story of the 1901 discovery of Kolkwitzia amabilis by legendary plant explorer Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson (1876-1930) while collecting in the mountains of Hubei, China for Veitch’s Nursery of England. The shrub was about 5 feet tall and out of bloom, though he recorded in his notes that it had spinose fruits. He collected seeds which Veitch’s grew on until, six years later, small plants labeled as “Abelia” were sent to Boston’s Arnold Arboretum where Wilson had been employed. Finally, in June 1915 the shrubs flowered for the first time. According to a story in Arnoldia, the Arboretum’s newsletter, “Their early-summer displays of pink blossoms, profusely borne on arching branches, so impressed Wilson and others that it was christened beautybush.”

Photo courtesy of Arnold Arboretum – Copyright President & Fellows of Harvard College-Arnold Arboretum Archives.

Seeing it in Claudette’s garden in full flower with swallowtail butterflies…

…..and bumble bees competing to forage in the pale-pink blossoms flecked with amber nectar guides, I cannot help agreeing with its discoverer.

Here’s a little video I made of insects enjoying the flowers:

And though I wouldn’t consider it a prime candidate for floral design, here’s a very tiny bouquet that shows the inner markings of the corolla.

Much of my love of gardening came from watching my mother tend her garden in the suburbs of Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada’s mild ‘banana belt’. She grew camellias, magnolias, flowering cherries and a collection of brilliantly-colored Japanese azaleas – and I was her willing student.  Though I garden in a much colder climate, in her honor I planted the ultra-hardy ‘Cascade’ azaleas (Rhododendron ‘Cascade’) beneath my sundeck.  It is the sole survivor of many rhododendrons I planted over the decades, most of which eventually succumbed to imperfect conditions or summer drought. But ‘Cascade’ kept ticking along, and is an important color component of this little white-and-green-hued area, along with old-fashioned, white-edged Hosta undulata var. albo-marginata.    

Here it is with my romping Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) peeking through the flowers.

The fairy crowns are coming fast and furious now – it’s a job trying to keep up! Want to see more from earlier this season?
#1 – Spring Awakening
#2 – Little Blossoms for Easter
#3 – The Perfume of Hyacinths 
#4 – Spring Bulb Extravaganza
#5 – A Crabapple Requiem
#6 – Shady Lady
#7 – Columbines & Wild Strawberries on Lake Muskoka
#8 – Lilac, Dogwood & Alliums

Fairy Crown 7 – Columbines & Wild Strawberries on Lake Muskoka

Posted on by
2

My 7th fairy crown for late May was created at our cottage on Lake Muskoka, a few hours north of Toronto. It features native wildflowers and fruit: red-flowered eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), common blue violets (Viola sororia), wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana), lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium), the poet’s narcissus (Narcissus poeticus var. recurvus) and a little weed for good measure, yellow rocketcress (Barbarea vulgaris).

If my city garden takes a somewhat naturalistic approach to gardening, it is nonetheless situated in a traditional urban neighborhood. It might be the most flowery front garden on the street, but I’ve worked to make it fit in with the lawns up and down the block by having a hedge as a side boundary; by retaining old clipped boxwood shrubs on either side of the front stairs; and by paying attention to pleasing floral succession, from the earliest snowdrops to the last asters. And my neighbors do love it. In contrast, the meadows and garden beds I created atop Precambrian bedrock at our cottage on Lake Muskoka a few hours north of Toronto are truly wild-looking – and there’s no need to fit in with any neighbors. (I wrote about gardening at the lake in my extensive 2017 blog titled ‘Muskoka Wild’.)

I don’t grow tulips there — they’re just not right for the lake — but my fairy crown for May 20th features the last daffodil of the season, the poet’s daffodil (Narcissus poeticus var. recurvus).

Daffodils grow amazingly well in the acidic, sandy soil here since they love to dry out in summer, popping up each spring amidst the big prairie grasses and forbs.

Besides the poet’s daffodil, one of my favourites is the highly scented Tazetta variety ‘Geranium’, below. 

My grandchildren have all experienced nature on Lake Muskoka. This is Oliver exploring another perfumed daffodil, ‘Fragrant Rose’.

And there is nothing more satisfying than a bouquet of perfumed daffodils on the table in April or May.

On many occasions, I’ve tucked a bunch of daffodils in my bag as I head back to the city.

Daffodils flower concurrently with our little native common blue violet, Viola sororia.

Viola sororia is native to Muskoka, as it is to much of northeast North America. It doesn’t take up a lot of room and grows wherever it pleases, but always with a little shade and moisture at the roots.  

Apart from violets, the landscape here features a large roster of native plants, including the lovely eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) that pops up in the lean, gravelly soil where many plants might struggle. I try to sow seed of this species, being careful to leave the seeds uncovered since light is necessary for germination.

But wild columbine is very particular about where it wants to put down roots, and always surprises me when I see the first, ferny leaves pop up in a new location in spring. 

Hummingbirds are said to enjoy the dainty flowers of eastern columbine, but I confess I’ve never seen them doing so.  I would have to lie in wait on rocky ground by the shore, not as much fun as sitting comfortably on my deck watching them fight over the ‘Black & Bloom’ anise sage (Salvia guaranitica).

Muskoka and wild blueberries just go together naturally, and somebody’s grandmother always made the very best wild blueberry pie in August. In our family, it was my husband’s mother, and she taught her grandkids her secret recipe, including my daughter. So I’m always happy to see the queen bumble bee pollinating those first wild blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium) flowers in May.

But just in case the chipmunks find our berries before we do, we always make a stop at the wild blueberry stand on the way to the cottage from town.

Wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana) bloom in Muskoka now, too, and on parts of my path above the lake they form a perennial groundcover so dense that I am sometimes afraid to step into their midst, lest I damage them.

But there are always enough strawberries ripening months later to make my grandkids pause on their way to the lake to sample the fruit…

…tiny, admittedly, but oh-so-sweet and juicy.

Similarly, May is when the dark-pink flowers of black huckleberry (Gaylussacia baccata) adorn the shrubs in the shade of the white pines along the lakeshore.  The deep-purple fruit will ripen in August and though somewhat seedy, it is sweet and good for eating raw or baking.

There’s a native serviceberry here at the lake too, but don’t expect to see billowing clouds of white flowers like those big species further south. Its Latin name Amelanchier humilis gives a clue as to its shape, “low, spreading serviceberry”.  Still, native andrena bees love nectaring on it in May, as do the bumble bee queens, which nonetheless must remain wary of  crab spiders looking for their own meals.

My crown’s golden jewels are flowers of the common European weed in the mustard family, yellow rocketcress (Barbarea vulgaris). In Europe, it’s called ‘rocket’ or ‘bittercress’, suggesting a strong-tasting, edible green. Indeed, my foraging friends would recommend picking the basal leaves as they emerge in spring or the rapini-like flower buds (raab) to cook in recipes.  Failing that, just wait for the mustard-yellow flowers to appear and wear them in your fairy crown!

I use my smallest vases to display these delicate blossoms of spring on the table – a welcome celebration of nature’s return to the shore of a lake that was thick with ice just weeks earlier

********

Want to see more of my Fairy Crowns? 

#1 – Spring Awakening
#2 – Little Blossoms for Easter
#3 – The Perfume of Hyacinths
#4 – Spring Bulb Extravaganza
#5 – A Crabapple Requiem
#6 – Shady Lady


Fairy Crown 1 – Spring Awakening

Posted on by
10

A fairy crown.  A flowery tiara. A chaplet.  A corona for Corona-virus times!  When I got the brilliant idea to mark another gardening season with a series of “What’s in Bloom” floral wreaths for my head, below….

…I was not inventing something new. People have actually been crowning themselves with flowers and greenery for millennia. Take Dionysus, for example, the Greek god of all things wine and too-much-fun (the Romans called him Bacchus). This is how Caravaggio imagined him, circa 1598, with a Bacchanalian wreath of grape leaves.

During a visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles a few years ago, it was a painting by the Victorian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema that made me peer a little closer. In ‘Spring’, from 1892, the artist had created a procession of celebrants wearing floral crowns wending their way through the streets of Rome.  The Getty’s website says: “It is unclear exactly which festival Alma-Tadema meant to depict, but the many references from ancient Rome all indicate a springtime celebration of fertility and abundance, perhaps most resembling Floralia, honoring Flora, goddess of flowers. British May Day traditions were also rooted in the Floralia festival and were revived during the 1800s to celebrate spring and nature in the face of rapid industrialization. On May 1, children decked themselves and their village with flowers, danced, and crowned a May Queen.”

When I was a little girl, I attended a Catholic convent in Victoria, B.C. called St. Ann’s Academy. It was on a beautiful property filled with gardens and orchards that the nuns tended… religiously. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). In my 3rd grade class photo from 1956 (!) below, you can see the massive rhododendrons behind us.  Today, St. Ann’s is a Provincial Heritage Site and ‘events venue’ with a small museum. But my point here is that every May 1st, or May Day, we girls would have a procession through the grounds carrying flowers to a statue of Mary while singing “Mary we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May”. Thinking back now (as an atheist), it still seems like the most beautiful idea, the floral crowning part at any rate. Who wouldn’t want to be “queen of the May”?

It was her own Catholic iconography that Mexican painter Frida Kahlo invoked when she painted her 1940 Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser.  From the Frida Kahlo website:  “Frida’s necklace of thorns is just a single strand, but it draws even more blood. In the background, leafless broken-off twigs profiled against an opalescent sky look like the dead twigs woven into Frida’s necklace in the self-portrait with the hummingbird. No doubt the dry white buds that mingle with the twigs (and that droop from Frida’s headdress as well) likewise refer to her desolation. Although Frida has flowers in her hair and wears the earrings in the shape of hands that Picasso gave her when she was in Paris, she looks like someone dressed for a ball for which she has no escort.  Frida’s work from the year in which she and Diego Rivera were separated demonstrates a heightened awareness of color’s capacity to drive home emotional truths.”

My photo project, on the other hand, was dedicated whimsically to the Goddess Flora…..

…. as featured in Botticelli’s famous Primavera, circa 1482, with its 500 identifiable plant species.  How many can you identify?

*****

After seeing one of my spring crowns, my son said I was ready to go to Coachella. I had to look up why that would be.  Ah…. a music festival in California! Of course, they wear flower crowns there and it’s all groovy, except, most are fake flowers! That would never do.  And I did note that some famous floral designers had designed massively ornate headdresses for garden muses to celebrate 2019 Garden Day in the UK. They were lovely, but not really what I had in mind. I just wanted to celebrate the flowering cycle for my garden by…. putting it on my head! It seemed like my inner child was whispering to me, as if Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell had made a perfectly reasonable suggestion about head-wear. So I decided to call it a ‘fairy crown’, and my first edition for April 7th features the earliest spring-bloomers in my Toronto garden, common snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis), purple and orange crocuses, bright-yellow winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis) and the sweet, hard-working little Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’.  (Some friends suggested I do the series as “how-to make fairy crowns”, which made me laugh. My crowns last as long as it takes to make a selfie, then proceed to fall apart everywhere.)

After five long months of winter, the return of spring to my Toronto garden is a glorious time.  Endorphins rise in me like sap in a maple tree. And while it’s not quite time to retire the snow shovel and winter coat, everything that’s magical about gardening lies in the weeks and months ahead. Each spring I make little bouquets of my first tiny bulbs to create that joyous feeling indoors, too. It’s often still chilly in the garden and cutting a few flowers for the kitchen table lets me explore them up close with my camera – and my nose!  And it always starts with sweet-scented snowdrops.  I made this image for a project a long time ago, using a crystal shot glass from an antique “gentleman’s travelling bar” that my father-in-law gave to my husband.  The caption is dramatic, but not far off reality. By late March, the gardener is parched for beauty; spring lets us drink it in.

But spring teases in our part of the world, thus the common name for snowdrops.

For the past decade, I’ve kept track of the date of the first snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) to bloom in my garden with the earliest appearance being March 7, 2012 and the latest April 16, 2014.  That’s a difference of almost 6 weeks, illustrating the vagaries of winter in the northeast. No matter when they bloom, there’s still a chance that a late snowfall will cause them to close their petals and serve as an appropriate reminder as to how they earned their common name. Snowdrops are easy to grow from a small bulb that should be planted in autumn as soon as they become available, since they deteriorate quickly. But I’ve moved flowering clumps around in spring with great success, something that can’t be easily done with other bulbs.  They prefer humus-rich soil in part shade, but like to dry out in summer.

But when they flower with all their sweet-scented goodness after the dearth of winter, there is nothing like a pristine clump of snowdrops, which is why the gardening world has so many “galanthophiles” who grow, rave about and trade various species and cultivars of snowdrops.

Though I appreciate that kind of obsession, for me the common snowdrop is perfection, though you must either get down on your knees or pluck a few for a nosegay to truly appreciate the shimmering, white flowers with their green-edged inner tepals. The bonus? They emit a delicate perfume – much easier to savor in a bouquet than in the garden.    

Within a few days of the snowdrops opening, the silken, purple “Tommy” crocuses (Crocus tomassinianus) appear. Here they’re joined by an early showing of the Dutch hybrid crocus ‘Pickwick’ whose fellow hybrids usually appear a week or so later.

A few days of spring warmth and sunshine encourage all the crocuses into bloom together. When that happens, my front garden looks like the Easter bunny arrived to sprinkle crocuses, instead of hiding eggs – and it becomes a favourite spot for passersby to click photos. Because my front garden is never ‘tidied’ much in autumn, it’s a trick to get out and cut back the old stems of the prairie perennials from last year while the soil is still frozen so the little bulbs can shine. But they always come up through scattered leaf mulch and stubble – all good food for the earthworms and soil organisms.

Here are four of the Dutch hybrid crocuses, their names lost in the mists of time.  When I originally planted the crocus bulbs en masse in the 1990s, many were dug up immediately by squirrels. In fact, a few days later, the garden looked like the craters of the moon. Now I immediately mulch bulb plantings with leaves (even getting some from my neighbours’ boulevards) and water them down so the squirrels don’t have a ‘nose’ for the freshly cultivated soil.

When it’s warm enough to fly (15C-59F), honey bees seek out the pollen-rich crocus flowers.  They’re especially fond of Crocus x luteus ‘Golden Yellow’.

Look at this happy vignette, with crocuses joined by Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’.   

Of all the spring irises I’ve tried and lost, this little iris is a true survivor, shrugging off harsh winters and late snowfalls to show off her indigo-striped, pale-blue flowers alongside her crocus companions. Hardy, easy and beautiful, she makes good-sized clumps over the years and is an attractive cut flower in a tiny vase. A small caveat: she does tend to get a virus that causes blue splotches on her petals and is transmissible to other members of the iris family. But since I have none growing near her, I don’t bother about it.

Gardeners in the northeast are accustomed to spring sputtering forward slowly and occasionally backtracking to winter (like this year). It’s been known to happen in my garden, and I shared the rhyme below on my Facebook page on April 3, 2016.

There once was an iris named Kate
Who sulked when winter stayed late:
“I’m tired of the cold and this foul April snow.
Had I known, I’d have remained well below!”

It happens to crocuses, too, but they have adapted to cold, snowy weather by keeping their flowers closed and their pollen protected.

Winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis), those lemon-yellow flowers in my fairy crown, have evolved a similar adaption to protect their pollen from inclement weather, as you see below.

The odd snowflake aside, spring has now sprung in my garden and the robins are seeking out earthworms once again.

And if you don’t feel inclined to make your own fairy crown, you can always cut a few stems of these tiny treasures to bring indoors and appreciate at nose level.  Spring is here at last!

Under Western Skies…. and Facebook

Posted on by
8

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….

The study by University of Texas Health Science Center levitra 40mg deeprootsmag.org (Houston), has found that men consuming greater caffeine every day have higher sperm checks and perform preferable sexually over men who don’t. 3. It hampers the ability of enzymes PDE5 to suppress the chemicals causing erection problem. levitra online find this The persons having less coupling capacity, they also can boost your immune system and fight http://deeprootsmag.org/2014/06/10/surf-verse-2014/ purchase viagra in canada infection. Also when Sildenafil is procured from leading online stores, your privacy is given a viagra pfizer 25mg great priority.

…. 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!