The past week has been a full one! Mom came home for the week, Connor attended a day camp in Stratford, Ontario for four out of five days, Mom and I painted the front porch, and the three of us planted more grass seed.

Connor’s day camp was actually only two hours each morning. It’s a 40 minute drive to Stratford, so while Connor was enjoying his time at ‘camp’, Mom and I would stick around for some adventures of our own. Keep reading for the details of our adventures and to see photos of a few of Stratford’s amazing gardens.

Most well-known for its Shakespearean Festival and other live theatre venues, Stratford is also a city of beautiful architecture and stunning gardens. Although official tours are offered, Mom and I chose to take small impromptu and unofficial tours, both on and off the beaten paths.
continue reading "Stratford Day Camp & Garden Tours"

I absolutely love garden watching. There’s no better way to gather inspiration for your own garden than to take the time to stop and smell the roses, or in this case, view the poppies in someone else’s garden.

While driving to the farm to do some work last week, I was greeted by this glorious site!

There was no way I could just drive by - I had to stop to take some pictures of these stunning poppies. I’ve never tried growing poppies in my own garden, but after seeing the vibrant orange-red of these beauties, I may no longer be able to resist.

The occupant of the house where I spotted this amazing display of poppies was just getting ready to leave, but was more than happy to linger long enough for a brief chat about these current ’stars’ in his garden and allow me to take some photographs.

I drove past this same garden one week earlier and there wasn’t even a hint of the brilliant color that would greet me on my next trip. Here is tangible proof that gardens are in a constant state of change. If we don’t slow down and take notice of the changes as they occur, we’ll miss them entirely.

I’m so glad I took the time to slow down and stop. I hope these poppy pictures encourage you to slow down a little as well.

Summer has just begun and you can be guaranteed that I’ll be doing a lot more slowing down and stopping over the next few months to take advantage of many more garden photo opportunities. My eyes will be wide open and my camera will be ready!

Wow, what a difference a few weeks makes in the appearance of a garden! Come along for an early June garden tour.

The three Bridalwreath Spirea shrubs are fully loaded and bending under the weight of thousands of glorious white blossoms.

It’s hard to believe they are the same scrawny, spindly specimens we planted last year.
continue reading "How Our Garden Grows - June"

The last long weekend of the summer has come and gone. As with previous long weekends this summer I snuck in a little garden watching. Take a look at what I found at Colpoy’s Bay (Wiarton).

I love this garden. I’ve walked past it every summer for the past four years. At any given time over the spring, summer and fall there is always a profusion of blooms. It starts off as a woodsy, natural garden at the front, as shown in the picture above and changes to more of a cottage-style, full-to-overflowing garden in the back.

With meandering paths, a water feature, and multiple rustic trellises, this garden seems to have it all. And if you ever get tired of looking at the garden, there’s always the view of the bay. On this particular weekend the garden boasted massive quantities of purple coneflower and rudbeckia at their peak.

I couldn’t resist a repeat visit to Rural Roots. I had to make the donation that I didn’t have cash for on an earlier visit this summer. Truth be told, any excuse would do.

I missed mentioning in my previous post, Gardens Off The Beaten Path, that Tom Ashman at Rural Roots holds workshops on building cedar trellises, arbors and obelisks. The above photo displays one of his trellises in operation. The garden was gorgeous as always. The highlight of this visit was the anemones in bloom and the monarch butterflies flitting about the butterfly bushes.

Even long weekends are too short and before I knew it I had to head home. I thought my weekend garden watching was over, but much to my delight when I was almost home I had the pleasure of spotting this glorious site.

This gardener is working with a white and green color scheme and the results are outstanding! White hydrangeas are surrounded by hostas with fragrant white blooms. The white anemones are just coming out under the bow window. Hostas and anemones have been long-time favorites of mine, but I might just have to add a hydrangea to my collection next year. Good to know that I don’t have to travel far to find garden inspiration. This one is just a short walk away!

There is an absolutely amazing garden to be found hiding in the woods just off the road between Wiarton and Oliphant at the base of the Bruce Peninsula. It’s called Rural Roots. I’d visited several years ago, and couldn’t resist the urge to pop back in to see what was new.

The rugged terrain of the Bruce Peninsula (rocks, rocks and more rocks) doesn’t make for easy gardening and soil to plant in is pretty much non-existent. It’s for this reason that the beds at Rural Roots are created in containers - old tires for the most part. It might sound tacky, but the results are anything but! This is container gardening in its finest form. The gardens are so beautiful and natural looking that the tires virtually disappear.

Scattered throughout the gardens you can find many unusual and unique features and characters. The two key characters at Rural Roots are the owners, gardeners and resident hosts, Tom and Dee Ashman. On the day I stopped in, I had the pleasure of chatting with Tom while he was watering in the garden. The gardens were glorious, just as I remembered, and Tom proved to be a wealth of information. While he tended to the watering I picked his brain on multiple topics and snapped a few photos.

Some of the topics we discussed were:

• Leaf miners and how they destroy the leaves on columbines.
• Preventing mildew on phlox.
• How to trim Spiderwort so it keeps blooming throughout the summer.

I had lots more areas of curiosity and questions I could have asked, but didn’t want to completely bombard him - thought I’d save some for my next visit! Sooner than later - I have no intention of waiting for several years to pass between this visit and the next! I’ll get into the specifics of our discussions in a later post where I can give them the attention I think they deserve.

If you’re ever in the area, I highly recommend that you stop in for a garden tour. Admittance and parking are free, however, they do accept donations. I didn’t have any cash with me the day I was there, so I’ll be doubling up my donation amount on the next trip - it’s so worth it!

Rural Roots can be found here.

Just like cottages are tucked into any and every available space in a beach town, so too are the gardens. Last week, while on vacation, I took a drive through the beach town of Sauble Beach. You may remember the cottage garden from an earlier post, All the Cool Gardens are at the Beach. That cottage garden piqued my curiosity and I wanted to see what other types of gardens I could uncover at the beach.

The garden styles at the beach vary as much as the cottage styles. Here are pictures of two totally different garden styles that I discovered on my drive.

The first shot is of a garden at a waterfront cottage. Obviously the sun, sand and surf agree with this garden because it is absolutely thriving! Lots of textures in the plantings - variations of green, and a mixture of shrubs and perennials.

This next photo is of a little garden carved out in a secluded spot at the back of an old-time cottage. I almost missed this one!

Although you can’t really tell by the photograph, this garden is surrounded by tall trees. It just so happens that it is situated in the only spot in the yard with enough sun for the lilies and the hollyhocks to grab on to what they need to grow and to provide beautiful blooms for the keeper of the cottage and the most alert pedestrians and motorists.

Garden watching is almost as much fun as people watching - just like people, gardens have their own individual personalities, characteristics and quirks.

Summer has only just begun, so keep your eyes peeled for more additions to the Garden Watching category.

My camera goes everywhere I go - it’s a good thing. While spending a sunny afternoon at Sauble Beach earlier this summer, I came across this beautiful cottage garden and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a picture.

Full and lush, it spills over onto the concrete sidewalk, sharing the space with thousands of people throughout the summer season. I watched people as they were strolling past and it was as though some had never seen a garden before or maybe they were just taken by the unexpectedness of it, as I was. Somehow it survives all the poking and prodding from hands big and small that can’t help but touch and sometimes pick the glorious blooms.

I may have inadvertently stumbled onto a new summer activity here. Instead of people watching at the beach this year, I think I’ll do some garden watching instead!