Tag Archives: Toronto

Gordon Lightfoot on a Snow Day

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I used to think I was lucky to live in a part of the world with four distinct seasons. How could I appreciate the swan song of autumn without the colourful abundance that is summer?  How could I love summer, if not for the delicate opening act of spring that promised such fullness? And how was it possible to revere the first warm days and blossoms of spring, without living through the long months of winter, when hope seems as far underground as the resting shoots and roots?   But as I age, that last seasonal quid pro quo seems less attractive. Five to six months of winter is a long time. And the first snow, often as autumn leaves are still changing colour on the trees in November, is a shock to the system.

WINTER ON LAKE MUSKOKA

I am very fortunate, for I get to enjoy the beauty and rigour of winter in two places: at our cottage on Lake Muskoka a few hours north of Toronto, and at the house in the north end of the city where I’ve lived and gardened for more than 37 years now. Driving north to Muskoka in winter, we often pass cornfield stubble dusted with snow. Hopefully the roads aren’t bad for driving….

….. but sometimes, it’s a little scary.

Snow tires are a must and all-wheel drive is important, too, for the hills on the dirt road we have to negotiate to get to where we park. (Do you like my licence plate? That was the logo I used on my first business card and letterhead back in the late 1980s. It’s a good thing no one tried to speak to me en Français…)

We drag toboggans packed with our food and wine on a path through the forest. Hopefully the snow isn’t too deep because we’re getting a little old for tramping down a foot of powder.

And then we arrive. The deck and my summer pots are covered with fresh snow, the white pines look lovely.

I gaze through my bedroom window and….

….. down the hillside to the frozen lake, and the outdoors beckons.

I glance at my little west meadow as I head out. Another year I didn’t get to chop down the plants in November.

Then I pick my way carefully down the stairs towards the lake.

Sometimes, after freezing rain, the white pines on the dock wear a fringe of icicles…

… and above the frozen lake floats a soft mist.

Deep snow on the lake is beautiful, but it insulates with its warmth and works against the thickening of ice.  Extreme caution is needed and an official measurement of lake ice thickness before heading out on snowshoes or cross-country skis.

I am not an early riser, but once in a while I’ll catch a Lake Muskoka sunrise and it is definitely worth being on time for that after a fresh snow.

The swim ladder should be lifted each year to avoid mangling when the ice starts to thaw and move in spring. But sometimes we forget….

Showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa) is a beautiful, late season lifeline for all the bumble bees that call my meadows home. Its fluffy spires always last through the first few snows.

When we’ve been assured that the ice is thick enough, we set off down the lake with our hiking poles and sometimes our snowshoes too.  It’s easy hiking.

Or we follow the path through the forest and walk the dirt road around the end of the lake and sneak a peek at our place from across the bay.  That’s the screened porch where we eat our summer dinners.

If we’re feeling energetic, we might get into the car and drive the 12 kilometres to the Torrance Barrens, where I like to hike in summer.  My four kids looked kind of like Goths invading the Barrens one December a few years ago.

It is so very peaceful in winter, all the sounds muffled…..

…. all the bog grasses sculpted into snowy hummocks.

The back of the cottage often looks like this after hikes….

….. and if we’re lucky there might be a rosy sunset as day turns to night and we retreat indoors with our books.

I made a little video that captures the flavour of winter in our little bay on Lake Muskoka.  (Listen for the train whistle at 32 seconds.) Oh, did I mention the wind-chill can sometimes freeze your skin in minutes?

WINTER IN THE CITY

In Toronto, winter is a time to work on projects that require long periods of time at my computer. And I can often convince myself to bring my camera outdoors – at least for those initial few beautiful snowfalls of winter – perhaps with a first stop at the living room window to view the Japanese maple through my witches’ balls…
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…. then a walk down the front steps to check on the pollinator island under a snowy blanket.

Maybe wave to the snowplow operator.

If I turn the corner down the driveway to the garden gate…..

…. I might peek through just to get that same ‘secret garden’ thrill I felt when I first installed the heating grate in the 1980s…..

….. then I open the gate and head down the side-yard path that was a driveway once, back when cars were narrow and fit this restricted space.

Under the arch of orange-fruited bittersweet, I see my six pots on the lower deck. They’re planted with hardy sedums and grasses that benefit from that snowy blanket, but it won’t last long since this winter, like 2010 and 2012, is forecast to be relatively mild.

The fruit of my Washington thorn tree (Crataegus phaenopyrum) and bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) — yes, the evil Asian one — wear sweet little snow hats.

I wear a winter hat too, and snap a snowy selfie.

The pond garden looks so lovely when snow covers up all the weeds I didn’t get to pull in autumn and the yews I didn’t manage to prune.

And the sundeck looks pristine until my footprints mess up all the perfect snow. But that’s okay… it’s time to go indoors and take off my boots and turn on some music.

Speaking of music, have a little look at this video of my Toronto garden in winter. I actually forgot that when I filmed the snow falling from inside my kitchen, I was playing a favourite song by Greg Brown on my stereo, sung here on a tribute album by Leandra Peak and Neal Hagberg. Somehow, the lyrics reminded me of the power of winter snow to wash clean the detritus of autumn and this song captures that idea so beautifully. “Wash my eyes that I may see/the yellow return to the willow tree“.

********

Song for a Winter’s Night, Gordon Lightfoot (1967)

It wouldn’t be a blog in #mysongscapes of 2020 without a song. This time, I’m featuring Canadian musical icon Gordon Lightfoot and his beautiful ‘Song For a Winter’s Night’. Though it sounds like a love song he might have written late gazing out a window at the falling snow, the story goes that “the song was written on a hot summer night in Cleveland while Lightfoot was performing there. He was missing his wife of the time, Brita Ingegerd Olaisson, and his thoughts turned to winter.” As to his first wife, there’s actually a neighbourhood connection here. Gordon Lightfoot is a singular talent who has been writing and performing for more than 50 years with classic songs such as If You Could Read my Mind, Early Morning Rain, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, etc.  But when his first marriage to his Swedish wife Brita was ending in the early 1970s (he was married three times with numerous relationships in between), they were living in a rambling house on the corner of the Blythwood ravine just two blocks away from our house in Toronto. It’s long gone and redeveloped now, sold as part of what was (at the time) the largest divorce settlement in Canadian history. The final straw in the marriage breakdown was his affair with Cathy Smith, the subject of his song ‘Sundown’, and the femme fatale (literally) who injected John Belushi with his last speedball.

Okay, enough of the supermarket magazine gossip. Here is Gordon singing his lovely winter song live back in 1967. Try to ignore the goofy introduction and the fact that the audience looks to be hypnotized or perhaps temporarily drugged and just concentrate on the song.  And note the jaunty rhythm.

Now, to illustrate how a song’s arrangement can make a profound difference in how we experience it and connect to it emotionally, listen to fellow Canadian Sarah McLachlan sing the song 27 years later for the 1994 film ‘Miracle on 34th Street‘.

Need I tell you which version I prefer?

SONG FOR A WINTER’S NIGHT, Gordon Lightfoot (1967)

The lamp is burnin’ low upon my table top
The snow is softly falling
The air is still in the silence of my room
I hear your voice softly calling

If I could only have you near
To breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
On this winter night with you

The smoke is rising in the shadows overhead
My glass is almost empty
I read again between the lines upon the page
The words of love you sent me

If I could know within my heart
That you were lonely too
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
On this winter night with you

The fire is dying now, my lamp is growing dim
The shades of night are lifting
The morning light steals across my window pane
Where webs of snow are drifting

If I could only have you near
To breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
And to be once again with with you
To be once again with with you

***********

This is the seventh blog in #mysongscapes series that combine music I love with my photography. If you liked it, check out the others beginning with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’; Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography; Vietnam and Songs of Protest; a visit to Ireland and Galway Bay; Simon & Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. The last one recalled a John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.

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

Kodachrome – A Life in Photography

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When I first listened to Paul Simon’s ‘There Goes Rhymin’ Simon’, released in spring 1973, I was swept away by the rollicking cadence of ‘Kodachrome’, the first song on the album. It was obviously metaphorical, but I loved the bouncing rhythm and the irreverent opening…. “all that crap I learned in high school”.  And it was Simon without Garfunkel, a big change from the 1960s and their hits, ‘The Sound of Silence’, ‘Mrs. Robinson’, ‘The Boxer’.

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

1973 was a bit of a heartbreak year for me. A long relationship had ended and I was in a new job, in a new apartment near the beach in Vancouver, with four white parsons tables that my carpenter dad built for me, a mustard-gold Sears sofa, dozens of plants (it was the 70s after all), a brand-new attitude, and a brand-new turntable and Pioneer receiver (far right in the old photos below).  I played Paul Simon so loud on my new stereo that my downstairs neighbours often took exception and knocked on the ceiling, which of course was the essence of (One Man’s Ceiling is) Another Man’s Floor, from that album.

I still love listening to my music loud, and I still adore this album, though now I have the CD, of course. Sometimes, on the 2-1/2 hour drive north to our cottage, I just keep it in the changer and let it play over and over. Kodachrome, Tenderness, Take Me to the Mardi Gras with its New Orleans gospel vibe, American Tune, St. Judy’s Comet, Loves Me Like a Rock, the Reggae rhythms of Was a Sunny Day, etc.

But what about “Kodachrome”…. the film?  Fifteen years later in 1988, I was married with four kids, living in Toronto, and determined somehow to create a career combining writing, which I loved, with gardening, which I also loved. And somehow, I did it! I had my first piece published in my botanical garden’s newsletter that spring.  It was about my backyard pond.  Six years later, I debuted my newspaper column with the Toronto Sun. After my spring introduction, below, I would be required to provide my own photography each week. That went on for six years with this paper, (okay, it was a tabloid with bikini-clad girls on page 3 and hardly any of my friends ever read it, unless they found it on a streetcar or in a hockey arena dressing room, but still….), then another few years with the National Post. So I became a photographer, too.  And when I discovered I loved photographing plants as much as writing about them, I launched my own stock photo library.

In the early 90s, I used a Pentax point-and-shoot camera to illustrate my gardening articles and columns. Then I bought a new Canon Elan SLR. And yes, in those days (1990-1996) I used Kodachrome 64 slide film. It did produce Paul Simon’s “nice, bright colors” but it had problems, too.  It was high contrast, something that can be problematic in garden scenes in bright light. (And since I was never an early morning riser, preferring to work in my office late at night, I counted on overcast conditions for my optimal outdoor light.) Because of its unique emulsion (something about dye couplers), it meant that development of the film had to be done by Kodak or an approved dealer. When digital began to emerge in publishing in the late 1990s and necessitated the scanning of slides, it was apparent that the emulsion did not behave like the Fujichrome transparencies to which I switched after 1996.  (These are so old that the little kid with the beans in the top row is now a dad of a toddler!)

Today I have an overflowing bookcase filled with many dozens of binders of slides containing tens of thousands of pre-2007 images. Having switched to digital that year, I rarely pull out a binder. (The photo below only shows some of them; the rest are scattered around my office.)

But when I do, I cringe if it’s a Kodachrome slide I need to scan with my Plustek scanner (the successor to my first Coolscan scanner, below it), because it requires a lot of fiddling with the software.  I kept the old Coolscan as a stand so the Plustek insertion frame would not knock into my Canon flatbed scanner below.

Over the years, I went through a lot of cameras and lenses and photo tutorials. In 1998, at a workshop in New Brunswick, when the renowned photographer Freeman Patterson turned my camera from horizontal to vertical to show me the difference it made in framing a scene, I could only watch him in amazement. I wanted to see with his eyes.

My cameras came with me everywhere. This was me in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the 1990s. (My hair was still mostly dark then….)

I’ve been photographing at that wonderful 200-acre arboretum/graveyard in all seasons for more than two decades.  Just one of my many ongoing projects.

Another multi-year photography project is the Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Preserve in Muskoka. One year, a cousin took me up in his plane with the window open (!)….

……so I could get some aerial shots of the Barrens with fall colour.

I recently had a night sky photography lesson there, with well-known photographer Wes Liikane. I blogged about that evening.

By 2014, I was juggling two cameras, one for wide landscapes, like this one at the Toronto Botanical’s Piet Oudolf-designed entry border (I wrote a comprehensive, 2-part blog about Piet’s design of this border) ….

….the other fitted with a 70-200 f 4.0 lens for intimate design vignettes and close-ups of my beloved pollinator insects.

Photographing on safari in South Africa was much more satisfying with my telephoto lens…..

…..which let me zoom in on the eyes of a black-maned lion just waking up.  (I wrote a 3-part blog about that safari at Kapama Game Park here.)

By the time I visited the Wellcome Collection in London en route to Kenya in spring 2016, I had purchased a lightweight, mirrorless 50x-zoom digital camera (Canon SX50 HS).  And rather than draw a self-portrait like the other people had done there….

….. I used my new camera to do a mirrored selfie. (Well, I needed one for Instagram!)

My new zoom telephoto camera had pretty good video and let me focus at a safe distance on the cheetah brothers roaming the savannah at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya a few weeks later.

I’ve had some magazine covers over the years, and many self-illustrated stories inside the pages.

I loved this cover because it illustrated my story inside the magazine on my wild meadows at our cottage on Lake Muskoka.

Indeed, our cottage is where I indulge in my love of nature photography….

…. using my own meadows and wildish garden beds……

…… and hummingbird-friendly containers as my muses.

I’ve done some smoke and mirrors fine art photography over the years. Especially in spring, after six long months of winter.

And I’m crazy about autumn, so I’ve used my light table to create some fall colour fine art…..

….. then had a photography show at the perfect time of year.

But seriously, my old slide light tables are mostly used as superhero or cute-kitten tracing centres now….

….. and most of my non-floral photography these days is devoted to my three grandkids. I’ve made a gallery each year filled with photos and videos and I keep them in a private folder on my Smug Mug site.  A gift to my daughter and son-in-law.

But Smug Mug is also where I keep my bees and butterflies and birds and all the plants I’ve managed to keyword and upload to date, which is about 10% of the total. Sigh……

All those years, all those days spent in gardens with cameras… sometimes three of them… slung over my neck, often for 6 or 7 hours straight. Thank you, Naomi Brooks, for recording the moment on that hot August day in 2016 on New York’s High Line when some helpful tourist suggested I get some harness contraption that would keep all the camera straps straight. That really sounded too logical to me!

Though I’ve spent more hours alone photographing in gardens than I could begin to imagine, from time to time, I had a dear photographer friend, Virginia Weiler (aka Ginny) who would bring her camera from her home in North Carolina and we would play like kids together in various photogenic places that piqued our fancy, like a Civil War graveyard in Charleston. Or we would play hooky from boring symposiums and rent a car and drive to the garden we both wanted to photograph. Or we’d phone each other on a few days notice and say, “Superbloom, California!” and fly out to meet and wander the Mojave Desert or Mount Figueroa in the Santa Ynez mountains to photograph poppies and lupines. That’s us below in April 2004, and below that, Ginny and me at the beautiful 2014 Quebec wedding of Ginny and her partner Claudine.

Cellphone cameras? Selfies? I secretly scoffed at tourists like these ones posing beneath the Statue of Liberty and resisted buying a cellphone of any kind until late 2017 when my family said I should have one for night-time driving emergencies.

Then my Samsung S8 became my easy travel camera for social media updating. And yes…. okay… selfies, too.  I joined the legions of ridiculous people, just like I said I wouldn’t.

But for my stock photo library of plants, I still need the higher resolution of my digital SLRs – and I spend much too much time at my desk late at night photo editing. It is truly a life immersed in photography and I am so happy to be there. Buried so deeply I may never be found.

And when I look at my rainbow array of flora, made especially to illustrate my paintbox garden concept, I do know Paul Simon had it exactly right way back in 1973.  We need “those nice bright colors”….

….. because “everything looks worse in black and white”.

KODACHROME (1973-There Goes Rhymin’ Simon – recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, Alabama. Here’s a little background on the recording.)

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought ’em all together for one night
I know they’d never match
My sweet imagination
Everything looks worse in black and white

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph

So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

********

 

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Here is the entire #mysongscapes list up until the end of winter (and Covid)!

Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’;

Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography;

Vietnam and Songs of Protest;

Galway Bay and memories of my grandfather and Ireland;

Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme;

The John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.

Gordon Lightfoot for a Snow Day

Madame George by Van Morrison – my favourite song in the world

Brown Eyed Girl(s) – Van Morrison’s classic and my black-eyed susans

Raindrops – on flowers and in my gardens

Miss Rumphius and the Lupines

Bring me Little Water – on water in the garden

Amsterdam… Spring Sunshine – a Dutch travelogue and a brilliant Broadway play

Both Sides Now – a reflection on clouds and Joni Mitchell

Crimson & Clover and Other Legumes – a love letter to the pea family, Fabaceae

Mexico – James Taylor serenades in my travelogue of a decade of trips to Mexico

Crystal Blue Persuasion – blue flowers in the garden

My Bonny – remembering the late Laura Smith (and my dad)

Up on the Roof – a Carole King love-in and a lot of green roofs

Singing Malaika in the Serengeti

That Morning Sun – Melody Gardot (who?) and a song of optimism for these times!

Night in the City

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My Night in the City

My favourite night photography session happened because of a full moon. A “Supermoon”, that is, if you’re trying to sell the concept as an advertising ploy, instead of a very normal celestial occurrence during which the full moon comes to within 90 percent of its closest approach to earth, as measured from their respective centres. Anyway, it was November 14, 2016, and I was on a 4:15 pm ferry from Harbourfront to Ward’s Island, a sandy, somewhat bohemian enclave in Lake Ontario just a 20-minute sail away from downtown Toronto.

It was still light when we pulled up to the Ward’s Island dock.

I was there to photograph the supermoon which I strangely believed, without researching, would rise like a golden balloon over the skyscrapers of the city to the north.  I found a spot on a smooth rock on the island’s wildish north shore. It was cold. On a rock beside me sat a young Irish girl named Cheryl, in Canada on a temporary work visa and living with her “brudder”. She fielded a call from him as we sat watching the sky; he was wondering when she’d be home for dinner. “I told ya, I’m out to see the moon!”

And there we waited, two moonstruck women watching the sun set in the west….

…. as geese flew by….

…. and the ferry headed back to town with the vestiges of sunset splashed across the sky.

The sky darkened, the air got colder and I regretted not adding a second layer…..

…. as Porter airplanes flew past the CN Tower homing in on the airport on Centre Island nearby.

Soon the sky was black velvet and the lights twinkled in the financial buildings downtown, a mile or two south of Yorkville, the scene of Joni Mitchell’s Night in the City. It was night in the city, but still no supermoon.

Cheryl and I decided we’d had enough. Clearly we’d missed the moonrise or it had climbed unseen behind some bank of cloud. Disappointed, we said our goodbyes and I wandered slowly along the lit island pathway towards the ferry dock. By chance I gazed up and there was my moon, hazy and framed by a verdant tracery of autumn leaves still hanging onto a tree. It was not a supermoon; it was just my faithful moon, bathing with its glow this cold November night in the city.

Joni’s Night in the City

I met Joni Mitchell once. It was 1996 and Joni was already standing in the elevator I entered at the Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon, the city of my birth. My family and I were staying there while attending a Campbell family reunion to celebrate my Irish-born grandfather’s arrival in Canada eighty-five years earlier. Though Joni was born in Alberta, her family settled in Saskatoon when she was 11 years old, so this was her childhood home. There was a man with her –  well, there was always a man with Joni. Given her towering reputation in song, she was shorter than I thought she’d be, just 5’5”. As the floor numbers lit up on the descent, I succumbed to my inner fangirl and said: “Joni, I’ve always loved ‘Night in the City’. It was on one of the first albums I owned.”  She replied, in a voice made husky by decades of smoking: “Oh, I leave those songs to the young voices now.” On this day, as I recall, she was heading out on a bike to ride along the Saskatchewan River and we smiled at each other as we left the elevator and went our separate ways.

But Joni had her young, soaring voice back in 1967 when she recorded her first album, Song to a Seagull, released in 1968  That year I was in my first apartment in New Westminster, just outside Vancouver. I had a job and a roommate named Jean from work. An older woman, she came from Yorkshire and when she’d had a little too much to drink, she’d say with a thick Midlands accent: “Aye, be gum. It’s champion!” I had the Seabreeze record player I’d brought with me from my family home and Joni’s album, with her fantastical art on the cover, played on it constantly. It was a 2-part LP, a concept album; one disk was titled “I Came to the City”, about Canada, the other “Out of the City and Down to the Seaside”, about California. And all those songs were like poems to my ear.  In fact, Joni dedicated it to her 7th grade English teacher Mr. Kratzman “who taught me to love words”.

The album cover is actually an interesting story. When the sleeve was first printed and packaged by Reprise Records on the album that was going to be titled simply Joni Mitchell, they didn’t notice that Joni had painted a message in flying seagulls and they cut off the last “L” in “Seagull”.  You can see it on older versions of the album, below.  When the mistake was noticed, the album cover was reprinted and the album was re-released with a new title.

To keep viagra sale canada all of the body organs active and cure ill-effects, you need extra support for muscles, joints and veins which can make your stomach uncomfortable. Fact #4: These headaches are medically known as TMJD (Temporo-Mandibular Joint Dysfunction) and require specific headache treatment; so DON’T start medication after merely reading up a few details, and looking across some articles and blogs online! usa viagra no prescription cute-n-tiny.com Consult a reputed doctor before you start any interactions with your partner. Driving the blood towards penis is the cause cute-n-tiny.com super generic cialis of hardening and erection. Hoodia grows in clumps of green upright stems and is levitra buy levitra actually a succulent, not a cactus. Joni’s song ‘Night in the City’ was born in Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood. Though it’s all chic boutiques and restaurants today, in the late 1960s it was a place of coffeehouses and hippies and counterculture: Canada’s Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury rolled into one. In 1968 Joni sang at The Riverboat, 134 Yorkville Avenue. The cover charge was $1.75 to get into a club that hosted folk icons like Odetta, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, Richie Havens and home-grown talent like Ian & Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young and Kris Kristofferson.  It would close ten years later, on June 25, 1978, with the concert of Toronto folksinger Murray McLauchlan, below.

Coincidentally, I saw Murray McLauchlan sing exactly 40 years later at a little club near our summer cottage on Lake Muskoka. He’s on guitar at left, with Toronto singer-songwriter Marc Jordan (‘Living in Marina del Rey’) on guitar in the centre. They are part of a foursome called Lunch at Allen’s with Cindy Church and Ian Thomas.

Joni, who cut her entertainment teeth in Yorkville with her first husband, folksinger Chuck Mitchell, wrote about the scene there and how she came to write ‘Night in the City’:

“So one night I decided I was going to go down, I was going to be very broad-minded, I was going to enjoy myself, I wasn’t going to pay any attention to any of the wise-cracks I got from people as I walked down the street. I was just gonna walk down and groove. And so I did and I stood in front of all of the buildings, like they have about 6 or 7 or 8 – more than that – on Yorkville Avenue proper of music spots like this that showcase everything from good folk music to bad folk music to good rock n roll to bad rock n roll to good jazz to bad jazz. You can stand out in front of the clubs in what I like to call music puddles – it’s the area where the music just kind of hangs and you can walk over that far and you’re out of the range of it again. So that’s what I did and I came home, climbed up the stairs to the place where I was staying and wrote this song, called Night in the City.”

Night in the City

Light up light up
Light up your lazy blue eyes
Moon’s up nights up
Taking the town by surprise

Night time night time
Day left an hour ago
City light time
Must you get ready so slow
There are places to come from
and places to go

Night in the city looks pretty to me
Night in the city looks fine
Music comes spilling out into the street
Colors go flashing in time

Take off take off
Take off your stay-at-home shoes
Break off shake off
Chase off those stay-at-home blues

Stairway stairway
Down to the crowds in the street
They go their way
Looking for faces to greet
But we run on laughing with no one to meet

Night in the city looks pretty to me
Night in the city looks fine
Music comes spilling out into the street
Colors go waltzing in time        © 1966 Gandalf Publishing Co.  

The album was produced by David Crosby (later of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby Stills Nash and Young). He would say: “The strongest thing I did for Joni as a producer on Song to a Seagull, from 1968, was keep everybody else off of that record. She was a folkie who had learned to play what they call an indicated arrangement, where you are like a band in the way you approach a chord and string the melody along. She was so new and fresh with how she approached it. It’s the reason I fell in love with her music. She was a fantastic rhythm player and growing so fast. She had mastered the idea that she could tune the guitar any way she wanted, to get other inversions of the chords. I was doing that too, but she went further. I understood her joy in using bigger tools later – jazz bands, orchestra. But the stuff she did that was basically her, like 1971’s Blue, was her strongest stuff. Match her and Bob Dylan up as poets, and they are in the same ballpark. But she was a much more sophisticated musician.”

Now listen to the young voice of Joni Mitchell… actually two voices, both hers, singing harmony in rounds. And hear 22-year old Stephen Stills playing a very strong bass.  As Joni said:  “He came up with a beautiful bass line that I just couldn’t deny.”  And if you like, do sing along with me on some beautiful night in the city.

******

The blog above is a bit of an experiment for me, the product of a restless mind and a love of photography and music. I decided that 2020 would feature some blogs that combine my photos (not always of gardens or flora) with a little bit of memoir-ish trivia topped with a You Tube video of a favourite – and related – song from the era. I’ve called them #mysongscapes.  If you like the idea, please drop a note below and I’ll do some more. But don’t worry. I will include lots of garden blogs in 2020 as well. Happy New Year!

Postscript:  Here are the other song blogs in this series:

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

Visiting Marjorie’s Garden

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I have a free summer afternoon in Toronto and call my dear friend, garden writer and designer Marjorie Harris. Could I come to see her and bring my camera?  Of course, says she gracefully. Thus, on a hot afternoon at the very end of July, I walk up her midtown street. It’s never difficult to find Marjorie’s house. It’s the one with the luscious green floral tapestry in front. And it’s the one with the biggest ‘Sun King’ aralia (A. cordata) I’ve ever seen. It seems to extend its golden foliage over most of the frontage, on a narrow city lot that measures 20 x 137 feet (6 x 42 metres).

It’s also the garden with rare Japanese umbrella pines (Sciadopitys verticillata) hiding in the undergrowth, along with hellebores and golden hakone grass…..

….and a tiny, jewelled ‘Hana Matoi’ Japanese maple keeping company with Japanese painted fern.

But seriously…. that aralia! I can’t think of another perennial that creates such an element of privacy as this one. However, as Marjorie reminds me, her garden soil is really rich in compost (“lashes of compost” is a favourite phrase of hers) and she has an irrigation system that targets water on plants that really need it.

Marjorie and I spend a half-hour chewing the fat on the front porch. She and I have known each other for three decades. She is a straight shooter (calls a smart woman a “dame”), well organized, energetic and very involved in the cultural heartbeat of the city. And she is still head-over-heels about the garden she created behind the Annex home she has shared with her husband, novelist Jack Batten, for over 50 years. In it, they raised their children — two each from previous marriages — and enjoy visits from their three grandchldren.

She’s just as beautiful as she was in the mid-90s, when she was the editor of Toronto Life Gardens. I wrote articles and book reviews for her in those days, like the one below on landscape designer Neal Turnbull.  It’s hard to imagine this was 23 years ago! (Click for larger versions of the photos).

Later, she became editor-in-chief of Gardening Life magazine and we worked together then, too. (Interestingly, in her Summer 2005 editorial, below, she talks about Larry Davidson of Lost Horizons Nursery, from whom she acquired many of the choice trees and shrubs in her garden.)  Sadly, most of our beautiful, glossy gardening magazines have since disappeared from the publishing landscape in Canada, which is a crying shame.  But that’s a story for another day.

She’s been an ardent feminist all her life. Once, when I was looking through old magazines in my office, I found a 1973 Vancouver Sun Weekend magazine I had saved because it contained an article on the company I worked for at the time (a jade mine… long story). But as I flipped through the pages, I also found a piece titled The Invisible Women by Marjorie Harris.  The topic was “women’s liberation”. That was the beginning of her freelance career, after time spent on staff at Maclean’s and Chatelaine,

And, of course, she’s written tons of books, including the masterful Botanica North America, (to which I contributed some images). Published in 2003, this heavy tome was a rich, encyclopedic treatment of selected naive plants of the biomes of North America.

She was the Globe & Mail‘s gardening columnist for years and does features for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), among many other gigs. As well, she has her own landscape design business, and designed four gardens on her own block. And she goes to France every winter with Jack and makes us all jealous as we shovel the snow back home!

Ah bien, let’s stop chatting on the front porch and head out to see the back garden. And “seeing the garden” is a brilliant reality at Marjorie’s house, even before you actually go outside, because of the fabulous folding glass doors that span the lowered dining room. Designed as part of a 2005 renovation by Lisa Rapaport of PLANT Architect Inc., the glass expanse opened up the view to Marjorie’s exquisite woodland — a mélange of carefully chosen shrubs and trees, many evergreen, whose architecture creates four seasons of interest.

Now let’s step outside into the garden and look back at the house through the colourful tapestry of trees and shrubs. Beside the urn is a red-leaved Japanese maple (Acer palmatum ‘Dissectum Atropurpureum’).  “It was my first expensive plant,” says Marjorie. “I paid $20 for it at Ron’s Garden Centre in the 1980s. Couldn’t believe I’d spend that much money on one plant at the time. It led to madness of course“.

At first it’s not easy to discern a path forward through the abundance, with interesting plants drawing my eye from ground-level to the leafy canopy above. That’s part of Marjorie’s design strategy. As she says: “I find that too often designers miss out on the mid layers in a garden design:  I think mainly about foliage and how leaf shapes relate to one another and then I think about the height of each plant’s maximum effect and how that relates to the whole garden.”

Fittingly, I have to reach above my head and point my camera down to capture this delicious duo, a fullmoon Japanese maple (Acer shirasawanum ‘Aureum’) with colourful barberries below.

On the fence is Clematis ‘Betty Corning’, a spectacular, easy vine that Marjorie laments as being essentially unavailable in the trade.

There are few annuals allowed out here and those invited to stay must pay their rent, like purple-leaved Strobilanthes dyerianus with chartreuse ‘Margarita’ sweet potato vine.  Behind is a glaucous evergreen Marjorie bought to decorate her Christmas table at the corner jug milk store one autumn, “then out to the garden to see just how big it might get,” she recalls. “I love it“.

It’s the exquisite little touches that draw the eye, like this ‘Geisha Gone Wild’ Japanese maple and gold hosta.


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A few choice conifers lend structure and interest in Toronto’s interminable winter, like ‘Algonquin Pillar’ Swiss stone pine (Pinus cembra). “My garden looks good every day of the year except for about 10 days in early spring,” says Marjorie, “when it’s flooded and looking kind of crappy, with all the stuff I haven’t cut down for the winter being brazen enough to be obvious. That I usually clean up myself just because of the shame of it.”

She spends a lot of time looking up at her trees, a remarkable collection, especially given the size of the garden.

There is a beautiful katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) with its heart-shaped leaves and burnt sugar autumn aroma…..

….. and a gorgeous Kentucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus), below, with its intricate compound leaves, the largest of any Canadian native tree.

It’s a favourite among her Carolinian forest natives, including tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera), sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), fringetree (Chionanthus virginicus) and ruby-flowered Calycanthus, below.  “Oxydendron croaked on me,” she admits, “as have several others. I keep trying.”  

A pretty pink astilbe purchased from John’s Garden in Uxbridge grows in dappled shade here, too.

Walking towards the back of the garden, I reach an obelisk adorned with clematis and a nicely pruned blue falsecypress (Chamaecyparis), another one of Marjorie’s Christmas decorations.  Back in the 1980s, Marjorie’s garden featured a unique geometric checkerboard design, with half the spaces in flagstones and the other half choice plants.  In 2002, she hired Earth Inc. to design and install pergolas.  “All seemed fine,” recalls Marjorie, “until the dining room was added in 2005 and then the checkerboard just began to look too fussy.”  So a more streamlined path was substituted leading to this series of pergolas, which allowed space for a more interesting mix of woody plants.

The metal grate under the pergola covers the sump pump.  “The property is build on Seaton Pond flood plain, which rises every spring now that there are not enough trees to drain it properly,” Marjorie explains. “There is an underground stream which is an off-shoot of Taddle Creek, which comes through our garden and under the house. Hoses take the excess ground water out to the street storm sewer; and the stream is dealt with by in-house sump pumps and out through the sewage system.”

Marjorie’s pink floss tree (Albizia julibrissin), below, has now survived three winters. It’s the cultivar ‘Ernest Wilson’, purchased from Jim Lounsbery’s Vineland Nurseries and named for the famous plant explorer who found it in a Korean garden in 1918 and brought seed home to Boston’s Arnold Arboretum. He wrote about it in a 1929 bulletin.  “The origin of the plant in the Arboretum affords a good illustration of the importance of obtaining for northern gardens types which grow in the coolest regions they can withstand. The particular tree was raised from seeds collected in the garden of the Chosen Hotel at Seoul, Korea, by E. H. Wilson in 1918. It grows wild in the southern parts of the Korean peninsula but appears quite at home in the more severe climate of the central region. A few seeds only were collected and seedling plants were set out in the Arboretum when about four years old; several were killed the first winter but one came through with but slight injury and since that time has not suffered in the least. From its behavior during the last seven or eight years there seems reason to believe that this Korean type will prove a useful and valuable addition to gardens. It has a long flowering season, continuing in blossom throughout August.  Albizia is a member of a tropical tribe of the great family Leguminosae and it is astonishing that this tree should be able to withstand New England winters. Apparently it is happy in fully exposed situations, where good drainage and a sandy loam prevail.”

Shredded umbrella plant (Syneilesis aconitifolia) comes from one of Marjorie’s favourite wholesalers, Connon Nurseries, and has the most interesting flowers.

Here is a closeup of those unusual flower panicles.

At the back of her garden is a raised planter filled with an eclectic collection of plants. Says Marjorie: “If a plant looks awful in a client’s garden, I will replace it and I usually bring it home and put it in the Jardin de Refusée. If I don’t want it, one of the crew will and we baby these things along and then they become a respected part of our own gardens. I’ve never sold one of these babies back to clients even though they’ve done well in my garden.  In this garden, you have to drop dead to be removed.”

I try not to take that last sentence as a metaphor as I walk back towards the house, past a young striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum), centre, and a ‘Slender Silhouette’ sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua), right. “Getting the right plant in the right place is a whole lot harder than most people understand,” notes Marjorie. “They want copies of stuff they see in magazines and online and most of the time just won’t work in our climate, our neighbourhoods.  Finding the ideal plant is always my goal, and will it work with the ecosystem I’m trying to build up to satisfy both birds and bugs I want to draw into the garden.  I cannot express how boring those so called minimal “modern” plant designs are.  They don’t work ecologically and they require huge amounts of work to keep on looking neat.  Nature is not neat.”

But gazing back past the Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’, left) and the ‘Herman’s Pillar’ barberry (Berberis thunbergii), right, below…

….. I think that this lovely paradise in the Annex represents a leafy manifestation of Marjorie’s life and career: long, rich, full of interesting things acquired with care and intent, and a joy in every season.

Finally, here’s a little taste of a mid-summer day in the garden. The birds and cicadas are a bonus. Thanks for the visit, Marjorie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oJtmQaZTmk&feature=youtu.be

A Chilean Wine Tour

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We spent 3 weeks of March cruising the valleys of Chile and Argentina drinking wine. A lot of wine. Mostly sipping and occasionally spitting, of course, as one does on a wine tasting tour, but always enjoying wine with dinner and often wine with lunch. And I discovered not only that these countries are producing a lot of excellent wines in the verdant valleys at the base of the Andes, but that ‘garden’ and ‘nature’ often intersect with ‘vineyard’ in a way the piqued my personal interest. This tour with Toronto’s Steve Thurlow, after all, was a bit of a balancing equation after 3 weeks touring gardens in New Zealand in 2018, aka “Janet’s tour”. Now we were celebrating Doug’s passion, wine-collecting, while escaping a slug of nasty Canadian winter in the southern hemisphere. So…. what did we see that might interest my blog readers? Have a look below. (And I promise to get back to the last few New Zealand gardens very soon.)

Approaching Chile – We flew overnight, a 10-1/2 hour flight from Toronto, and as dawn broke over the Andes as we neared Santiago, I looked down at the most unusual cloud formation over the Pacific Ocean. Later, as we listened to various winemakers talk about the effect of marine fog and the cold Humboldt Current on grape growing, I realized that what I had seen was not cloud, but a blanket of marine fog. The Humboldt Current originates in waters north of the Antarctic circle and flows along the coast of Chile to northern Peru. It is named for Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th century Prussian naturalist who explored South America and recorded the temperatures of the current in his 1846 book Cosmos.

Santiago, Chile – We spent a few days in Chile’s capital and took a hop-on-hop-off bus to gain a fast understanding of this city. With a population of 7-million (2017 figures) across its 37 municipalities (conurbation) in a nation of 18-million people, it is the seventh largest city in Latin America. In the residential areas under San Cristobal hill, where I made the photo below after arriving in a cable car, it also has a lovely green canopy.

Although I saw a lot of Chilean wine palms on our trip, this view of Santiago is framed by a Canary Island date palm (Phoenix canariensis). With its central Chile location, Santiago has a semi-arid Mediterranean climate.

That night, I had my first pisco sour cocktail at the rooftop bar of the Magnolia Hotel, where we stayed. Here we see containers of society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea), which we would see used prolifically in many more Chilean gardens.

Veramonte, Casablanca Valley, Chile – After driving out of Santiago via a tunnel through the coastal mountains, we visited our first winery. In the gardens here, I saw old favourites, goldenrod (Solidago sp.) and Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia). Like many vineyards, Veramonte subscribes to sustainable practices and encourages an ecological balance, which includes gardens…..

….. and ponds for birds that eat insects, and often…..

….. the inclusion of native Chilean plants like romerillo (Baccharis linearis), which we saw along the highways.

The mountains are never far away from Chilean vineyards, and often grapes are grown on steep slopes of the foothills.

There were also the brown bracts of artichokes…..

…. and of course, lots of luscious grapes, like these bunches of Syrah. If you go to Chile in March, you hit the middle of harvest time (the equivalent of our September), which begins with Sauvignon Blanc and ends with Carmenere.

Concón, Chile – After our lunch at Veramonte, we drove to the seashore near Concón, where our hotel for the next 3 nights, the Radisson Blu Acqua Hotel, featured crashing waves right below our window…..

…..and an amazing living wall over the parking lot.

Casas del Bosque, Casablanca Valley, Chile – This vineyard, which we visited the following morning, featured a pretty garden…..

….and a shrub/small tree we would see a lot in Chile, crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica).

Like New Zealand, we saw our fair share of agapanthus too.

Viña Emiliana, Casablanca Valley, Chile – Our luncheon tasting was at this organic, biodynamic vineyard which featured some principles like planting and pruning according to the moon phases, using interplantings of nitrogen-enriching legumes, etc. They had water gardens…..

…. and baby alpacas! That pretty plant in the photo below is Mexican sage (Salvia leucantha); we would see a lot of that in Chile and Argentina, too.

I bought my only wine here, a really lovely Rosé which I served last weekend for Easter dinner.  (Plus I loved the wrapping!)

Viña Casa Marin, San Antonio Valley, Chile – It was a thrill to visit this winery and meet Maria Luz Marin, aka Marilu, Chile’s first female oenologist. There I am in green raising a glass of a very nice Sauvignon Blanc.

Valparaiso, Chile – An evening visit to Valparaiso saw us touring part of this historic city on foot, and using the 1893 Artillería ascensor or funicular railway to negotiate one of the many hillsides.

Valparaiso was the main port of Latin America for goods from Europe until the construction of the Panama Canal, after which its fortunes declined. It is still a major port and we looked out on the view of the harbour…

…. which was very busy with containers being loaded.

Walking up and down city streets, the decline is still evident through the city, though it is now enjoying a renaissance as a cultural centre. It is also a UNESCO heritage site.

Sweet little gardens adorned brightly painted houses.

Street art is a big thing in parts of Valparaiso. I loved this staircase leading to one of the more famous mural lanes. It says Tu no puedes comprar al sol – “You cannot buy the sun.”

This painting “Young Girl’ by France’s Mr Papillon for Hostel Voyage is famous in street art circles.

And how about these little pop bottle windowboxes?

Viña Chocalán, San Antonia Valley, Chile – We enjoyed our morning tasting at the Malvilla vineyard of the Toro family winery Chocalán…

…..one of two vineyards owned by the Toros, who began 60 years ago as wine bottle producers.

We sipped whites and rosés in the shade of a grape-laden pergola…….

…. followed by a winery tour with Aida Toro, who encouraged us to taste the Sauvignon Blanc grapes.  While ripe wine grapes usually taste sweet and delicious, it’s the complex development of tannins and other factors that separate the wine from the grape.

We had a second Chocalan tasting indoors, in a room with a wonderful view of the mountains.

We finished with a lovely lunch at a long family table out in the vineyards where we enjoyed a delicious barbecue and more wine. 

Cono Sur Vineyards and Winery, Colchagua Valley, Chile – This big operation, owned by Concha Y Toro, was our first winery in the Colchagua Valley. It was a hit with our group, not just for the lovely 19th century guest house that serves as the reception area…….

….. but for the bicycles they offered to let guests cycle out to the distant vineyards, just as the grape pickers still do today.

Two decades ago, Cono Sur (named for the ‘southern cone’ of Chile) switched to sustainable agriculture practices, featuring integrated vineyard management and carbon footprint reduction. They use sheep to curtail weeds and geese to eat a beetle that harms spring grapes. The geese are kept caged at night at night in spring against foxes and later in the season because they love the taste of ripe grapes.

Cono Sur also uses native species as companion plants to introduce an ecological balance to the vineyard, much like the natural hedgerows of British farm fields. Shown here are salvia roja (Salvia microphylla) and the Chilean pepper tree (Schinus molle). Nearby was sweet-scented lemon verbena (Aloysia virgata).

We were fortunate to see some of the manual and mechanical wine-sorting at Cono Sur during our visit. Leaves, rachis (the main bunch stem) and individual grape stems are composted outdoors over the Chilean winter and the compost is then used to feed the grapevines.

Here’s a look at some of the Cono Sur winery harvest action, and the tasting remarks of one of the winery’s winemakers, Carol Koch.

Yes, we tasted each one of these wines…..

…..followed by a delicious lunch featuring an unusual, beautiful and delicious avocado-frosted savoury torte.

Viña Ventisquero, Colchagua Valley, Chile – We were told to wear comfortable shoes for our late afternoon visit to this hillside winery……

….. and as I walked up the switchback dirt road in my sparkly flip-flops, I kicked myself for leaving the hiking shoes at the hotel.

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Note that many of the vines here are single staked, rather than trained laterally. This is common on steep hillsides.

Ventisquero means an exposed, windy place on the mountains and this lovely vineyard aerie gave us a spectacular view of the surrounding valley.

Thanks to tour member Kathy who captured me photographing the vineyard.

Our evening ended with a stunning sunset. 

Viña MontGras, Colchagua Valley, Chile – This winery stop was such fun because their own guide, Marcelo, was a born entertainer.  He quizzed us constantly.

Out in the vineyard, he taught us the shapes of the various varietal leaves.

In the winery, he gave us a ‘tasting’ quiz (including ungainly photo of the blogger, below) and asked us to guess. It was easy: ‘Sauvignon Blanc’.

Chile suffered a devastating earthquake in 2010. (In fact, Chile is the site of the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, the May 22, 1960 Valdivia 9.5 Mw earthquake, which left 2 million people homeless.)  At our lunch after our tasting in the courtyard, our attention was drawn to the earthquake-mitigating beam joints in MontGras’s building construction.   

Viña Montes, Colchagua Valley, Chile – Our last visit in the Colchagua Valley was to Aurelio Montes’s elegant winery.

We walked across a large ornamental pool that is used to circulate water in the winery, including a fountain in the reception area, according to Feng Shui principles.

And if you like that, you might enjoy listening to the Gregorian Chant that Montes plays constaly for the wines aging in the barrel rooms.

Montes features a multi-floor gravity flow for its winemaking, eliminating the need for pumps. You can see the orange-wrapped chutes leading to the fermentation tanks in their modern facility. Following our tour, we were bused up the hillside to an al fresco barbecue dinner.

Viña Santa Ema, Maipo Valley, Chile – Architecture was front and centre at this family vineyard…..

….. where our wine tasting included some very nice nibbles before a lunch.

 

Casa Real Hotel –  Santa Rita, Maipo Valley, Chile – By the time we got to this venerable old hotel owned by Santa Rita wines – including its historic, 40-hectare estate garden – I was a bit wiped out. Given that we were spending two nights at this luxurious 16-room hotel, and this was our guest room….

…. including a delightful sitting room, I decided to play hooky from the next day’s tour stop, Santa Carolina wines and just hang out and investigate the property.

This is the front of the hotel, and though it was almost out of bloom, the bougainvillea draped over the cypress is reputed to be the biggest in Chile. Viña Santa Rita was founded in 1880 by the businessman Don Domingo Fernández Concha. As well as establishing his adjacent vineyards, he hired the German architect Teodoro Burchard to design this building, his summer home….

….as well as the adjoining neo-Gothic chapel….

…. especially for his daughter’s wedding.

I loved this loggia.

We toured the estate before and after our wine tasting – the smell of jasmine was intoxicating.

The garden was designed for Don Domingo Fernández Concha in 1882-85 by the French-born landscape designer Guillermo Renner (1843-1924), who was also the Director of Gardens of Santiago and the Municipal Plant Breeder and is considered to be the “father of landscaping in Chile”. It mixes elements of Italian, French and English styles.

In a spacious pond, we found a pair of black-necked songs who seemed to be singing plaintively for their supper.

Amidst the abundant orchards and citrus groves…..

…. and arboretum-like plantings of trees from around the world, like these ghost gums (Eucalyptus)….

….. was a very modern swimming pool.

A surprising feature of the Casa Real estate was a beautiful, modern museum, Musee Andino, featuring an amazing collection of pre-Columbian artifacts…

…. including pottery, textiles, sculpture, tools and a roomful of gold antiquities.

On my walk outside the estate, I looked longingly beyond a fence onto a nearby hillside where the native flora included the Chilean cactus Echinopsis chilensis.  That splash of scarlet on the side of some of the cacti is not flowers but a parasitic cactus mistletoe (Tristerix aphylla). Oh how I would have loved to climb that hill!

Viña Perez Cruz, Maipo Valley, Chile – With the Casa Real as our base, we visited this nearby winery/almond plantation with the most spectacular architecture, designed by José Cruz Ovalle, who used curved laminated wood to create optimal air movement within the building….

…. and built Inca-inspired pirca stone walls everywhere!

Viña Errázuriz, Aconcagua Valley, Chile – My favourite winery was also our last one in Chile. Beautiful Errázuriz took the honours for landscape design with dramatic entrance gardens and reflecting pools leading to the original 1870 bodega and winery constructed by founder Don Maximiano Errázuriz over 15 years. The Errázuriz name is very familiar to Chileans, since four men in the family ultimately became president of the nation. The terraced hillside of the Aconcagua Valley behind is actually the base of one of the foothills of the Andes, which we would cross the next morning.

Scalloped garden beds flanked the vineyards and drew the eye towards the modern Don Maximiano Iconic Winery, built in 2010 and designed to look like a ship sailing through a sea of vines.

I loved the way the line of reflecting pools seems to extend up into the linear grape plantings. Bubblers come on intermittently to keep these pools clear.

We saw South African native society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) in many gardens in Chile.

Designed by architect Samuel Claro out of bleached concrete, the Don Maximiano Iconic Winery was built to bring Errazuriz wines into the 21st century, using cutting edge winemaking technologies, environmental sustainability and solar and geothermal energy. It is used exclusively for Errazuriz’s high-end red labels.

Grasses and low shrubs frame the view of the vineyards from the entrance.

Inside, the process of fermentation and aging features gravity movement of fruit and liquids from the top floor to the tanks and barrels on the two floors below. All three floors can be seen in the image below.

For our Errazuriz wine-tasting, we moved to the old winery where bricks were mortared together almost a century-and-a-half ago with a mixture of egg whites and sand. The cellar rooms alone took 5 years to complete.

Casks in the old cellar are made of raulí beech (Nothofagus alpina), a native Chilean tree.

After the tasting, we moved to the outdoor restaurant where we were treated to delicious appetizers….

….. and a lovely lunch.

It seemed like a fitting place to say goodbye to Chile with a vacation snapshot of Doug and me.  (And this is officially my longest blog ever…..)

Next up on the tour: Through the Andes into Argentina.