Tag Archives: Toronto Botanical Garden

Marvelous Magnolias

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As part of my series on spring trees and shrubs, I thought it might be fun to take a deep dive into some of the many magnolias I’ve encountered during my garden travels over the past three-plus decades. As I said to someone, “I spend a lot of time writing about useful sparrows. Every now and then, I like to focus on the peacocks.”  And magnolias, like peacocks, were precious cargo for the earliest botanical explorers collecting seeds and cuttings from far-flung shores.

By the time Carl Linnaeus published Species Plantarum in 1753, thereby assigning binomials (two-word Latin names) to the known plants of the world, Pierre Magnol, the highly respected director of the botanical garden at Montpellier in southern France had been dead for thirty eight years. But Magnol had been honoured in 1703 by botanist Charles Plumier in the naming of a West Indies magnolia, M. dodecapetala. 

It was a time of discovery in the New World, as plant explorers visited the American colonies, sending back seeds and plants in Wardian cases. One of those explorers, Mark Catesby, travelled through Virginia and Carolina from 1722 to 1726, tramping through swampy woods and finding a magnificent tree with large, waxy, lemon-scented, white flowers which he called the Laurel Leaved Tulip Tree or Carolina Laurel. He made a preparatory drawing of the tree which came back with him to England in a trunk, along with drawings of many other plants and a few seeds and herbarium specimens. His drawings were the first Europeans had seen of plants and birds of North America. Some were repainted by other artists, then engraved as plates and published in ten parts from 1729-1748 in a collection called Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.  Thus was Catesby’s Laurel Tree of Carolina, Magnolia altissima, flore ingenti candido, later named simply Magnolia grandiflora by Linnaeus – memorialized in 1744 in the hand-coloured etching, below, by Georg Dionysius Ehret.

Today we know this beautiful species as southern magnolia. I found it in bloom in the Beatrix Farrand-designed landscape at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., now owned by Harvard University. I wrote a blog about my June 2017 visit to this spectacular garden.

Southern magnolia has made its way around the world, including an old specimen in the garden at Akaunui Farm Homestead in New Zealand, which I blogged about in 2018.  The tree grows 60-80 ft tall (18-24 m) and 30-40 ft (9-12 m) wide, though some in Mississippi have reached 120 ft (36 m) in height.

And it was on fragrant southern magnolia flowers near the beach in New Zealand where I found honey bees feverishly gathering pollen from the stamens.

Magnolias feature a cone-like aggregate fruit called a “follicetum”, like the one below from M. grandiflora.  

Magnolia ancestors are among the most primitive plants, having evolved in the Cretaceous (145-66 million years ago) with the dinosaurs, and they ranged in places far from where we find them today.  Wrote John Fisher in The Origins of Garden Plants, “the climate in the northern hemisphere remained mild, and magnolias, bread fruit and camphor trees flourished on the west coast of Greenland – 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle.” This is a photo by Geology Professor James St. John shared under Creative Commons Attribution of a fossil leaf of extinct Magnolia boulayana, from the Cretaceous flora of Alabama, USA from the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL.

Fossil leaf of Magnolia boulayana from the Cretaceous of Alabama – Field Museum, Chicago. Shared from Professor James St. John under Creative Commons

Though we cannot grow southern magnolia in Toronto, we can enjoy its leathery, bronze-backed leaves in winter arrangements like the ones below, on my back deck.

But Magnolia grandiflora was not the first American magnolia species to cross the Atlantic. The Bishop of London and head of the Anglican church in the American colonies, Henry Compton, had a garden at Fulham Palace and was an avid collector of rarities. He sent the missionary John Banister to Virginia in 1678; in the coming years, he would prepare a catalogue that represented the first survey of native American plants. One of his discoveries was the sweetbay,  Magnolia virginiana, with creamy scented flowers. It was used medicinally by the native Indian tribes of the southeast, who prepared decoctions to treat rheumatism, fever and consumption.  It would become the first of the genus to be successfully grown in Britain. I found M. virginiana ‘Green Shadow’ below, growing on New York’s High Line.   

I also found another native American magnolia on the High Line: M. macrophylla var. ashei, Ashe’s magnolia, below. Closely related to the taller bigleaf magnolia (M. macrophylla), it was named for William Willard Ashe (1872-1932) of the U.S. Forest Service. Though we often think of Dutch designer Piet Oudolf as a creator of four-season meadows, he is also skilled at using regionally native shrubs and trees for specific applications in his designs.

Beetles are considered to be the evolutionary pollinators of magnolias, since the plants evolved in the Cretaceous before bees appeared. But bees certainly take advantage of the flowers, as we see below with a native megachile leafcutter bee foraging on Ashe’s magnolia.

The only magnolia native to Canada – or at least the Carolinian Forest in extreme southern Ontario where it is listed as ‘endangered’ – is cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata var. acuminata).  Though it does not grow in the wild near me in Toronto, it is nonetheless hardy here and there is a lovely specimen in the 200-acre Mount Pleasant Cemetery, below. It is much smaller than its southern counterparts which can reach 80 ft (25 m).  Cucumber magnolia is morphologically variable, and the southern form, M. acuminata var. sub cordata, has been used in breeding with Asian magnolias to produce many of the highly prized yellow cultivars below.

The flowers of cucumber magnolia are unusual looking with green outer tepals cupped around yellow inner tepals. They close at night.

The tree gets its common name from the cucumber-like appearance of the unripe fruit, which turns red in late summer. 

Enter the Asian Magnolias

The first popular magnolia resulting from a 1956 cross of cucumber magnolia with the white-flowered Chinese Yulan magnolia (M. denudata) was called ‘Elizabeth’. Created by Dr. Evamaria Sberber at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden…..

…. its soft-yellow, precocious flowers (i.e.appearing before the leaves) marked a new chapter for magnolias.

But breeders wanted even brighter, longer-lasting yellows. This is the beautiful ‘Butterflies’, a 1990  cross of  M, acuminata ‘Fertile Myrtle’ x M. denudata ‘Sawada’s Cream’ by famed Michigan magnolia breeder Phil Savage.

My photos of  ‘Butterflies’, below, illustrate the reproductive strategy of magnolias. The flowers are protogynous, meaning the flowers open initially in the female phase during which the curved stigmas are receptive (top). They then close, only to reopen with the male reproductive organs, the pink-tipped stamens, ready to shed pollen (bottom). Magnolias evolved this system to improve the chance of cross-pollination, rather than self-pollination, thus strengthening the genetic diversity.

I have blogged previously about the wonderful yellow magnolias in the collection of the Montreal Botanical Garden – see “Mellow Yellow Magnolias” – so I won’t repeat myself here, other than to offer this montage of a selection of those beauties.


1- ‘Golden Sun’, 2 -‘Maxine Merrill’, 3-‘Banana Split’, 4-‘Yellow Bird’, 5-‘Golden Goblet’, 6-‘Sunburst’, 7-‘Limelight’, 8-‘Golden Endeavour’, 9 -‘Tranquility’

There are a number of hardy Asian magnolias for our climate (USDA Zone 5–Can. Zone 6), though their early flowering sometimes coincides with a spring frost. Native to Japan and Korea, the Kobushi magnolia, Magnolia kobus var. kobus, is a small tree or large shrub that grows 25-50 ft tall (8-15 m) with a wide spread. I have photographed specimens in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery and at the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, ON, below.

The white flowers of M. kobus are considered by some to be the most fragrant of the early magnolias. According to Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Léonie Bell in their book The Fragrant Year, the blooms distill “the ripe mango aroma of orange and pineapple softened by a note of lily, a perfume noticeable many yards away. Later the glossy leaves and gray twigs, crushed, have the spiciness of bayberry.”

The lovely star magnolia from Japan, Magnolia stellata, is related to M. kobus (some botanists consider it a variety) and a good choice as a tree or shrub for a small garden, given it usually doesn’t grow taller than 10 feet (3 m) with a spread of 15 feet (4.6 m). It bears at least 12 ribbon-like tepals, usually white but with natural variants such as var. rosea and var. rubra of pale rose to pink. When I was a young girl in the suburbs outside Vancouver, BC, my mother grew a star magnolia outside my bedroom window. It had a light perfume, one that Wilson and Bell describe as “watermelon or honeydew blended with Easter lily.”  

I photographed one of the more bizarre design uses for star magnolia one spring at Ontario’s Royal Botanical Garden in their “hedge plants” area. 

Ask most gardeners in the northeast what their favourite magnolia is and they’ll likely describe the ‘tulip tree’ or the ‘saucer magnolia’, both names for the widely available, hardy hybrid Magnolia x soulangeana.  Now almost two centuries old, it is reported to have appeared in 1826  in the garden of M. Soulange-Boudin at Fromont near Paris, an accidental cross between two Chinese species, the pure white Yulan,  M. denudata and the mulberry coloured Mulan, M. liliiflora.  On a well-grown shrub, those upturned rose-pink goblets are utterly enchanting in early spring, just when winter-weary gardeners are starved for beauty.

There are beautiful, mature specimens in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, usually flowering in mid-late April, the same time as the early Japanese cherries and native plums, depending on the season. The oldest specimens reach 15-20ft (4.6-6 m) with a large spread.  

I believe this is the cultivar M. x soulangeana ‘Lennei Alba’, introduced in 1931 by Terra Nova Nurseries in Holland.

Saucer magnolias can be found throughout the temperate world. I photographed ‘Verbanica’, below, an 1873 introduction from France at Van Dusen Botanical Garden on May 2, 2017. Note that its later flowering has also meant that the flowers are not ‘precocious’, i.e. the leaves have also emerged.

In warm climates, M. x soulangeana often flowers in winter. I photographed ‘Lilliputian’, below, bred  for its miniature form and flower size, at the Los Angeles County Arboretum on January 6, 2018.

Now for my personal favourites, the Loebner hybrids, so-named because they were first created in the early 1900s from crosses between the Japanese species Magnolia kobus and M. stellata by renowned German horticulturist Max Löbner (1869-1947).  The one I admire each spring at the Toronto Botanical Garden, below, is the white-flowered cultivar ‘Merrill’. It was grown from open-pollinated seed in 1939 by a student of research scientist and professor of genetics Karl Sax at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Sax named the cultivar in 1952 for the retiring Arboretum director Elmer Merrill, whom Sax would replace as director.

Unlike its slow-growing star magnolia parent, ‘Merrill’ grows quickly to a mature height of 20-30 ft (6-9 m), i.e. less than M. kobus.  The large, slightly fragrant flowers that appear on the bare branches are white flushed with pink, the tepals slightly broader than those of star magnolia. It is truly lovely.   

My other favourite Loebner hybrid is pink-flowered ‘Leonard Messel’.  An award-winning 1955 cross between M. kobus and M. stellata var. rosea from Nymans Garden in Sussex, England, home of the Messel family, this cultivar has more of star magnolia’s dainty appearance, its pink, ribbon-like tepals fluttering in the breeze.  At the Toronto Botanical Garden, there are two shrubs, including this one in a sheltered corner on an inner terrace.

I have been known to spend long minutes focusing on the enchanting blooms……

….. that emerge like floral Cinderellas from the fuzzy brown winter buds.  

There are also a few ‘Leonard Messel’ magnolias at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, growing in relatively unprotected sites.

Now for the bad news:  f-r-e-e-z-i-n-g.  Unlike plants adapted to growing in sub-zero climates, Japanese magnolias hail from mountain regions where their flowering is timed with the onset of mild spring temperatures.  In Ontario, you can have an early spring in March that teases open magnolias, then snows on them, as it did with M. x soulangeana at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in April 2002…

….. or turns those March 2012 ‘Merrill’ flowers in my photo above to brown mush four days later. So a little caveat emptor is in order with magnolias.

The Oyama magnolia, Magnolia sieboldii, with its bright red stamens made its way quite dramatically from Japan to Europe with the German botanist and doctor, Philipp Franz von Siebold, physician to the Governor of the Dutch East India Company.  An eye surgeon who could remove cataracts, he had arrived in 1823 and therefore initially found popularity with government officials. He lived with his Japanese mistress with him he had a child and gardened with his newly found plants on the man-made port island of Dejima in Nagasaki prefecture. But when it was discovered that he had procured maps of the mainland, he was charged with espionage and imprisoned for a year. He was expelled in 1830 and was permitted to take his plants with him (including Hosta plantaginea, Corylopsis spicata, Clematis florida var. sieboldii, Fatsia japonica, Hamamelis japonica), but left his mistress and child behind. If this sounds like a fairytale, in fact Puccini’s 1904 opera ‘Madama Butterfly’ is based on von Siebold’s travails. As for Magnolia sieboldii, it is a beautiful small (10 ft – 3 m) woodland shrub for light shade and marginally hardy in Toronto where I have photographed it in June, but it thrives in milder parts of Canada.

The ‘Girl’ Series of hybrid magnolias were developed in 1955-56 at the U.S. National Arboretum by William F. Kosar and Dr. Francis de Vos.  They involved crosses of one of two of the Magnolia lilliflora  (the Mulan or woody orchid magnolia) cultivars ‘Nigra’ (below) and ‘Reflorescens’ and one of two Magnolia stellata cultivars ‘Rosea’ (var rosea) and ‘Waterlily’.

The resulting sterile hybrids, released in 1968, were named for the daughters of Kosar (‘Betty’) and de Vos (‘Ann’, ‘Judy’, ‘Randy’, ‘Ricki’); the daughter of Arboretum director Henry Skinner (‘Susan’); and the wife of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman (‘Jane’).  Flowering 2-4 weeks later than M. stellata and M. x soulangeana, they are less at risk from late spring frost that will damage the flowers. Of the ones I’ve included below in this blog, ‘Ricki’ and ‘Ann’ are the shortest (10-12 ft or 3-3.6 m) with a 16-ft (4.8 m) width; ‘Jane’ is the tallest at 20-25 ft (6-7.6 m) with a 20-ft (6 m) width.  ‘Ann’, below, which I photographed at the U.S. National Arboretum is the earliest-flowering; ‘Jane’ is latest; the rest are midseason. 

 ‘Betty’ shows the upswept tepals of parent M. liliiflora.  It is a rounded, multi-stemmed shrub.

‘Susan’ sports twisted tepals; it is slightly fragrant.

The abundant tepals of ‘Ricki’ with their white interior hint at its M. stellata parentage.

Finally, here’s ‘Jane’ towards the end of her flowering period; unlike the others, her open blossoms recall the form of her parent M. stellata ‘Waterlily’.  

On an April 2008 trip to Ireland to find my grandfather’s ancestral home in the countryside near Banbridge (see my musical blog titled ‘Galway Bay’), we visted the National Botanic Garden, Glasnevin near Dublin where I found the magnificent Magnolia ‘Galaxy’ at on April 26, 2008. A late-flowering, tree-form magnolia with upward branching and a mature height of 30-40 ft (9-12 m), it is a 1963 cross between Magnolia liliiflora ‘Nigra’ and M. sprengeri ‘Diva’.  Like the ‘Girl’ Series, it was developed at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington DC in 1963 and released in 1980.  

I love to visit Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Gardens in spring; it’s where my mother and I would go to get our floral fix when I travelled ‘home’ from Toronto to visit her. There is so much to see there, I wrote a 2-part blog called ‘Spring at Van Dusen Botanical Garden’. One of the highlights is their magnolia collection, including Magnolia ‘Star Wars’, below, which I photographed on May 2, 2017. It was bred in New Zealand by Oswald Blumhardt, one of New Zealand’s renowned magnolia breeders. It’s a cross between Magnolia campbellii and M. liliiflora, bearing large, sweetly-scented flowers.

I photographed another New Zealand-bred magnolia at Van Dusen on May 2nd. This is ‘Apollo’, a Felix Jury cross between M. campbellii subsp. mollicomata ‘Lanarth’ and M. liliiflora ‘Nigra’. It is said to have a fruity fragrance but the flowers were too high for me to sniff.    

And finally, on Van Dusen’s Rhododendron Walk on that same May day, I found a stunning specimen of evergreen Magnolia cavalerei var. platypetala from China (formerly Michelia).  The fragrance was wonderful.

In 2019, I visited lovely Darts Hill Park Garden Park in South Surrey, outside Vancouver, B.C.  It is the home of the late plantswoman Francisca Darts (1916-2012) whom I was lucky to meet with my mom, Mary Healy, at the right below, one rainy spring day long ago.  I’m including this photo because my mother loved magnolias, she died the same year as Francisca, and she would be tickled pink to know that they are featured together under all these magnificent specimens.

During my 2019 visit to Darts Hill, I was interested to find Magnolia officinalis in flower, below.  Discovered originally in Sechuan, China in 1869 by French Abbé Henry David (of Davidia fame), it was found again as a cultivated plant in flower in 1900 by British plant explorer Ernest Henry Wilson who collected seeds that autumn to send to his then-employers at Veitch Nursery.  As he wrote later:  “The Chinese designate this species the Hou-p’o tree, and its bark and flower-buds constitute a valued drug which is exported in quantity from central and western China to all parts of the Empire. It is for its bark and flowerbuds that the tree is cultivated. The removal of’ the bark causes the death of the tree and this would account for its disappearance from the forests. The bark when boiled yields an extract which is taken internally as a cure for coughs, colds and as a tonic and stimulant during the convalescence. A similar extract obtained from the flower-buds, which are called Yu-p’o is esteemed as a medicine for women.”  Bark from the tree is used in Chinese medicine to this day.

I will finish this long wander through the hardy Magnolias with two recent arrivals, having been transferred there taxonomically from the former genus Michelia after genetic sequencing determined that Magnolioideae should contain only one genus. Included in that are 210 species of magnolias from around the world.  I found Magnolia laevifolia, formerly Michelia yunnanensis, at the San Francisco Botanical Garden (then Strybing Arboretum) one March long ago.

And though it was a little too bright at the Los Angeles County Arboretum on January 28, 2018 for good photos, I was delighted to find fragrant Magnolia doltsopa ‘Silver Cloud’ (formerly Michelia) in flower. 

As I gaze out the window in Toronto on this March day, winter is still holding on with a freshly-fallen blanket of heavy, wet snow. But spring is surely just around the corner – and with it, those spectacular floral peacocks, the magnolias.

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Anxious for spring, too? See my recent blogs on tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera),  redbuds (Cercis canadensis and its cousins), and the many native northeast maples.  

The Once and Future Toronto Botanical Garden

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I visited the Toronto Botanical Garden this week, my third visit this year. Given the constraints placed on the garden (and I’ll get into those later), it looked pretty good. The three gardeners and volunteers have tackled most of the weeds in the main borders. The beautiful Piet Oudolf-designed Entry Border was its usual boisterous self, the spiky, white rattlesnake master consorting with the blue Russian sage….

….. and the bees were buzzing in the blazing stars (Liatris spicata).

The Entry Border sported new rails to keep out unruly, selfie-snapping visitors….

…. with a few noticeable plant additions that might not have been strictly ‘Oudolfian’, like the brilliant orange daylilies behind the rampaging Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firedance’, below  As I wrote in my 2-part, 2017 blog on the design of the border, Piet Oudolf-Meadow Maker–Part 1 and Part 2, the border was funded by the Garden Club of Toronto and constructed in 2006. Piet Oudolf recommended a full-time gardener as part of the ongoing maintenance of the entry garden. In his work with Chicago’s Lurie Garden (read my blog on the Lurie here), there was a multi-year ongoing relationship between him and the Lurie’s gardeners; that did not happen at the TBG due to financial constraints The complexity of this garden, its self-seeding plants and the ongoing assessment of performance stretches the capacity of a severely underfunded garden (I’ll get to that later, too). 

However, when I rounded the corner from the entry border to the entrance courtyard itself, I was dismayed. Red and blue salvias in Victorian ribbon planting with canna lilies. It felt a little like being in a 1950s municipal park.  

What happened to the creativity that should be the hallmark of a botanical garden, even in the current straitened circumstances?  The little square near the entrance is prime real estate, intended to be the greeting card for all who come to the TBG. In spring, it always hosts a colourful mix of bulbs; later swishing grasses and interesting annuals and biennals. But this?

These urns used to be filled with wonderful annuals and tropicals…

…now they’re filled with dwarf hemlocks. Just plain hemlocks.

Around the corner in the garden flanking the water channel in the Westview Terrace, there were impatiens plants sprinkled throughout the perennials. Given the prevalence of devastating IDM (Impatiens Downy Mildew) over the past decade, it was a shock to see them. But it was also disappointing from a creative point of view to have your grandmother’s impatiens in what should be an inspiring border filled with high performance perennials.    

And my spirits sagged further when I walked into the Edibles Garden – or what used to be the productive, instructive, nutritious Edibles Garden – to find it filled with bedding annuals in a new Trial Garden. The “Wild for Bees” installation would not be seeing a lot of activity with the annuals chosen here.

I know Ball Flora well; I’ve been to their display gardens outside Chicago as part of a bloggers’ tour. They do good work and I’m sure they’re happy to be featured here and make it an attractive partnership, financially speaking, for the TBG. But expanses of annuals are really not showing off what should be cutting edge planting design for a garden like ours.  

Not to mention that the Edibles Garden as it was conceived was a source of hundreds of pounds of annual donations to the North York Food Bank. Here are some of my photos from previous years. This was 2014.

And 2016’s edibles.

A visitor from Victoria looked quizzical. When I asked what he thought, he said “They seem to be growing very common plants here.”  Indeed. Instead of lantanas and petunias, what about a garden of fragrance in front of this hedge, with lilies, nicotiana, dianthus, scented peonies, heliotrope, phlox, dwarf lilac, daphne, hyacinths, clethra, etc?  The TBG is light on small ‘theme gardens’ that help people design their own spaces

A bed in the Beryl Ivey Knot Garden had been planted bizarrely with Scotch thistle (Onopordum acanthium), which is as invasive a self-seeder as it is gawky. Why it would be plunked in this formal space is beyond me.

When I walked towards the perennial borders, I passed the window-box planters adjacent to the Spiral Garden. There must have been left-over red and blue salvia because these looked pedestrian, too.

In 2016, I wrote a blog on the TBG’s planter designs featuring the great creativity of the garden’s previous horticulturist Paul Zammit. The photo below shows three years of designs in these planters.

Sadly, through a lack of funding and administrative support, the TBG lost the creative minds of both the previous chief horticulturists, Paul Zammit and Paul Gellatly. My purpose here is not to retread the institutional woes, exacerbated greatly by Covid, that led to the May 22nd Globe & Mail story. It is to reflect on what made the garden brilliant as an underfunded 4-acre jewel and what looms ahead as a major 35-acre botanical garden (final concept plan below), once the merger with Edwards Gardens is complete.

On that note, I attended all three community engagement meetings with landscape architects and city planners, so I know a little of what went into the planning of the new garden, as spearheaded skilfully by former Executive Director Harry Jongerden with creative input by landscape architect W. Gary Smith, below, pointing out details on the screen. 

I care very much about the garden. As well as being a long-time member of the TBG and the Civic Garden Centre before that, I have written many blogs about it: the spring tulip extravaganza; the Blossom Party; the Woman-to-Woman luncheon; the annual Through the Garden Gate Tour, and more. Since May 2007, I tallied 152 visits to photograph the garden; these provided me with the images for the seasonal photo gallery that was on the TBG’s website for several years….

……as well as for my blogs and images the garden needed from time to time. Below is garden philanthropist Kathy Dembroski at the 2018 luncheon; she and her husband George Dembroski….

….were the lead donors for the award-winning Silver LEED building opened in their name, The George and Kathy Dembroski Centre for Horticulture.

In my 33-year career as a freelance garden writer and photographer, I’ve also visited and written about a vast number of public botanic gardens, from New York, below, to Chicago, Cape Town’s Kirstenbosch, Christchurch, Kew Gardens, Los Angeles, Malaysia, Saigon and Kyoto, as well as favourite Vancouver gardens like VanDusen and UBC Botanical, among many others. I’ve also spent a lot of time in privately-funded public gardens like Chanticleer near Philadelphia and Wave Hill in the Bronx and at the iconic High Line in New York City. So I am very familiar with a broad variety of public gardens, large and small.

My husband Doug and I have been regular TBG donors for many years. As well, I have contributed various articles and donated photos to the Trellis magazine (my cover story on cottage gardening, below).

Our daughter was married at the TBG in October 2012, and we have beautiful memories of that showery autumn day.

I especially loved seeing Meredith and her attendants standing in front of the donor panels featuring my own fern photos. Our rental of the facility nine years ago tallied $5,700 for her wedding, so I know how devastating 16 months of Covid closure has been for TBG rental revenues….

….. not to mention the loss of sales from two consecutive annual plant sales and the summer fundraiser garden tour.

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Why am I writing this blog? It’s not to trumpet my work in gardening, but to share a concern I have. Following the TBG’s Annual General Meeting in June – an online meeting that painted everything as rosy and was carefully scripted to exclude any critical commentary from members upset with board decisions – acting Board Chair Gordon Ashworth encouraged members to send in any issues they might have. This is my response.  In a word, it has to do with MONEY. At 35 acres, the expanded TBG will present both a great opportunity and an ongoing challenge to bring ground-breaking horticultural and environmental displays to Greater Toronto’s 6 million people, as well as providing inspired educational programs for children and adults. Ironically, the TBG’s current fiscal challenges have come at the same time as the federal and provincial governments announced a $2.2 million investment in Burlington’s Royal Botanical Gardens, below, as part of its 25-year master plan. Without taking anything away from the RBG and notwithstanding its 300 acres of gardens and 2400 acres of land stewardship, it is not positioned in the centre of the 4th largest metropolis in North America.

In 2012, I attended a city council meeting at City Hall to support the TBG’s then Executive Director, Aldona Satterthwaite as she begged for more financial support than the paltry $25,000 the city has traditionally given the garden in order to overcome a small deficit caused by the lack of potential revenue owing to the protracted parking lot renovation, a lot used mutually by Edwards Gardens and the TBG. I made the photo below in spring 2012; the work went on for months and months. Naturally, facilities rentals declined sharply. Through the efforts of Ward 15 City Councillor Jaye Robinson, bridge funding was secured to keep the garden solvent.

At that City Hall meeting, former Councillor Janet Davis (my doppelgänger) asked me during a scrum if I knew how much other gardens charged for admission. I answered that most had an admission fee except ours. In the case of privately-run, 55-acre Butchart Gardens in Victoria, which receives more than a million visitors annually, it is very steep, reflecting the cost of running a world-class garden (not a botanical garden, but useful for comparison). In 2013 when I photographed the entrance, below, it was $28; it’s now $36.  Well-run, creative gardens cost money. It’s that simple.  

I make this point because one of the major conditions in the expansion plan between the City of Toronto and the TBG is that admission to the expanded 35-acre botanical garden be free. At first glance, this is in keeping with ‘park’ policies; you don’t pay to visit High Park or any of the city’s many excellent parks, and Edwards Gardens is a large ravine park currently accessed via the renovated parking lot whose significant parking fees now thankfully accrue to the TBG. But once the TBG and the park are amalgamated, is free entry really the right financial vision for a botanical garden in the 4th largest city in North America?  Or is it a lack of vision rooted in unreality?  Or just thinking small? Here is a table I made with the admission costs and membership fees of botanical gardens I’ve visited. 

BOTANICAL GARDENAdult EntryAnnual Membership
   
Toronto Botanical GardenFree$45
Royal Botanical Garden$19.50$85
Montreal Botanical Garden$16.50/21.50*$45
VanDusen Botanical Garden$11.70/8.40*$45
UBC Botanical Garden$10$55
Butchart Gardens$36$69 (annual pass)
New York Botanical Garden$28-23$98
Chicago Botanic Garden$24-26*$99-$72*
Missouri Botanical Garden$14-6*$50
Denver Botanic Garden$15$55
San Francisco Botanical Garden$12/9*$70
   
*Variable pricing due to weekend/weekday, seasonal, or geographic parameters.  

The now defeated Rail Deck Park project proposal is a cautionary tale of planning without financing. In a May 13th editorial, the Toronto Star put the blame for the failure of the Rail Deck Park at the feet of the city and Mayor John Tory. “In 2017, the city designated the rail corridor as parkland but still didn’t move to acquire the air rights, through a negotiated purchase or expropriation if necessary. And it didn’t earmark the estimated $1.7 billion the project would cost or even explain how it intended to fund Toronto’s “next great gathering space.”  It would be disastrous if our expanded TBG suffered from the same lack of realistic financial planning. Its needs will be much greater than a municipal park.

In her opening remarks during the June AGM, Councillor Jaye Robinson said that “getting the Master Plan through city council was not for the faint of heart. Very little support, quite frankly, but I got it through by compromising and we’re very excited to see this institution grow to 35 acres.” She also said that she and Ward 25 Councillor Jennifer McKelvie moved a motion to make 2022 The Year of the Garden in Toronto. That will be great — but why so little support?

We can only hope that life will return to some semblance of normal before long, and that activities will resume that require rental facilities like the TBG, thus returning it to a level of financial security. Development personnel will start knocking on doors looking for donors for the exciting expansion. And the lead landscape design firm PMA Landscape Architects will begin rolling out detailed designs for the new garden areas. The relationship between current city park personnel and TBG staff and volunteers, like those below, will hopefully be engineered to co-exist smoothly. But my fervent wish is that the amalgamation comes with a better financial framework from the city, province and federal governments that recognizes the real importance of the botanical garden to Canada’s largest city and its diverse and growing population.

On that note, I leave you with a little musical glimpse at the other population that the Toronto Botanical Garden serves.

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Up on the Roof

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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…

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…. 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

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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

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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.

Raindrops

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Have I told you lately that I love you?  Oh, never mind. That’s a different Van Morrison song. Just thought I’d throw it in here, for all the folks who’ve patiently travelled this  #mysongscapes road with me thus far.  And it’s not a ‘Van the Man’ song today like my last two blogs, but an older guy who’s no longer with us. We’ll get to him later.  In the meantime, can we talk about rain?  As in….

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Let’s talk about rain and photography!  Because depending on how you look at rain, your glass is either half-empty or half-full. And I’m definitely in the latter camp, as you can see by my smiling face as I stride down the High Line under my umbrella. (Thanks to my photographer pal Ginny Weiler for the photo.)

Unless it’s pouring down (and I’ve been in some of those rains carrying three cameras in a big garden far from shelter), an overcast sky and drizzle is far easier to deal with than the bright sunshine of mid-day. Look at the beautiful Magnolia ashei I photographed that May day on the High Line….

….. and the prairie smoke (Geum triflorum) beside the rain-spattered sign….

….. and the pretty heuchera leaf turned over under raindrops to show its lovely purple reverse.

Apart from the gentle light for photography, in a place like the High Line there are far fewer visitors when it’s drizzling.

When I visit Vancouver, I make sure I take an umbrella to photograph plants at my two favourite haunts, the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden and Van Dusen Botanical Garden. In fact, the wettest I’ve ever been in was at UBC on May 29, 2013 – and the raindrops in the pond below just got more serious as I moved through the garden.

But when I’ve got the day booked for plant photography, I hate to give up because of a little downpour…..

…. especially when the Himalayan poppies, below, are in perfect bloom in the David Lam Asian Garden.  The raindrops just add to the enchantment – and I have never sprayed a blossom with water to make it more “picturesque”, when nature does it for me for free!  (By the way, I wrote a blog on the exquisite David Lam garden in May.)

The redvein enkianthus (E. campanulatus) looked lovely in the drizzle……

….. and across Marine Drive, the Garry Oak Meadow was gorgeous that rainy day. Imagine how terrible this tapestry would have looked in full sun!

In UBC’s herb garden, bees were still foraging on the Angelica archangelica, despite the weather.

The downward-facing flowers of Sicilian honey lily (Allium siculum) acted like umbrellas for this bumble bee, though her fur-like hairs were beginning to mat down in the rain.

Though it hails from the hot, dry Drakensberg Range in South Africa, the Moraea robusta in UBC’s wonderful rock garden wore its sunshine yellow with raindrops that day.

A few weeks later in early June, I was back at my “home garden”, the Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG) on a rainy June morning with no one else around. Though the paving stones were wet on the Westview Terrace where the Indigofera kirolowii was in full flower….

….. and at the entrance to the Floral Hall Courtyard where the Bowman’s root (Porteranthus trifoliatus previously Gillenia) was a cloud of white…..

…..my raindrop close-ups from that day, like the Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’, below, were lovely.

Peonies were just opening that day in June, too…..

…. and the lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis) wore its many rain-spattered, folded capes.

Even the eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) sported its raindrops nicely.

Though I’m usually alone at the TBG on a rainy day, I occasionally catch sight of a pretty umbrella held by another intrepid garden visitor.

On June 8, 2015, I visited the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington Ontario with a group of fellow bloggers. We drove there through a massive rainstorm, so when we arrived at the famous Iris Collection….

….. all the bearded irises were delightfully adorned with raindrops. This is ‘Florentine Silk’.

There were so many, I wanted to capture them in one gorgeous photographic memory.

In Manhattan one hot, humid August afternoon, I braved an uptown subway train with no air-conditioning and waited out a thunderstorm and all the people running out of the beautiful Conservatory Garden at Central Park so I could be almost all alone there.

But it didn’t take long for a few people with umbrellas to return to enjoy the spectacular, Lynden Miller-designed borders. I blogged about that August afternoon in the garden.

When I visited Monet’s garden at Giverny in France in April 2008, a spring shower meant the other visitors carried their umbrellas over his famous Japanese bridge on the lily pond…..

…. but all the flowers enjoyed the rain. I blogged about the spring lessons from Giverny as well.

The majority of my rainy photo shoots were in spring, as you might expect “when April showers bring May flowers”.  But May has its share of rainy flowers too. This was on May 5, 2014 at the Horticultural Centre of the Pacific just outside Victoria, B.C.  Bluebells (Hyacinthoides hispanica) and Tulipa bakeri ‘Lilac Wonder’ looked enchanting to me…..

…. and the trumpets of the little gentians were laden with raindrops.

The skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) was happy to be in its preferred damp state that day.

And of course spring at Vancouver’s wonderful Van Dusen Botanical Garden means there will be lots of west coast rain to make the various Himalayan poppies (Meconopsis)….

….. in the Himalayan Dell just that much lovelier.

While staying with friends in Sun Valley, Idaho in September 2016, we took a walk through a wild meadow just as big rainclouds appeared behind the mountains.

Though we didn’t make it home before getting soaked, I was happy to have had my camera with me to capture the intricacy of the rain drops on the meadow grass seedheads. (And I will refrain from mentioning the irony of rain in Sun Valley….)

More recently, if you read my massive blog about Botanizing Greece with Liberto in November 2019, you might recall the day we stopped at a serpentine outcrop near Smokovo in the pouring rain…..

….. to look for tiny Crocus cancellatus subsp. mazziaricus, which we did find, but they were as soaked as I was.

We also found our first Sternbergia lutea that morning, but they refused to open in the inclement weather (which is an obvious evolutionary adaptation to keep the reproductive parts dry).

A few redbud (Cercis siliquastrum) flowers still hung on to the trees and they did look pretty in the rain….

….. as did the wild flowers in the meadow (even as my shoes were squishing in the grasses).

In the fall of 2015, I visited Costa Rica with my hiking group. Though we did manage some hiking, that particular one-week period had more rain than the Osa Peninsula had seen in the entire rainy season. I blogged about my time at El Remanso Lodge, but here’s a little video of what real rain is like in a tropical rainforest…..

In my own Ontario gardens, as you might expect, my camera is never far away when the rain stops. At the cottage on Lake Muskoka one June, I found my wild lupines spangled with raindrops…..

…. and the palmate leaves with their small hairs seemed to trap perfect raindrops like mercury quicksilver.

When a big rainstorm hits the cottage on a summer day, it’s often so spectacular in its onset that I grab my camera and set it to video. Have a look (and try to pick up the distant thunder in the first few seconds) ……

At home in Toronto, rainy May days are welcomed because summer is often hot and dry and our urban tree canopy needs all the help it can get. Especially lovely are spring bulbs – this is Tulipa ‘Ballade’, one of my favourites…

….. and this is ‘Angelique’ looking like ballerina tutus hung on a line to dry.

A few years ago, I stood under my umbrella photographing my grandson Oliver doing a little jaunt on the stepping-stone path through the spring bulbs in my front yard while rain poured down and thunder boomed in the distance. Doesn’t he look proud of himself?  I snapped a still photo at the end.

But since this is #mysongscapes, we do need a song to finish up this blog, so let’s take a rainy day tour of my entire Toronto garden, as I found it under my umbrella on June 24, 2018.  And we’ll be serenaded by Dee Clark with his famous Raindrops song from 1961.

*******

This is the tenth blog 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

And please do feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.