Tag Archives: gardening

Up on the Roof

Posted on by
4

I adore Carole King. And I admit that I saw ‘Beautiful: The Carole King Musical’ three times: twice on Broadway (2014, 2015) and once in Toronto (2017). My favourite versions were the two that featured Canadian actor Chilina Kennedy, below, who played Carole to perfection from her teenage years in the 1960s in New York City as a young wife, mother and co-writer of hit pop songs, to the 1970s in Los Angeles and her own mega-hit album Tapestry (You’ve Got a Friend, It’s Too Late, I Feel the Earth Move, etc.)

Chilina Kennedy as Carole King in the Broadway production of ‘Beautiful – The Carole King Musical’

Like all the songs from Carole’s song-writing partnership with and marriage to Gerry Goffin (when she was 17 and he was 20), below, Carole wrote the music and Gerry penned the lyrics. From that partnership in New York’s iconic Brill Building at 1619 Broadway came songs like Take Good Care of my Baby (1961 – Bobby Vee), Will You Love me Tomorrow (1962 – The Shirelles), The Loco-Motion (1962 – Little Eva), It Might as Well Rain Until September (1962 – Carole King and Bobby Vee), Go Away Little Girl (1962 – Steve Lawrence), One Fine Day (1963 – The Chiffons), I’m Into Something Good (1964 – Herman’s Hermits), Don’t Bring Me Down (1966 – The Animals), (You Make me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (1967 – Aretha Franklin) and Pleasant Valley Sunday (1967 – The Monkees). In 1962, Carole also wrote the music for The Everly Brothers’ Crying in the Rain with a different lyricist.

Carole King and Gerry Goffin in the Brill Building, New York

One of my favourite songs from Carole King’s long career – and the one that features in this 19th #mysongscapes blog – is ‘Up on the Roof’, written in 1962 for The Drifters, below. In a Rolling Stone story about the song, Gerry Goffin recalled, “Appropriately enough, the song was born among the rat-race noise of a crowded city street.” Carole came up with the melody in the car. Gerry thought it could be about a place to be alone. Carole ventured ‘My secret place’, the song’s original title. But in time it was changed to ‘Up on the Roof’.

When Carole King was celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honours in 2015 alongside President Barack and Michelle Obama, her friend James Taylor sang the song for her. (I saw Carole and James in Seattle singing the song in May 2010 during their Troubadour Tour, one of the best concerts ever).

But perhaps my favourite version of ‘Up on the Roof ‘ is this 1982 rendition by Toronto’s a cappella singing group The Nylons. I had them on cassette tapes in the 1980s, saw them in concert and knew many of their songs off by heart, singing them at the top of my lungs around the house when my kids were little. The lead singer here with the beautiful tenor is Marc Connors; tragically, within a few years, he would die of HIV- AIDS. So for me, it’s bittersweet to watch him and the three others celebrate that special place to get away from ‘the rat-race noise’ in such a proudly Canadian way.

UP ON THE ROOF (Gerry Goffin & Carole King, 1962, Screen Gems – EMI)

When this old world starts getting me down
And people are just too much for me to face
I climb way up to the top of the stairs
And all my cares just drift right into space

On the roof, it’s peaceful as can be
And there the world below can’t bother me

Let me tell you now
When I come home feeling tired and beat
I go up where the air is fresh and sweet
I get far away from the hustling crowd
And all that rat race noise down in the street

On the roof’s the only place I know
Where you just have to wish to make it so
Let’s go up on the roof

At night the stars put on a show for free
And darling you can share it all with me
I keep on telling you

Right smack dab in the middle of town
I’ve found a paradise that’s trouble proof
So if this world starts getting you down
There’s room enough for two , up on the roof
Up on the roof, oh come on, baby
Everything is all right
Everything is all right
Up on the roof

******

Up on the Roof in the Garden

All right. Time to finish up my Carole King love-in and move on to the garden side of my blog. If there was a rooftop that I looked at and thought, “Ah, this is a lovely place to get away from the rat-race below,” it was Clarissa Morawski’s roof deck garden in Toronto. I photographed it for a book series I was illustrating in the mid-90s. At the time, Clarissa’s career was all about the three R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. (Today she’s a consultant in waste minimization). And her rooftop was the perfect illustration of the three R’s. There was an actual main-sail for a sunshade; wooden crates filled with veggies and herbs; and bushel baskets filled with flowers.

While a rooftop deck with planters is a relatively conventional gardening scenario and has been around for a long time, an actual “green roof” is a bigger technological endeavor, one that North America was slow to pick up on, compared to Europe. Green roofs buffer rain water, cleanse the air and cool ambient temperatures, acting as natural air-conditioning for buildings, thus saving energy, both in winter and summer. They’re also beautiful and bring wildlife and pollinators to urban spaces. When we arrived in Amsterdam in 1999, I snapped a shot of the sedum-planted green roof spanning the departure terminal at the Schiphol Airport; at the time it was more than ten years old. The roof was recently redone by a Massachusetts firm, retrofitted with solar panels and now features a hardy succulent plant mix called “Sedum Carpet’ especially formulated for green roofs.

Later in that 1999 trip to the Netherlands, we visited a town called Alphen aan den Rijn to see an experimental Dutch model community called Ecolonia. The buildings utilized sustainable construction material; green roof technology was used, below; wetlands were restored and made a focus and a central storm retention pond became a feature. Conceived by Lucien Kroll of Belgium, it was similar in concept to the New Urbanism movement in North America.

There’s a green roof in my neighbourhood in Toronto, atop the workshop of the house owner and adjacent to the art studio used by his wife. Designed by architect David Lieberman, I photographed it in 1998 as it was being installed by my friend Terry McGlade, then managing his own green roof company called Gardens in the Sky, now part of Flynn Canada. A few years later, I came back and nervously climbed up the ladder so I could stand on the roof and photograph the now-mature plants and the resident cat. Then I wrote and illustrated a story on the roof for the magazine Gardening Life, below. The photos after that show the steps in its creation (though there are now modular components that take the place of the Styrofoam).

The roof was covered with a waterproof, single-ply EPDM membrane surrounded by a 30 cm (12 inch) high metal parapet. The perforated drainage tube would be laid around the perimeter and connected on overflow pipe.  Note that the white things on the outer wall that look like portholes are actually vents leading out from an airspace between the roof and the insulated ceiling of the workshop below, designed to keep the soil frozen in winter and the plants in dormancy.

Then an 8-10 cm (3-4 inch) layer of Styrofoam pellets was distributed, covered by filter cloth to prevent plant roots and soil from entering the drainage area.

Next, a 15-23 cm (6-9 inch) layer of lightweight, compost-rich, soilless mix was spread on and watered thoroughly.

Then a palette of low-maintence hardy perennials was planted: sedums, perennial geraniums, strawberries, phlox, thyme, calamagrostis, liatris, echinacea. Hostas were planted on the shady east side.

A few years later, I returned to check out the plants. The family cat eyed me with interest.  Everything did well except the echinacea, which seems to prefer sandier soil.

From a little flagstone path on the rooftop, I could look down on the ground-level deck below. I have learned that this rooftop had to be redone in the past year or so, which means it had a 20-year life. Presumably newer technologies would have extended that lifetime.

The sloping green roof atop the Dembroski Centre for Horticulture at the Toronto Botanical Garden was planted in 2005 by Terry McGlade. At slightly more than 2400 square feet, it was a critical factor in the TBG gaining a Silver LEED designation for the building itself. The plants used on the initial roof planting are a combination of drought-tolerant sedum species: Sedum album, S. sexangulare, S. spurium and S. kamtschaticum.

The flat part of the TBG’s green roof features native wildflowers such as penstemons, coreopsis and other meadow-like, drought-tolerant perennials.

The TBG also has a small straw-bale building with a sloping green roof.

It features prairie grasses, coreopsis (C. lanceolata), columbines (Aquilegia canadensis), hairy penstemon (P. hirsutus) and…

It also has more antioxidants devensec.com pfizer viagra price than red wine but for the best hope of a night of raised libidos and hot passion, try combining both together. This way an erection is experienced during treatment, so it is better to stay indoors soon after consuming the pill. generic viagra wholesale One may feel headache, levitra brand online see over here upset stomach, flushing or diarrhea after taking the drug. December 19, 2015: Sonia and Rahul cialis samples online Gandhi to appear in court and pleaded not guilty.

…. the occasional nesting goose.

I photographed the 3rd floor rooftop herb garden of the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel in Vancouver back in 2010 for a story I was proposing on urban beekeeping.

I loved walking through the garden, which evidently saved the kitchen thousands of dollars each year in herb costs.

I was able to sample those herbs in a honey-themed lunch served to me by the Fairmont.

But my real interest in the Fairmont’s green roof was the apiary set in a miniature meadow overlooking Vancouver’s Coal Harbour. At the time, it featured beautiful hives hand-painted by students at Emily Carr College of Art. Alas, the meadow also harboured ground nests of yellow-jacket wasps that frightened guests (unlike the honey bees) so the following year the meadow was removed and replaced with a conventional garden that was not nearly so appealing. Note the Vancouver Convention Centre across the street; I’ll get to that green roof in a minute.

I did a big photo shoot of Graeme Evans, the hotel’s beekeeper, who at the time was also Head of Housekeeping. He had proposed the apiary to the Fairmont chain and was a natural with the bees, never wearing protective gear as he checked the frames or harvested honey.

The resulting story, which also featured profiles of beekeepers in Chicago and Atlanta, was published in a 2012 edition of Organic Gardening magazine. Alas, like a lot of other gardening magazines, it is no longer around. (Yes, that’s a queen bee surrounded by her worker nurse bees in my photo of a brood frame from the hives at the hotel.)

Back to the convention centre. At the time, this was the largest green roof in North America, at 6 acres (2.4 hectares). It was planted with 400,000 native British Columbia plants from 25 species.  To achieve a west coast meadow look, there were 40,000 bulbs, including nodding onion (Allium cernuum) and camas (Camassia quamash) plus 128 kilograms of flower and grass seed, including Idaho fescue (Festuca idahoensis), red fescue (F. rubra) and sheep fescue (F. vulgaris). As well, 80,000 sedums were planted on the hottest part of the roof on the west side. It has become a haven for nesting birds and a rich foraging site for pollinator insects.

The Hugh Garner Housing Cooperative green roof in Toronto was featured on a Garden Bloggers’ Fling tour in 2015. The South Roof, then 5 years old, featured a combination of raised planter boxes and actual green roof technology beds to produce a beautiful space for residents, with pergolas and community garden space.

There was a photo display showing the engineering processes used to build the roof. The specifications from the project’s web page include a “Cold Applied Rubber roofing membrane with ILD leak detection system; polyethylene sheet root barrier….

…. 4″ extruded polystyrene rigid insulation; 2″ Pontarolo storm water reservoir; filter cloth; and ballast consisting of reused concrete pavers, wood decks, planters and planting beds (ranging from 6″ – 18″ in depth).”

Interestingly, the architect on the Hugh Garner project was Monica Kuhn, a founding member of Toronto’s Rooftop Gardens Resource Group. I photographed her own little Cabbagetown rooftop way back in the mid-90s for my newspaper column. I remember that she cautioned me to be careful because she didn’t have her railings up yet!

I wrote a blog a few years ago about Siri Luckow’s lovely garden in Toronto. Her garage features a green roof and while touring the garden with fellow bloggers, we climbed a ladder, as my friend Sara Katz is doing below…..

…. to photograph the textural meadow that grows on the roof.

During that bloggers’ fling, we also toured gardens on Ward’s Island in Toronto and I liked the effort put into the miniature green roof on this toolshed.

In 2017, a sodden morning of rain didn’t deter these media folks previewing the Toronto Botanical Garden’s garden tour route from trying to get a better view of the green roof over a garage at one of the gardens.

I found my telephoto lens worked well to take a closer look. I see lots of bearded irises up there!

In 2018, during a symposium in Chicago with my Garden Communicators (Gardencomm) group in Chicago, I was privileged to visit a 25,000-square-foot rooftop farm at McCormick Place West,  run by the Windy City Harvest program out of Chicago Botanic Garden.

In this garden, apprenticeship graduates from the program work with Savor (the building’s food service operators) to focus on rare heirloom crop production and rooftop-appropriate varieties of vegetables, native fruits, herbs, hops and edible flowers. The rooftop farm features microgreens production, honey bee hives and vermicompost bins.

Some of the Windy City Harvest produce also goes to a local farmers’ market.

I’ll end my musings on ‘Up on the Roof’ with one of the most famous green roofs in North America – though many visitors might not guess that Chicago’s beautiful Lurie Garden and Millennium Park are actually “situated over a network of underground parking garages, pedways, and commuter electric train lines”. As the Lurie website says, “This unique engineering and location situation presents special, but manageable, plant care challenges. Visitors are often surprised by the presence of large, mature trees in Lurie Garden given its relatively shallow soil depth and construction as a rooftop garden. Horticulturalists at the garden have become highly skilled in managing plant growth and development in the challenging environment of a rooftop garden.”

I’ve blogged about the Lurie and would invite you to have a look at this fabulous urban meadow designed by Piet Oudolf.

******

This is the 19th blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading it, have a look at the others.  And please leave a comment if you enjoyed any of them.

  1. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’;
  2. Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography;
  3. Vietnam and Songs of Protest;
  4. Galway Bay and memories of my grandfather and Ireland;
  5. Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme;
  6. The John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.
  7. Gordon Lightfoot for a Snow Day
  8. Madame George by Van Morrison – my favourite song in the world
  9. Brown Eyed Girl(s) – Van Morrison’s classic and my black-eyed susans
  10. Raindrops – on flowers and in my gardens
  11. Miss Rumphius and the Lupines
  12. Bring me Little Water – on water in the garden
  13. Amsterdam… Spring Sunshine – a Dutch travelogue and a brilliant Broadway play
  14. Both Sides Now – a reflection on clouds and Joni Mitchell
  15. Crimson & Clover and Other Legumes – a love letter to the pea family, Fabaceae
  16. Mexico – James Taylor serenades in my travelogue of a decade of trips to Mexico
  17. Crystal Blue Persuasion – blue flowers in the garden
  18. My Bonny – remembering the late Laura Smith (and my dad)

Bring Me Little Water

Posted on by
12

Water in the garden.  What garden doesn’t benefit from the sound of water, the reflective qualities of water, the ability of water to create a shimmering focus in any scene? Monet was a master at water in the garden; in fact, he was obsessed with trying to capture the light as it played on the water where he grew his famous water lilies. I watched the light play on his garden when I visited one spring.

And water, of course, brings an abundance of wildlife to drink and bathe.  Even a simple birdbath adds life to the garden. (The one below was custom-made for the gardener.)

My friend Marnie Wright has a birdbath in her garden near a bench where, if she’s quiet, she can watch them bathe.

Her birdbath is a little piece of art in itself.

But Marnie also has a meandering pond where she can indulge her love of aquatic plants and moisture-loving marginals. Have a look at my blog on Marnie’s beautiful garden in Bracebridge, Ontario in the Muskoka region near my own cottage.

 

Visiting public gardens can be inspiring for ideas on water gardens. At Chanticleer Garden in Wayne, PA (I wrote a 2-part blog on this, my favourite North American garden), the pond garden is large, with complex plantings. Here you see one side through a scrim of alliums….

……. and here through variegated water iris, I. laevigata ‘Variegata’…..

….. and then looking right into the pond at the water lilies (Nymphaea) and the pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata) on the far side.

Chanticleer’s ponds meander through a damp area with moisture-loving primulas and carnivorous plants just beyond; but the planting in the other direction is inspiring and very floriferous.

Near Chanticleer’s entrance, the Teacup Garden features a different take on water gardening…. a simple, sophisticated, overflowing “teacup” fountain.

At New York Botanical Garden, the Native Plants Garden makes extensive use of water, and moisture-loving plants like Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium) and cardinal plant (Lobelia cardinalis).  If you want to read more about this wonderful garden in the Bronx, have a look at my blog.

At Wave Hill in the Bronx, it’s always fun to see the formal pool with its elegant lotuses.  I included this gorgeous water feature in my blog on Wave Hill.

At New York’s fabulous High Line, water is introduced in a subtle way in the Scrim water feature. Moisture-loving plants flank this artificial wetland, where visitors – especially children – are known to cool their feet on hot summer days.

When I visited the Missouri Botanical Garden one incredibly hot July day, I enjoyed seeing Dale Chihuly’s blown glass ‘Walla Walla onions’ floating on the pond surface beside the large, platter-like leaves of the Victoria water lilies (Victoria amazonica).

At Filoli near San Francisco, formality dictates the perfect axis of the ornamental pools that lead the eye across the next garden room to the spectacular green hills in the mist beyond.

In my visits to Portland’s serene Japanese Garden, I’ve been impressed with the variety of water features, from the very large, below, to the small water basins. These all represent specific symbolism in Japanese landscape design.

This is the yatsuhashi zig-zag bridge, meant to deter the evil spirits that might follow you.

After my last visit to the Japanese Garden in 2018, I wrote a blog that included its wonderful water features. But you can see all of them here in my accompanying video, including the noisy shishi-odoshi or “deer scarer”.

At Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden, a zig-zag bridge leads across an arm of the pond to the impressive Southern Hemisphere collections.

My favourite part of The Butchart Gardens just outside Victoria, B.C. in the sunken Japanese garden. Here is a wealth of water features, including a stone basin and bamboo spout fountain in a shady grotto…..

…. and a shishi-odoshi “deer-scarer” fountain that clacks regularly as the bamboo spout fills with water…..

…..and a few serene ponds, including this small one with a waterfall.

At Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Hillwood Estate in Virginia, the Japanese garden arrayed down a hillside features several water features, including these dancing water spouts.

On a tour of the D.C. area, I admired this multi-spouted fountain in the garden of Debbie Friedman, principal of Bethesda Garden Design.

Not far away was the garden of my friend Barbara Katz, with its impressive hillside waterfall and lily pond, below. I wrote a blog about Barbara and Howard’s beautiful garden.

In Austin, Texas, I was enchanted with the wonderful garden of Jenny and David Stocker. In one of their ‘garden rooms’, a galvanized stock tank is used to grow aquatic plants.

But their swimming pool almost seems to be a water feature in itself, given the flowery landscape flanking it.  How wonderful it would be to swim lengths beside all those blossoms! I wrote a blog about the Stocker garden.

Fun-loving Lucinda Hutson might know more about tequila than anyone else in North America! The Austin garden of the woman who wrote the best-selling book Viva Tequila is a colourful trip into the fantastic, indoors and out! Naturally, Lucinda got her very own blog.   Her little pond and its trickling fountain occupy a corner of a siren-themed patio, below.

A sophisticated Austin garden called Mirador featured a potager with a sleek concrete water feature. You can see more of this stunning Texas landscape in my blog.

Garden writer Pam Penick also features a stock tank in her garden (yes, I wrote a blog on Pam’s garden too) but she’s added a little faucet fountain to enjoy the trickle of water and keep the tank aerated.

Pam also has a pretty blue urn fountain, one of many blue touches in her Austin landscape.  It requires a receptacle below the rocks so the water can re-circulate, but is a less labour-intensive alternative to a pond.

My Denver friend and plantsman-extraordinaire Panayoti Kelaidis has a rectangular pond abutting his plant-filled patio at the base of a rock wall filled with alpine plants. Naturally, the pond features myriad plants as well!  I wrote about Panayoti’s garden in a June blog last year.

Although Tatiana Maxwell’s stunning Boulder CO garden featured a large pond, I loved this little touch of water using two overflowing bowls. This also utilizes a below-grade receptacle to circulate the water.

There were a few water features in the Fort Collins, CO garden of Carol and Randall Shinn, but I especially liked this Corten-and-concrete wall fountain because it’s such a good example of how to bring the splash of water into a restricted space. You can read my blog about the Shinn garden here.

In Rob Proctor and Dave Macke’s exquisite Denver garden, a little faucet fountain poured into a watering can, below. That was just one feature of hundreds of perfect vignettes in this well-known garden about which I blogged last year.

In the colourful, art-filled Englewood, Colorado garden of Dan Johnson (of the Denver Botanic Garden) and Tony Miles, there were a few brilliant touches of water. I adored this container water garden surrounded by a large plant collection…..

…. and look at this tiny little gesture, below. Anyone could do this, with a small pump and some ingenuity! (Okay, maybe some glass cutters and some silicone, too….)

Chicago Botanic Garden’s Evening Island is a landscape surrounded by lake, so water is always part of the view here. I made a video of my lovely August morning on Evening Island a few years ago.

Garden designer Kellie O’Brien’s lion’s head wall fountain in Hinsdale, near Chicago.

Further afield, my 2018 garden tour of the north and south islands of New Zealand offered lots of design inspiration. Naturally, the spectacular pond of Di and Ian Mackenzie’s Akaunui (my blog on their garden is here) might be a little ambitious for most of us, but it does point out the beauty of the reflective quality of a large body of water.

In the Cloudy Bay area of Marlborough, Rosa Davison’s large pond at Paripuma (see my blog here) has no reflection at all – but then she installed it as a sanctuary for grey ducks which, of course, appreciate all the duckweed on the surface!

At Upton Oaks near Blenheim, which I blogged about in 2018, Sue Monahan carefully sculpted a circular hedge to echo the contour of her formal lily pool.

The Giant’s House, Josie Martin‘s otherworldly Akaroa garden is filled with her mosaic sculpture (see my blog here) and water is used cleverly in a few places. But I loved this water feature surrounded by “mosaic swimmers”.

At Penny and Rowan Wiggins’s garden The Paddocks  near Auckland, a simple sphere sculpture burbled with the splash of water. There are many such fountains available in a range of sizes and styles.

Back in Canada, this large reflecting pool at the Montreal Botanical Garden features a collection of stainless steel “island containers” planted with moisture-loving flora.

At the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, Ontario, the reflecting pools also feature aquatic flora, but planted in containers below the surface.

At the residential level, I’ve stayed at James and Virginia Mainprize’s pretty bed-and-breakfast in Niagara-on-the-Lake where I admired their little water garden, which was nicely integrated into their border.

Garden tours are excellent sources of design inspiration and this Cabbagetown garden in Toronto inspired me with its Japanese-themed bamboo and copper spouts spilling into a small pond. However, the mechanics here might be a little beyond my skill level!

And I thought this wall fountain designed by Toronto’s Kim Price was simply stunning. What a way to take a garage wall and turn it into a thing of beauty!

Speaking of vertical wall fountains, the Toronto Botanical Garden where I spend a lot of time photographing has one of the coolest water walls. Designed by PMA Landscape Architects , it offers the element of water without using a lot of space.

No matter what season…..

….. it adds a lovely splash to the entrance courtyard at the TBG.

On the Westview Terrace behind the front part of the Toronto Botanical Garden’s building, a lively focal point is the diagonal water channel that begins at a waterfall tucked between two raised plantings abutting the rear portion of the building. A stone slab bridge lets visitors cross the channel.

For parties at the TBG, they’ve been known to move containers into the channel.

In autumn, it’s particularly lovely when the grasses are in flower and the shrubs turn colour. That’s Indigofera kirilowii with the bright yellow leaves on the right.

Oh! I wonder how this old photo of my daughter and her groom got in here?  (Didn’t they look lovely? They’ve got three kids now…)

So… that brings me to my own pond. It’s pretty old now. I dug it myself in 1987, acquiring a shoulder injury that required nerve surgery along the way! But it continues to be the main focal point in my garden as it visually anchors the dining patio.

It has been rebuilt once after the liner failed.

At that time, I added the boulder fountain, drilled through to admit the PVC tubing leading from the pump.

It looked pretty and worked for a few years, but the pump eventually failed and was replaced by another pump, which also failed. Do you sense my theme?  Ponds like this are not low-maintenance.

In fact, if you’re not going to pay a pond service company to clean out all the leaves and debris that a pond like mine collects each season – as well as replacing the rocks that fall in during the freeze and thaw periods – you’ll have to do it yourself.  And from personal experience (those boots are mine), it’s not a job for the faint of heart.

Even though the only book I’ve written was called Water in the Garden, on behalf of Canadian Gardening magazine (1995), I would recommend thinking small on water features.

But I will add that, despite the work involved in keeping it somewhat clean-looking, my pond pays me back in spades on that spring or summer morning when I look out and see the birds taking turns to bathe in it.  Because the cardinals and robins simply don’t care how messy it is.

*****

Okay, let’s get to the title of my blog  How would someone “Bring me little water”? Maybe as the waiter did in the rainforest in Costa Rica, with a sweet stick insect sticking to the side?

El Remanso Lodge; Osa Peninsula; Costa Rica

Or maybe someone would bring me a little water in song. For me, the ideal person to do that would be Moira Smiley. A singer-songwriter, composer and teacher with her own group called VOCA, I would want her to use her famed body percussion (clapping, stomping, bodybeats) to “bring me little water”, as she did with these young people at the Los Angeles Choral Workshop, teaching her own version of the 1936 song composed by Huddie Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly (1888-1949).

And here she is with her own singers doing her official version of “Silvy”.

If you want to learn how to do body percussion, Moira will teach it to you, too!

When I was 12, my mother took me to see Harry Belafonte in Vancouver. He sang ‘Sylvie’ as a plea from an incarcerated man to his lover, the lyrics lamenting that Sylvie “brought me nearly every damn thing, but she didn’t bring the jailhouse key”. Here is Harry Belafonte singing the song from his Live at Carnegie Hall album that very same year.

And here’s the very rustic inspiration by Lead Belly himself.  When he wasn’t in jail or on drugs, Ledbetter sang to earn his money. He said ‘Sylvie’ was inspired by his farmer uncle calling for his wife to bring him water out to the hot fields.

BRING ME LITTLE WATER SILVy  (Moira Smiley, orig.Huddie Ledbetter, Lead Belly)

Bring me little water, Silvy

The other 12 states are “safe states” which receive no attention from the nominees. viagra buy Many of the erectile dysfunction (ED) medicines, like price sildenafil only fight the symptoms of ED and do not work at all. It is also convenient to choose the Right iPhone Repair Service Provider? These days, there are several iPhone repair service providers in New York as well as across the globe but the customers need to ensure which one will suit them and be friendlier to their pocket. http://amerikabulteni.com/2014/12/11/bir-ulusal-guvenlik-yasa-paketi-patriot-act/ canadian cialis online Did you know that probably the biggest cause of impotence. cialis online online

Bring me little water now
Bring me little water, Silvy
Every little once in a while
Bring it in a bucket, Silvy
Bring it in a bucket now
Bring it in a bucket, Silvy
Every little once in a while
Silvie come a runnin’
Bucket in my hand
I will bring a little water
Fast as I can
Bring me little water, Silvy
Bring me little water now
Bring me little water, Silvy
Every little once in a while
Can’t you see me coming?
Can’t you see me now?
I will bring you little water
Every little once in a while 
Every little once in a while
Every little once in a while
Every little once in a while

*********

This is the 12th blog (marathon?) in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others beginning with

  1. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’;
  2. Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography;
  3. Vietnam and Songs of Protest;
  4. Galway Bay and memories of my grandfather and Ireland;
  5. Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme;
  6. The John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.
  7. Gordon Lightfoot for a Snow Day
  8. Madame George by Van Morrison – my favourite song in the world
  9. Brown Eyed Girl(s) – Van Morrison’s classic and my black-eyed susans
  10. Raindrops – on flowers and in my gardens
  11. Miss Rumphius and the Lupines

If you enjoyed this blog, please feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.

Penstemon Envy

Posted on by
10

I’ve just returned home from Denver (and the annual edition of my Garden Bloggers’ Fling) with a severe case of ineedmore. There’s not really a cure for this, except to acknowledge that “I need more penstemons” is a real affliction, especially in June. Especially after being in Colorado, where so many penstemons are native.  I felt it stirring at the High Plains Environmental Center in Fort Collins, where red-flowered scarlet bugler (P. barbatus) was consorting wtih purplish Rocky Mountain penstemon (Penstemon strictus) and native yellow columbines (Aquilegia chrysantha).

Pretty sure I saw gorgeous, pink Palmer’s penstemon (P. palmeri) at the doorway to the visitor centre there. I tried to grow that one from seed, but no dice.

I have a photo specialty of bumble bee (Bombus) images, and I was happy to collect a new species, Bombus nevadensis, the Nevada bumble bee, nectaring on Penstemon strictus at the High Plains Environmental Center.

Denver Botanic Garden‘s new Steppe Garden featured penstemons galore. I loved this little meadow with large-flowered penstemon (P. grandiflorus) in various colours.

This was an interesting combination at Denver Botanic: Penstemon grandiflorus in a bed of Fire Spinner ice plant (Delosperma cooperi).

I do grow P. grandiflorus at my cottage on Lake Muskoka, north of Toronto. A biennial, it makes a rosette of succulent, silvery-gray leaves the first year, then sends up this sturdy stem with gorgeous lilac-purple blooms the next year. It’s easy to grow from seed. This is what it looked like the first year I seeded it, up near my septic bed. (And yes, it is growing with the pernicious, invasive, lovable oxeye daisy, Leucanthemum vulgare…)

If I watch this penstemon carefully , I’ll see lots of native bees and hoverflies exploring the lilac-mauve flowers.

Desert penstemon (P. pseudospectabilis) was in flower at Denver Botanic Gardens, too.

We would see that pretty penstemon at The Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins, this time with a pink dianthus.

There were other penstemons at this developing garden. This sky-blue one had no label, but horticulturist Bryan Fischer is quite sure it’s Penstemon virgatus, the upright blue penstemon or one-sided penstemon.

Well-known designer/writer Lauren Springer Ogden is creating The Undaunted Garden (named after her iconic book) at The Gardens on Spring Creek.  One of the plants she’s used is the stunning Penstemon heterophyllus ‘Electric Blue’, below.

Rocky mountain penstemon (Penstemon strictus), of course, is a common native beardtongue in Denver.  This is P. strictus ‘Bandera’ at Denver Botanic Gardens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Denver Botanic Garden’s Chatfield Farm campus (where we enjoyed a buffet dinner and line-dancing lessons!) we saw Penstemon strictus growing with scarlet bugler (Penstemon barbatus ‘Coccineus’) and a bearded iris thrown in the mix.

And Penstemon strictus made a beautiful purple foil to native yellow blanket flowers (Gaillardia aristata) at Chatfield.

Browse online ordering viagra and see which articles have five star ratings and reflect on these articles as this will show you how to reach a better level of communication. A man suffering from 5mg generic cialis view these guys impotence lives under depression. Stress viagra side online davidfraymusic.com also increases your irritability, sapping away your sexual mood instead. Sexual health is a very private subject to cialis sale online many.

This was an effective colour combination there: apricot mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) with Penstemon strictus. 

Banana yucca (Yucca baccata) made a brilliant focal point in a sea of Penstemon strictus at Chatfield, below.

In Carol Shinn’s beautiful Fort Collin’s garden, I admired purple P. strictus and scarlet bugler (P. barbatus ‘Coccineus’) in a gritty bed beside her driveway. They were flowering with a native white erigeron, yellow eriogonum and tall yellow prince’s plume (Stanleya pinnata) in the background.

 

\

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dan Johnson and Tony Miles’s lovely garden in Englewood, Pentemon strictus was consorting happily beside a little water feature with California poppies.

At radio personality Keith Funk’s garden in Centennial, below, a front yard alpine garden paired the compact red flowers of pineleaf penstemon (P. pinifolius) with yellow foxtail lily (Eremurus), right, and evening primrose (Oenothera), rear.

Well-known garden guru Panayoti Kelaidis, outreach director of the Denver Botanic Gardens, had lots of penstemons in his garden. I liked this colourful combination of cacti with desert penstemon (P. pseudospectabilis).

I first met Panayoti in June 2006 when he generously gave my husband and me a 90-minute tour of the botanic garden, of which he was (and is) so deservedly proud.  We were on a driving trip from Denver to Edwards CO and we stopped in at DBG and also at the Betty Ford Alpine Garden in Vail. What a delight that little jewel of a garden is, especially for penstemons!  So when I came back to Canada, I decided to sow some penstemon seed in my wild, sandy, hillside garden on Lake Muskoka, north of Toronto. As I wrote above, biennial large-flowered penstemon enjoyed the conditions and still comes up here and there. Not all the seeds took, but one luscious species, prairie penstemon (P. cobaea var. purpureus) found happiness with its roots seemingly tucked under rocks and graced me with just two plants that appear faithfully each June.

My most successful seed-sowing, however, was our native foxglove penstemon (P. digitalis), which loves my granite hillside, thrives in sandy, acidic gravel and shrugs off drought.  It is a great self-seeder and enjoys the company of lanceleaf coreopsis (C. lanceolata), which likes the same mean conditions.  They are always in bloom on Canada Day (July 1st).

Here it is with a foraging bumble bee. Hummingbirds love this penstemon, too (as they do all penstemons).

Penstemons are also called “beardtongue”, for the fuzzy staminode in the centre of the flower. You can see that below with a closeup of foxglove penstemon.

Penstemons flower mostly in June and early July. Depending on the species, they make beautiful garden companions for lots of late spring-early summer perennials: irises, peonies, lupines and more. One June (before the foxglove penstemon came into flower), I made a little bouquet from my country meadows here on Lake Muskoka.  Along with the pale-lilac Penstemon grandiflorus I included native blue flag iris (I. versicolor), wild lupines (L. perennis) and weedy oxeye daisies and buttercups. This year our spring was cold and flowering was late, so I’m back at the lake in the first week of summer in time to enjoy all these flowers, and the ones that come later.  And to daydream and write about the wonderful gardens we visited in Colorado, where penstemons rule supreme!

 

If you love penstemons (or if I’ve misidentified any), please leave a comment. I love hearing from you.

An Illinois Flower Garden

Posted on by
5

One of the joys of participating in the annual symposium of the Garden Writers Association (GWA) is the opportunity to tour local gardens. It’s especially fun to visit private gardens where the owner is clearly a long-time, passionate gardener – and the garden is big enough to accommodate a few busloads of visitors at a time. That was the case in August when we visited Susan Beard’s wonderful 3-1/2 acre garden in Oak Brook, Illinois, in Chicago’s western suburbs. Though the Beards have lived on the property for 37 years, the frame house is one they built in 1996.  And the welcome couldn’t have been more flowery!

Flanking the driveway was a sea of blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta) – the old-fashioned biennials, not the fancy perennials.

The entrance to the back garden at the end of the driveway was announced by a bench, birdhouse and picket fence…..

…. and a planting of ‘Queen Lime’ and pink zinnias and butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii).

I loved this chartreuse and magenta combination!  And this was just the first of scores of birdhouses in Susan’s garden.

Inside the fence, the garden dips steeply to one side via flagstone steps.  On the stairs, ‘Margarita’ sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) was deployed as a brilliant edging.

Down below I could see a lime-green Tiger Eye sumac (Rhus typhina ‘Bailtiger’) and a bridge over a damp part of the garden.

Here’s a closer look at the bridge.

There is dampness here…..

….. and Susan takes advantage of the moist soil with swamp hibiscus (H. moscheutos) doing its beautiful, late summer thing in shades of white….

….. and cranberry-red.

Back up near the house, zinnias are such cheerful flowers and Susan used them throughout the garden, including here as an edging.

The honey bees approved!

Around the corner flanking the house was another visually stunning edging of Japanese hakone grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’) – another one of Susan’s mainstays.  And I liked the way the flagstone pavers are set flush into the soft lawn, rather than forming just another hard surface.

Ahead was Susan’s swimming pool, set on an interesting angle and framed by a stone sitting wall and a split-rail fence with the main garden behind.  Long ago, the pool was bright blue, but she had it painted it black so it wouldn’t be an eyesore.

There’s a good patch of lawn here, but the main show is from flowers grown in a lovely, informal, cottage garden style.

The view looking into the back garden was an August tapestry of hydrangeas, summer phlox and blackeyed susans……

……… with the occasional obelisk bearing purple clematis.

This was the swimming pool view towards the house.

The walls of the blood vessels become clogged with plaque deposits, lessening order cheap viagra why not try this out blood flow to body parts. Erectile dysfunction is also something which is hotly talked about today when it viagra in uk comes to male’s sexual health. Taking one of my hands in buying levitra in canada hers, the kissing continued. Stretching will promote healthy joints, muscles, prix viagra pfizer bones, connective tissues, and even generate new skin, etc. Susan Beard was standing near her kitchen to answer our questions. As well as being a former president of garden clubs and active with Chicago’s Morton Arboretum, she has made the garden available to charities, tours and artist groups for many years.

We were welcomed into her kitchen with homemadc cakes and cookies!

But there was still much to see and I returned to the garden. I passed another birdhouse and more waterfall-like hakonechloa.  Although flowers create colour throughout the growing season, Susan has included lots of conifers in the borders for bird habitat and visual interest and structure throughout Chicago’s long winter.

A birdbath sits amidst blackeyed susans.

Then it was into the woods: a mature forest containing oak, shagbark hickory, ash and hawthorn……

….. and some lovely pieces of metal sculpture.

Susan has cleared away some of the understory here to create a beautiful shade garden.

There are lots of native ferns and buckeyes…..

…… and piles of firewood left in place (which attract fireflies).

Another lovely fish sculpture graces the forest garden.

When Susan’s six grandchildren were young, they played hide-and-seek on the paths through the forest and gardens.  And I’ll bet they loved this garden house.

With so much shade here, hostas are used extensively (300 varieties!), along with native plants like Solomon’s seal.

The compost heaps and nursery plant area even have their own gated section!

New plantings here are carefully mulched…..

…. with the abundant leaves shed each year.

Though the woodland is predominantly green, garden art supplies a little brilliant colour.

According to a story in the Chicago Tribune, the forest garden owes much to Susan’s late father, a retired U.S. Air Force general from Santa Barbara who needed a project when he visited long ago, so used a chainsaw to begin the process of clearing the edges of the woodland. And it was from her father’s garden that Susan brought back the naked ladies or surprise lilies (Lycoris squamigera) that were just moving past their prime in the photo below.

Soon we were out of the forest and back into the garden via another stone path edged with invaluable hakone grass…..

….. and found our way to the comfy teak tables beside the pool where we relaxed until the call to load up the buses that would take us to the next stop on our tour of Chicago’s beautiful western suburbs.

The Garden at Akaunui

Posted on by
5

Day 14 of our New Zealand tour took us out of Aoraki Mount Cook National Park and down onto the Canterbury Plains with its patchwork of agricultural fields. Here’s a bus window look at the descent.

In late morning we drove into Akaunui Farm Homestead in the countryside near Ashburton. As we walked down the long, hedge-lined driveway, we were greeted politely by the two family dogs.

The brick house was lovely, with its generous verandahs and covered balcony. Built in 1905 for Edward Grigg, a son of one of Canterbury’s pioneering colonial farmers, John Grigg, first president of the New Zealand Agricultural Society and a large-scale sheep and cropping farmer, it was originally part of the Grigg family’s massive Longbeach estate. But it has long been in the family of our host and hostess today, Di and Ian Mackenzie.

Di and Ian, below, share that farming pedigree with their predecessors.  Though their grown son now farms Akaunui’s 600 hectares (1500 acres) in vegetable and grain seed and sheep and dairy cattle, Ian has previously served as the national grain and seed chair of the Federated Farmers of New Zealand.

Di Mackenzie does all the gardening on a property whose landscape was designed originally by Alfred William Buxton (1872-1950). As the New Zealand government historical entry says, “Buxton’s landscape designs were typified by curved entrance drives, perimeter plantings of forest trees, water.…”  We saw that all here at Akaunui, the curved entrance drive and perimeter plantings of forest trees. ……

…… ….. a sinuous pond….

….. and a bog garden……

……with Gunnera manicata, among many other choice plants.

The pond curved around past Di’s vast collection of trees and shrubs, including bottlebrush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora) …..

…..and presented the most spectacular reflective view of the house.

There was a lovely tranquility about this pond, with its little rowboat.

I liked this combination, of a hybrid of native Phormium tenax with Verbena bonariensis.

Many of the specimen trees are very old, like this southern magnolia (M. grandiflora)…..

….. which was still putting out shimmering blossoms in mid-summer.

The lawns alone take Di Mackenzie 15 hours a week on her sitting mower, and clearly they had just been done before our arrival.

The beds around the house feature roses and perennials…..

…. and Di’s exquisite sense of colour is on display here, like this buff peach rose with Phygelius capensis.

There is a sweet parterre along an outbuilding wall.

Rain showers started as I made my way from the lovely swimming pool……

……(Canterbury’s summers can be hot and very dry)…..

…….. to the enclosed garden……..


The next stage of risk control is examined from a systemic perspective, whereby uncertainty and risk can be created by causal events or situations that are greatly wholesale cialis price removed from each other. Do not cheap levitra pills pdxcommercial.com if your doctor has advised you against sexual activity for a particular time period, you must refrain from taking this prescription drug. They are unable to take out time for everyone around including viagra uk pdxcommercial.com himself. But at the same time, you need to take care of many things such as eating right, stay active, enough sleep, using protection viagra india prices such as condom etc.
….with its espaliered apple allée  and stunning focal point.

Outside, there were pears…..

….. and peaches…..

…..and figs……

……and more apples.

Di’s vegetable garden produces an abundance of produce…..

……which she uses for family meals. What’s left over gets preserved for winter.

I loved this flower border, with its pretty white-and-blue theme including Ammi majus and love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena).

And I liked the way Di mixes perennials with roses, making the roses earn their keep instead of segregating them in a rose garden.

We were walked up to the newest part of the garden: the 4 hectare (10 acre) native-rich designed wetland. Paradoxically, when John Grigg bought his 32,000 acre estate here in 1864, the property was said to be mostly “impassable swamp”. But for Di and Ian, turning part of it back into a designed wetland with a meandering, marshy swale……

….. bordered by native flaxes (and also some colourful Phormium tenax cultivars, below)  and grasses…….

….. like Cortaderia richardsonii, a New Zealand cousin to pampas grass…….

…. and native hebe,below, with a foraging bumble bee,…….

…. offered more than an embrace of modern ecological sensibilities. There are also family golf matches in this area, where the water hazards are clearly abundant.

Perhaps the dog has been trained to retrieve lost balls? Or maybe he just likes a dip.

That bridge above, in fact, was where Ian Mackenzie showed us something he’s very proud of, something that for him seems to have made the return of the wetland all worth it. Have a look at these, below. They’re Canterbury mudfish (Neochanna burrowsius), an amphibious species that can survive long periods without water by burrowing into the mud. And they’ve been making a big comeback here at Akaunui.

We returned to the picnic tables via the previously overgrown woodland, which Di has started to clear in order to plant rhododendrons and lots of shade-loving plants.

We were offered a luscious home-cooked lunch with delicious beets and greens, courtesy of Di’s garden.  Oh, and the best rhubarb cake ever!

And there was a little wine (actually a lot of wine!)

As we made our departure from this beautiful farm, I stopped to watch the dogs’ tails move through a big field of something green. Looking closer, I realized it was another of the Mackenzie family businesses: radishes on their way to ripening seed.  I read later that New Zealand supplies almost 50% of the world’s hybrid radish, carrot and beet seed. Next time you slice a radish for a summer salad, consider for a moment that it might have started its journey in Ian & Di Mackenzie’s pretty field in Canterbury.