What Moves Through a Garden
When we tend to our gardens, we make decisions based on a kind of assumed permanence. We plan and plant as if the systems we see will remain. Gardens change through the seasons, but in the long term, we often treat them as stable. Each spring, the thaw forms a seasonal creek that runs from […]
Timing in the Garden
It’s that time of year again. Birds start chirping, the sun feels brighter, and bulbs begin to poke through the leafy layer left by fall. This is about timing. Every spring, this presents a dilemma. When bulbs emerge through the leaf layer, I know that if I wait too long, they will grow through the […]
Plants
Plants Before plants arrive, a garden is a meeting of land and a gardener, held as a kind of dream. Where they meet, the dream is planted, and plants happen. They are the response to the conditions. They are the effect. Plants express the garden continuously. As conditions change, they change. Water ebbs and flows, […]
Techniques
Techniques When you stand in a space you would like to call a garden, tools at hand, you are at the threshold of action. You are where a garden becomes gardening. Gardening develops where land, body, and tools meet. Techniques do not add a layer to the garden. They are where prior forces finally act […]
Tools
Tools So here you stand, in a space you would like to call a garden. Land is beneath your feet. You are settled in your body, accepting consequence. With land and body in place, you reach for a way of making a garden: tools. Tools won’t make a garden, but a gardener without them will […]
On Becoming a Gardener
On Becoming a Gardener About body, time, and learning to listen I didn’t set out to become a gardener. I was on a different path, and became one along the way. What follows is not a change of careers so much as a change in attention. When I was younger, I wanted to write soundtracks. […]
What Is a Garden
What Is a Garden Before Making a Garden Most people think of a garden as something finished: a look, a layout, a set of plants that finally make sense together. But a garden begins earlier than that. It starts before tools come out, before anything is planted or moved. It begins the moment a piece […]
THE JOYS OF WEEDING (Part 1)
About the human body, hand tools, and finding what works for you.
Dear Reader,
Like a parachute, Grimsby’s trees suddenly deployed their canopies and we landed mid-spring. It seems just yesterday the Niagara Escarpment was bare and brown, now it’s a sea of green so dense you can no longer see the ridge from below. Even blooms and buzzing bees have awakened. The air is fragrant with lilacs, crabapples and korean spice viburnums. The long weekend, an early one this year, has come and gone. It rained before, and it’s raining again. Gardeners, roll up your sleeves, spring cleanups are on their way out; it’s weeding time!
THE LITTLE SEDGE UNDER THE OLD OAK
About where inspiration comes from
Dear Reader,
Beneath Grimsby’s last remaining old growth oaks, near the fairytale Grimsby beach homes, grows a partly shaded garden. Its steel blue and burgundy foliage, highlighted by white margins, display annually on a carpet of black mulch. But as enchanting as are the globe blue spruces, Japanese maples and carpets of variegated hostas, what interested me most last Thursday was a small patch of fine bright green grass.
The grass, planted a few years ago, has established well in its sandy dry shade corner.
THE LONG AWAITED RETURN OF YELLOW WILLOWS
Dear Reader,
There is such a thing as the perfect day for cutting sod.
I finally got a sod cutter the Saturday before last. A manual one – looks like an 1300’s plough with V-shaped handles, but instead of a share there’s a horizontal 12” blade attached to an equally wide roller. It works like a charm, if charms worked with a kick and a grunt.
It is a significant improvement over the fork and hand hoe method, having tripled my work speed. The sharp blade slices soil easily and evenly. It’s counter-balanced by the weight of the roller, so when you put your body weight