Malverleys – A Garden of Rooms

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On my recent trip to England with Carolyn Mullet’s Carex Tours, one of the most beautiful gardens we saw was Malverleys, a private home in East Woodhay, Hampshire featuring an 1870s house on a 60-acre estate, of which 10 acres are intensively gardened, and the rest parkland or sheep pasture. We strolled in past the Topiary Meadow, formal yew topiaries in an ebullient meadow of wildflowers and grasses, reminiscent of the meadow at Great Dixter that I’d seen just days earlier. That isn’t surprising, perhaps, since Malverleys’ grounds manager is…..

……Mat Reese, who after training in horticulture at college, worked at Wisley, then Kew, before working with the late Christopher Lloyd at Dixter. Mat has become well-known in English gardening circles for his regular features in Gardens Illustrated that explore design principles he’s used at Malverleys. He makes a few introductory remarks, then leads us on our tour.

We begin in the Cloister Garden with its long rill and arching fountains leading from a statue of Neptune under a double allée of Japanese cherries.

The walls of the Cloister Garden are layered Cotswold stone topped with curved York stone slabs and adorned here and there with red valerian (Centranthus ruber). On our visit, the beautiful climbing rose ‘Meg’ was in full bloom.

‘Meg’ is a repeat-flowering, fragrant climber introduced in 1954 and still winning plaudits.

One of the notable features at Malverleys is that the gardens almost always frame the view from one garden into another . Here we see the neighbouring Hot Garden from the Cloister….

…… and the perfect frame of the statuary in the Cloister looking back from the Hot Garden.

Note the view from the sunken Hot Garden to the ornate chicken house/dovecote across the way. Though this garden was going through what the English call “the June gap” between the bulbs and early perennials of spring and the fulsome bloom of midsummer, it features a host of vibrantly-coloured trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants. The shrub rose at left, below,

…. is a dark-eyed cultivar called ‘For Your Eyes Only’, part of a trend in rose hybridization to use Rosa persica, which was once classified as Hulthemia persica but has now joined the Rosa genus.

The Hot Garden features strong colours of red, orange, pink and yellow with foliage extending from purple to chartreuse-gold. Aquilegia ‘Yellow Star’, Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’ and a lupine I believe is ‘Beefeater’.

Special plants are used here and in all the gardens. Below is Toona sinensis ‘Flamingo’ with its pink spring foliage that turns yellow before becoming green in summer.

I’m a great fan of lime and chartreuse foliage to liven the garden, and Cornus controversa ‘Aurea’, below, with its layered branching is one of the finest large shrubs.

At a different scale, but also bearing delightful gold leaves is the golden ghost bramble, Rubus cockburnianus ‘Goldenvale’.

The view, below, at the entrance into the Pond Garden from the Hot Garden is one of my favourite images from my stay in England.   The statue is framed by Magnolia ‘Susan’ and the cascading flowers of Wisteria x valderi ‘Burford’. To the right are the yellow umbel flowers of giant fennel, Ferula communis and at lower right, Phlomis fruticosa. The wisteria is a hybrid of W. brachybotrys x W. floribunda, by wisteria expert James Compton, formerly head gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden.

Though the pond is a formal rectangular shape, its plantings are naturalistic, evoking a pond in a wild setting. Once again, you also see the view right through to the chicken house.

Next up is the Cool Garden with its copper water basin and relaxed planting scheme of blues, lavenders, whites and mauves.

Here the formality of the statuary contrasts with the cottage garden ethos

There’s a meadow-like quality to combinations here, like the columbines, blue woodruff and pink chervil.

Annuals such as blue woodruff (Asperula orientalis), below, are used throughout Malverleys to lend colour thorughout the season.

I love the delicate pink flowers of hairy chervil (Chaerophyllum hirsutum ‘Roseum’), one of many perennial umbellifers used at Malverleys.

Another annual used extensively by Mat in several gardens is slender corn cockle, Agrostemma gracile ‘Pink’, native to Greece. Below we see it with creeping navelwort, Omphalodes verna.

The most intensively-gardened part of Malverleys is the area around the 1870s house – a parallel border along the terrace, the East Border separating it from the other gardens and the Wedding Ring Border leading from the entrance, where Mat Reese lost his ring many years ago. Here, a late lilac was in flower, Syringa x josiflexa ‘Bellicent’ bred in 1936 by the renowned Canadian hybridist Isabella Preston.

Colours in the house borders are rich and jewel-like, with lots of purple, blue, magenta and red.

The walls of the 1870 Victorian mansion are cloaked with climbers……

….including Rosa ‘Buff Beauty’ and the yellow form of Lady Banks’ rose, R. banksiae ‘Lutea’. Plants like santolina are allowed to spill across the paving.

In the Terrace Garden is a single hybrid tea whose interesting pedigree resonated with Mat Reese. For this particular rose, ‘Mrs. Oakley-Fisher’, from 1921, is a cutting that came from a rose at Great Dixter that was in turn grown as a cutting sent by Vita Sackville-West to Christopher Lloyd many decades ago.

Again, we see the beautiful Lupinus ‘Beefeater’ in the house border, paired with the lilac-purple Californian native lacy phacelia, Phacelia tanacetifolia.

The bright magenta Byzantine gladiolus, G. communis var. byzantinus, plays a starring role in the house border, along with various alliums, perennial geraniums, eryngium, honeywort (Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’) and tall mauve corn cockle (Agrostemma gracile ‘Pink’).

Here is a detail from this lovely purple-blue-magenta border: Eryngium x zabelii ‘Big Blue’ & Geranium ‘Dragon Heart’

And another pretty pairing with slender corn cockle, Agrostemma gracile ‘Pink’ and Geranium ‘Brookside’

Leaving the House Garden, we come to The Stumpery. Popular in the Victorian era, it is described on the Malverleys website as a “woodland folly constructed out of a collection of old tree stumps positioned at dramatic angles”. Irrigated via overhead misting, it creates moisture needed for tree ferns and other shade-lovers.

There is a slightly Jurassic Park feeling to this little garden.

Heading into the big Walled Garden, we come to a spectacular sight whose flowering was timed just perfectly for our visit: the magnificent laburnum arch (L. watereri var. vossii). I have visited the late Rosemary Verey’s famous laburnum arch at Barnsley House (and chatted with her in her dining room) and have strolled the lovely laburnum walk at Vancouver’s VanDusen Botanical Garden, but neither was as lusciously floriferous as Malverleys.

The Walled Garden is large and diverse. It features cutting gardens, a peony border, a tennis court (below)……

….. and ornate fruit cages.

I am delighted to see Malverleys’ fabulous specimen of the famous Rosa ‘Climbing Cecile Brunner’ at peak bloom. How lucky to be in England in a June when the roses here and in the Rose Garden at Kew, which I visited days earlier, are perfection. This rose was introduced in California in 1894 by the German-born breeder Franz B. Hosp, who noticed the long wands of flowers sporting on one of the Cecile Brunner polyantha sweetheart shrub roses he grew and selected it as a climber. Repeat-flowering, it will reach 6 m (20 ft) when happy.

The Kitchen Garden contains a profusion of leafy vegetables, many now destined to be featured in the brand-new…..

……Malverleys Farm & Dining  shop which just by chance happens to have its grand opening on the day of our visit. According to a December article in the Sunday Times, Emily von Opel, who with her husband Georg owns Malverley and loves walking the paths of the garden to “escape from the hustle and bustle of life”, decided to open the space to serve dishes made from the produce of the kitchen garden, provide a workshop venue and offer British-made homewares and plants for sale.

Doesn’t this bouquet say “June”, with all its romantic profusion?

Plants are offered for sale as well.

Finally…. I’ve saved the best for last, because Malverleys has justifiably become famous for its luscious White Garden. And having visited Sissinghurst’s renowned version just the week before, I would have to say that Mat Reese scores the grand prize for his interpretation, which is clearly at its peak in early June. Though most of the plants feature white flowers, there are a few, like the strongly-perfumed hybrid musk Rosa ‘Penelope’ with its pale peach-pink blossoms, included.

Peonies, white foxgloves, Eremurus ‘Joanna’, Lupinus ‘Noble Maiden’ and wisteria surround one of four formal raised pools in the White Garden.

And a final image from the White Garden of Papaver orientale ‘Royal Wedding’ and Lupinus ‘Polar Princess’. Thanks to Malverleys, for its horticultural excellence, beautiful design and generosity to the community.

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Like English gardens? Visit my blog on Dan Pearson & Huw Morgan’s ‘Hillside’ in Somerset.

Hillside:  Dan Pearson and Huw Morgan in Somerset

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It is somewhat daunting to write about a garden whose owners are a world-renowned designer with a lyrical, thoughtful writing style and a photographer-writer who chronicles their garden’s finest moments (and his own delicious recipes) in mouth-watering images for their beautiful online magazine Dig Delve. But to visit Hillside is to be enchanted – by its story, its scope, its exquisite melding of the garden to the land, and the land to the garden, and what came long before. So I will attempt to capture a little of the great joy of my short time there in early June.    

We start in the outdoor kitchen where our gracious and hospitable hosts, Dan Pearson, left, and Huw Morgan, right, serve us a refreshing elderflower concoction in pretty pottery cups. Here we hear a little history before wandering the 20-acre smallholding near Bath, which they purchased in 2010 from the estate of the previous owner, Raymond Lewis, an elderly farmer born on the property who had grazed his cattle to the very edges of the rolling limestone pastures and milked the cows in an old tin barn. Upon his death, friends living across the stream at the bottom of the valley below told Dan and Huw that the property was available. After walking the fields with the farmer’s brother, visiting the old orchard and inspecting the house that had last been decorated when the brothers’ mother was alive, Dan wrote later in The Guardian: “There were no ifs, buts or maybes. No doubt. It was where we wanted to be.”  It would take three trips from London eight months later, the car boot jammed with favourite plants from their long, narrow Peckham garden, to begin to put their minds to this vast empty canvas.

They went slowly, doing little for the first years. As Dan wrote in Dig Delve, “It took that long to know what to do with the place and what has felt right here.”  In autumn 2012, they installed a pair of 18th century granite troughs used originally for tanning leather, now intended to gather rainwater. Once the steep land grade was levelled on this upper spine, the troughs would connect the house with the barns and form the gateway to what would become the new kitchen garden beyond.

The horizontal line of the troughs, in the background below, also echoes the horizontal line of 52 ancient beech trees on Freezing Hill in the far distance, which occupies a Bronze Age landform between Somerset and the Cotswolds.

In gravelly rubble between the house and the troughs, Dan grows favourite clumping plants such as eryngium and calamint along with a host of self-seeders: cephalaria, corn cockle, silvery ballota, poppies, blue flax and a white California poppy (Eschscholzia californica ‘Ivory Castle’).

To understand the initial challenges posed by the steep lie of the land, it’s helpful to read Dan’s essay The Kitchen Garden tracking the 4-year progress from the trough installation to the first harvest.  As he wrote, “When we arrived here the flat ground was literally no more than a strip in front of the outbuildings. We perched a table and chairs there to make the most of not being on the angle”.  Gardening on the steep hillside was a challenge: “Sowing, thinning, weeding and harvesting on a slope were all that much harder with one leg shorter than the other and tools and buckets balanced.” In time the ground near the barns was leveled and a breeze-block wall built to hold back the sloping fields above, to reflect heat and the fragrance of perfumed plants……

…. and to give fruits such as cordon-espaliered pears, below, a warm surface on which to ripen. A fig in this area is a cutting of ‘White Marseilles’ from Dan’s project at Lambeth Palace, the parent plant “brought from Rome by the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, in 1556.”

In the early years, trees were planted: several in a new orchard; some in a ‘blossom wood’ of native species; hazels and alders down by the stream; memorial trees to honour missed friends; and a katsura grove in the valley with its exquisite autumn perfume to evoke Dan’s long project at Tokachi Forest in Hokkaido, Japan. Trial beds held David Austin roses for cutting, 56 varieties of dahlia and a rainbow of tulips. Signature plants appeared, including different species of towering giant fennel (Ferula spp.), a Mediterranean plant I saw first in the ruins of Troy many years ago, so it always makes me think of Homer to see it now. Dan has used Ferula communis subsp. glauca in his design for the Delos Garden at Sissinghurst. (More on that later.)

Rusticity and a sense of place is preserved in the tin walls of the barn, a backdrop to feverfew, bronze fennel and the unusual lilac-purple valerian, Centranthus lecoqii.  

English gardeners seem to grow more umbellifers than I’ve counted anywhere in my North American travels, and I had to ask Dan twice the name of the lovely one below. It’s Athamanta turbith, a cold-hardy native of the Balkans.

Another plant used by Dan in Delos at Sissinghurst also appears in this upper garden: tall pink Dianthus carthusianorum, shown here (in terrible sunlight, sorry) with Achillea ‘Moonlight’.

Constructed in spring 2014, the kitchen garden comprises a double row of steel-edged, rectangular beds with a broad walk in-between.

The soil where the vegetables grow is rich and productive. According to an elderly neighbour, in the 1960s the former owner’s parents grew vegetables in a market garden on the slopes, and berried boughs from holly trees still standing were harvested for Christmas wreaths for the market.

Creative trellising allows vertical growing of cucumbers and summer squash. Other crops include courgettes, French and runner beans, peppers, salad greens, carrots, turnips, beets, sweet corn and tomatoes (in a poly house).  

Berries and currants are grown in beds with frames that can be netted later against birds.

Three varieties of rhubarb are grown at Hillside, providing the ingredients for Huw’s delectable rhubarb galette.

Time is fleeting and Dan leads us down a path through the meadows towards the brook.  When I look up the hill through a bouquet of massive Gunnera manicata leaves….

….. that I literally held above my head as I passed under them a moment earlier, illustrating the deceptive scale, I see the cluster of buildings at the top. Closest is the milking barn, now the studio office where Dan and Huw carry out their design work.  To its right is the main ornamental garden, which we’ll visit in a few minutes.

On the way to the pond, Dan pauses in the meadow surrounded by oxeye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare), buttercups (Ranunculus acris) and black knapweed (Centaurea nigra). He is in the process of overseeding the meadows with yellow rattle and native orchids, including gift seeds harvested by Fergus Garrett at Great Dixter, to improve the biodiversity here.

 The pond is just two years old, the marginal plants still finding their feet. But water has always been important to Dan in a garden – and this pond might host two-legged swimmers, as well as aquatic flora.  

I am fond of meadows, having grown one or two myself, so I take note of the red campion (Silene dioica)……

….. and blue-flowered Caucasian comfrey (Symphytum caucasicum).

Water runs in a ditch through parts of the low meadows and after planting the banks with marsh marigolds and snowdrops, Dan sought to add small bridges. Apart from a pair made of stone, he riffed on Japanese landscape design with his own timber zig-zag bridge.   

In the damp ground alongside the bridge grows Iris x robusta ‘Dark Aura’.

Despite watching my legs and hands as I navigate the paths, the stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) seem to recognize a feckless Canadian and soon I am rubbing my wrist with a dock leaf (Rumex obtusifolius) proffered by Dan. (It helps with the sting but I have impressive raised welts the next day that cause me to reflect on the traditional medicinal value of this common European plant which, I suppose, would cause you to forget about your chronic arthritis while your skin deals with the acute inflammation.)  

Back at the top, we are now let loose in Hillside’s ornamental garden, which occupies several large, irregularly-shaped beds on the upper slope. Planted in Spring 2017 and finished in Autumn 2017, it was the result of five years of waiting and planning. There is so much to see here, but not nearly enough time to study it carefully.

Burgundy Knautia macedonica is stealing the show, with yellow Euphorbia wallichii in the rear. The profusion of summer perennials and ornamental grasses is still to come, which we can glimpse thanks to Dig Delve’s back issues.

A dark opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) is the progeny of gifted seed from plants Dan saw when cycling to work in his early 20s. It is the only variety he grows, careful not to let it hybridize with the mauve and pink ones his neighbours grow.  

The ornamental garden is a keen plantsman’s lair and it is such fun for us to learn the names of new plants. This is Nepeta ‘Blue Dragon’ a large-flowered hybrid of N. yunnanensis and N. nervosa.

Greek native yellow-banded iris (Iris orientalis) partners with a caramel-colored baptisia in one place…

…. while perfumed sweet peas twine pea sticks in another.

Sulfur clover (Trifolium ocroleuchon) has many of us clicking shutters.

Though it would be lovely to stay another week, there’s just enough time to see the latest chapter at Hillside. This spring, after contemplating the site for a few years and planting it first with a green manure, then a pastel mix of Nigel Dunnett’s ‘Pictorial Meadows’ seeds, a new garden has taken shape. It’s a Mediterranean garden inspired partly by Dan’s work recreating the Delos Garden at Sissinghurst, where he’s been a consultant for almost a decade.  

The new garden features a 6-inch mulch of sharp sand, following principles established by Swedish designer Peter Korn.  It features drought-tolerant plants such as lilac Phlomis italica, below, verbascums and N. American desert perennials like Sphaeralcea ambigua.

I was fortunate to have visited Sissinghurst the previous weekend and saw the Delos Garden….

….. richly planted with asphodelines and sages, among other Mediterranean plants.

Its stone altars were brought in the 1820s from the Greek island by Vita Sackville-West’s husband Harold Nicholson’s seafaring great grandfather and acquired at auction by Harold when the family house in Ireland was sold in 1936.  I have a special fondness for the sacred island of Delos….

…. having visited myself in autumn more than a decade ago when the grasses and wildflowers had gone to seed and were blowing in the hot wind, below. It was my fervent desire to return one day in spring when the flowers are in bloom, but seeing Dan’s garden at Sissinghurst in early June might be the closest I come.

As we head back to the open kitchen, I pass a handsome shrub that Dan tells me is his friend Dan Hinkley’s introduction Hydrangea serrata ‘Plum Passion’.   

And in a sheltered spot near the house are pots of perfumed dianthus and society garlic (Tulbaghia ‘Moshoeshoe’).

As our visit is coming to an end, we are invited to sit and enjoy the lovely English garden tour custom of “tea and cake”.  Huw Morgan has worked his magic on blackcurrants, garnished lavishly with rose petals…..

….. and quite possibly the best lemon pound cake I’ve ever tasted, garnished with tiny elderflowers and lemon slices.   

And after the last crumb is finished and it’s time to head into Bath nearby, Dan and Huw insist on posing with us for a group photo – the perfect hosts with the perfect garden at the end of a perfect visit in Somerset.

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If you like naturalistic meadow gardening, you might wish to read my blog on Piet Oudolf’s entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden, published as:

Piet Oudolf – Meadow Maker Part One and Part Two.

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Dan Pearson’s website

I travelled with Carolyn Mullet’s Carex Tours .

A Love Letter to Smooth Solomon’s Seal

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Each spring, I look with admiration on my drifts of an Ontario native plant that asks so little of me, but gives so much in return: Polygonatum biflorum, smooth Solomon’s seal.  Its tapered shoots emerge in April in my north-facing back garden, where the clumps under the black walnut tree that looms over my sideyard pathway are surrounded by the tiny flowers of the bulbous spring ephemeral Corydalis solida.

By mid-late May, looking back towards my garden gate, the corydalis has disappeared but the Solomon’s seals stand three feet tall.

It’s still early in the garden when they flower, the grasses in my deck pots still just inches high.

The colony in the back corner of the garden grows near a Tiger Eyes sumac and has as its neighbour fall monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’), not yet visible. Both enjoy the same shade-dappled, slightly moist, humus-rich soil.

It’s a testament to the travelling power of Solomon’s seals that they do sometimes subsume other plants. This ‘Ballade’ lily tulip – one of my favourites – is resisting.

But nothing keeps Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ from rearing its pretty head.

My garden features a number of invasive plants – some native, like ostrich fern (Matteucia struthiopteris), others enthusiastic exotics, like my lily-of-the-valley, aka ‘guerilla of the valley’ (Convallaria majalis).  (I’ve written about that pest before in my blog about making a perfumed garden party hat!)  But Solomon’s seal is up to the challenge and can stand its ground.

One that didn’t fare so well in competition with the Solomon’s seals was wild geranium (G. maculatum), shown below in a photo from a previous spring.  

At the Toronto Botanical Garden, blue Amsonia tabernaemontana, shown in the background below, makes a pretty companion for Solomon’s seal.

I love the way the pearl-drop flower buds of smooth Solomon’s seal open, curling up their green tips like dainty skirts.

In November, the leaves turn yellow-gold.

Solomon’s seal and other woodland lovers were featured in ‘Shady Lady’, one of #Janetsfairycrowns from 2021, which I blogged about last year.

My next-door neighbour grows smooth Solomon’s seal as well; it met with the approval of the resident male cardinal.

Finally, speaking of cardinals, here’s a tiny video made in my garden featuring smooth Solomon’s seal with my regular choristers, cardinals and robins.

FACEBOOK: Invasion of the Profile Snatchers

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I have been replaced on Facebook. Cancelled. Subsumed.

It took a week for the bad guys to knock me down and keep me down. I fought tooth-and-nail.  I emailed “support@fb” repeatedly and got no support, or even an acknowledgement. I tried various “recover your account” methods, and found two strange profiles linked to my account, but was stymied when I tried to go further with the unhelpful bots. I wrote passionate snail-mail letters to people in high places at Meta here in Canada, and ultimately to people in law enforcement and to Meta headquarters at …. wait for it… One Hacker Way in Menlo Park, CA. But in the end the criminals won. They became “me”.  On Facebook, though it still looks like “me”, below, I am now really a guy with a Nigerian country code on his Apple iPhone who changed my password and other details on my account, then proceeded to hit up tons of my friends with messages about various scams involving rebates and grants and other ways of making easy money that no reasonably sane person would fall for. Or would they?

In a careless moment, on Sunday May 7th at around 4:40 pm, I fell for one of those cons. I saw on my news feed that a Toronto friend was seeking help because she thought she’d been hacked. Someone suggested in the comments on her post that she change her Friend settings to be private, but she said she didn’t know how.  I commented with a screen grab showing her where the settings were and almost immediately a message popped up on Messenger from “her” saying it didn’t work that way on “her” phone and could I help her with a recovery code that Facebook would email  me. I was dubious and thought about it for a moment, but what harm could it do to give her a code? The email did come from Facebook and in the Subject line on my Inbox, it gave the code, so I dutifully messaged “her” the number.

What I didn’t realize was that I was not talking to my friend on Messenger, and it likely wasn’t even her page anymore.  But now look at what was in the body of Facebook’s email “below the fold” as they say in the newspaper business, once I opened it up fully.  The email was asking me if I wanted to change MY OWN password. It wasn’t for the benefit of any friend – it was the key to unlock my account, and I gave it away without realizing it.   I consider myself fairly skeptical and tech-savvy, but I didn’t see any of that coming.  Needless to say, (and I’ve worked with site developers online in the past) the code should NOT have been in the subject line. It should have been nested within the body so the recipient has a chance to see what is about to happen. As one friend said, we lose our rational brain when someone needs our help. Lesson learned.

Several minutes later, I got another email from Facebook asking if I’d changed my phone number to the Jackson, Mississippi one with the Nigerian country code that they showed me. Needless to say, I said it wasn’t.  At that point, I had to email them proof of i.d. so I sent a copy of my passport.  Three minutes later, they emailed again saying my password had been changed by that phone number.  Hackers know they have to act very fast. Now the Catch-22 was in motion: i.e. you have to know your current password to change to a new one, and since I didn’t know what the criminals had used, I was stuck.  I could no longer open my page on my phone or iPad but by some strange quirk, I was still able to open it on my desktop on Chrome, because I’d never logged out. So I could still post photos on my desktop and did so a few times, hoping they had been kicked off. But soon I got emails from friends about spam on Messenger and I was able to look at that via my desktop. There were loads of messages to friends… I don’t know how many but I’m guessing it was in the several dozens or up to a hundred…. showing that “I” was sending out spam messages and even audio calls about ELF rebates, grants, and other nonsense.  These have gone out in two waves, including today, when a friend in the Bronx emailed me a screen grab of the very same con-game I fell for last week. Only mine featured better grammar. Before I was locked out, I went into Messenger and apologized to all the people who’d received messages and who hadn’t yet blocked me or deleted the conversations; I told them to ignore the request, as it hadn’t come from me. My lovely friends were understanding, but eventually I lost the ability to reassure them since what was happening was not reassuring at all.

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I joined Facebook in January 2010, part of the growing movement to social media. In professional seminars I attended as a freelance writer/photographer in the early 2000s, consultants urged us to “Get on Social Media!! Gather followers! Ask them questions to generate feedback!”   I was never very good at that, had never taken part in chat rooms, but when I finally complied and signed up on Facebook I realized how much fun it was to have this growing community of like-minded folks.  Facebook became my ‘water cooler’, my ‘recess’ (with breaks taken too many times each day!)  Part of why I enjoyed it so much was that I’ve always loved “words with pictures”; it dictated the course of my career. So I especially loved making my cover and profile photos, which I eventually posted in my personal photo library on the cloud.

Of the 2800+ friends I gathered from around the gardening world on Facebook, I managed to meet several “IRL” (in real life) over the years.  On a 2014 trip to California, I met one of the leading native plant proponents based in Sonoma and we shared a lovely dinner with our spouses.  Planning a 2018 trip to Oregon, I put out a bulletin on my page that I was going to be in Seattle and Portland and would love to see my virtual friends for a picnic at the University of Washington (that’s me in the middle with David, Mary, Rebecca and Sue)…..

…… and a few days later at a favourite Portland nursery.  It was such fun to see fellow gardeners Ann, Vanessa, Kate and Patricia in the flesh! It made my life and career much richer.

In 2019, a happy set of Facebook-related events resulted in a shared small plane charter to the wild rainforest of the west coast of Vancouver Island with Mary Anne and Caitlin for a two-day stay in Cougar Annie’s Garden.

A few months later, I was meeting my dear Facebook friend Liberto in Athens “IRL” for the first time, as he hosted a botanical tour of Greece. That trip resulted in a very comprehensive blog about Greek flora — and music!

Liberto was the smartest part of my Facebook puzzle years 2013-15, when I designed tough anagram picture puzzles that tested my friends’ plant identification skills and anagram-solving talent. The solution to the one below is ‘California Dreaming’ (on such a winter’s day, get it?)  I wrote a blog about those fun puzzles.

Because I photograph plants for my stock library, I also became an administrator of a Facebook site called Plant Idents with more than 7.7K members.  As of this week, since I’m locked out of my Facebook account by criminals, the other admins are working without my help.

For seven months in 2011-12, I wrote a daily poem to accompany a photo I took on a one-mile walk and posted them on Facebook – I called them Walking Time Rhymes.  This was from November 25, 2011 in Vancouver. My mom would die less than 3 months later, so this particular rainy walk and rhyme was precious to me. 

And through Facebook, I met a group of very special friends and like-minded garden communicators who organize yearly tours called the Garden Bloggers’ Fling.  This lovely garden was in Denver in 2018, below. This September, we’ll meet in Philadelphia.  Our wonderful tour host Karl lost his own Facebook page to hackers, along with thousands of curated photos from his garden travels throughout the world.  We will have much to talk about together.  

Though I’m gone from Facebook for the moment, I’m pushing hard to get my page back. But like Hansel and Gretel, I’ve left some crumbs in the FB forest in the form of three sets of unique hashtags I made over the years. My friends who have enjoyed my pollinator posts….

…fairy crowns…..

…. and my blogs featuring music and related gardening concepts will likely know what they are.  The hashtag for social media was invented by a smart young man named Chris Messina, an open-source advocate who was kind enough to drop me a note saying he’d lost his own page once to hackers so he knew how stressful it can be. If you live by social media, you can die by it as well. I’m hoping I’m only seriously wounded, but not fatally. Fingers crossed.  

POSTSCRIPT: I set up a new Facebook page on July 13th. If you get a friend request from a woman who looks like this, it’s really “me”.

My Covid Journal

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The end of March 2023 marks 3 full years of dealing with a contagion that rocked the world in a way that no disease had since 1919 and the Spanish flu. As of today, the World Health Organization reports that 8,830,881 people died of Covid 19, a figure that almost certainly understates reality, given that many nations were not keeping statistics, or simply not reporting them to outside sources. I was reminded of this as I looked through my photo folders since March 2020, noting all the ways, big and small, that it touched us. This is my Covid journal.

March 14, 2020 – Covid has now been recognized in Canada for two weeks and the newspaper is starting to issue public service announcements.

March 17, 2020 – On St. Patrick’s Day, when I am supposed to receive my new left knee (elective surgery was cancelled by our provincial government), I listen instead to our Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland speak on behalf of the nation’s Covid Committee.

March 21, 2020 – The first day of spring and the newspapers echo our thoughts, for we are indeed “alone together” “in uncharted territory”. By now, we are watching daily t.v. reports by provincial health ministers somberly reading out Covid-19 statistics, including deaths, mostly in nursing homes at the outset.

March 24, 2020 – As people of a certain age, we are encouraged to stay home and stay safe. Instead, our 40-something son brings us groceries. And we wash everything down with rubbing alcohol! Honestly! Could Covid come in on our Raisin Bran?

March 26, 2020 – My apples have never been so clean, even though we doubt that they are spreading Covid.

March 31 2020 – People are encouraged to show the love in our front windows, so children passing by don’t feel so forsaken. I can’t help adding voices….

April 7, 2020 – It feels more real when Boris Johnson is sent to the ICU with Covid. It will be a few years before we learn that his own carelessness around Covid helps bring him down.

April 8, 2020 – Our civic government goes into overdrive protecting its citizens, and the park parking lot at the end of our street is closed. You can still walk in, mind you, but the dog-walkers have no place to leave their cars.

April 10, 2020 – People are getting decked out in masks and I can’t resist doing my own Lawrence of Arabia take on the newest disease control measure.

April 10, 2020 – A family birthday party is held outdoors. The new normal.

April 21, 2020 – Doug’s exercise club is closed, as are gyms all over the city. It will eventually declare bankruptcy. But Doug makes do in the living room, being careful with his golf club.

April 21, 2020 – A neighbour is sewing masks on her machine for visitors to local hospitals. I ask if I can buy a few and she gives them to me free, refusing my offer.

May 2, 2020 – Spring has sprung and people have been walking past my garden since the very first snowdrop. They seem desperate to have some touchstone, the normalcy of the seasons changing. From the porch, I chat with these women who have been photographing the spring bulb parade.

May 6, 2020 – Sourdough baking has taken the nation by storm, and a friend drops off a warm loaf on my doorstep.

May 7, 2020 – The front garden is bursting with color. Such a comfort.

May 8, 2020 – As friends sign up for no-contact grocery shopping services, we weigh how we should be buying our food. Just at the right time, we see an ad for a 100km local farms offer and pick up our order at a parking lot nearby.

May 9, 2020 – People are starting to have cabin fever, and friends call to ask us to take a walk with them. I love that the trilliums are in bloom in this spot overlooking a Toronto ravine.

May 10, 2020 – It’s Mother’s Day and my two youngest sons and future daughter-in-law celebrate my day with me on the front porch. Mimosas!

May 16, 2020 – I’m not sure now about the 46 ways we were going to change. Did we tick them all off? Or did we just tick off people who learned to hate poor Anthony Fauci in the U.S.?

May 18, 2020 – Everybody is growing seeds at home, it seems, since nurseries are effectively shuttered. I order soil from Amazon (!) and get into the act on the window seat of a 3rd floor bedroom, with the rare Petunia exserta and a marigold that Linnaeus and Rudbeck were said to have grown in Sweden.

May 19, 2020 – Our neighbourhood grocery store is allowed to open with a strict limit of customers inside at any one time. The handsome security guard outside (left) keeps count, ensures we’re masked and makes us clean our hands with the sanitary gel. The employee at right beyond the new social-distancing floor tape wears full-face protection.

May 31, 2020 – We watch our first-ever Zoom memorial service, for a dear friend, all the way from Santa Barbara.

Sept. 29, 2020 – I burst out laughing one day as I look at my lipsticks, and think that Revlon and l’Oreal are going to be badly affected when they can’t sell lipstick to mask-wearing women.

Oct. 31, 2020 – Halloween comes and Dracula and the jack are wearing masks.

Nov. 1, 2020 – On the 1st of November, I begin a 5-month ‘Covid project’ to distract myself through the winter. I call it #janetsdailypollinator. This is the saffron crocus (C. sativus) which I photographed in the town of Krokos in Greece. Little do I know that it won’t be the only winter that Covid visits.

Nov. 13, 2020 – Given we can’t go to restaurants anymore, we get into a rhythm of ordering each week from a local restaurant. Our favourite is halibut-and-fries from Zee Grill, a seafood fixture in our neighbourhood.

Dec. 5, 2020 – My brother, sister-in-law and nephew come to visit but we don’t go into the house – so we do a portrait in the driveway.

Dec. 24, 2020 – We are so fortunate to have our house on Lake Muskoka. It’s just three of us for Xmas eve, but we decorate our oak totem like it’s a fresh-cut balsam fir.

Jan. 14, 2021 – It’s a new year but with a spike in cases and deaths, the province institutes serious isolation rules. They even use the emergency system to drive it home.

Jan. 18, 2021 – My special order of home-sewn masks arrive and of course there’s a floral motif.

March 7, 2021 – The grandkids arrive for a March break visit and they stay outside (mostly) because who wants to give nana and poppa Covid?

March 7, 2021 – It feels weird to have a picnic on the cold front sidewalk, but we do. I feel such sympathy for my daughter and son-in-law who both work at home. Now they have 3 kids ‘attending school’ via their little tablets on the dining room table. But at least they have a back yard with trees, unlike all the kids who live in apartments and are in isolation with no schoolyard in which to play.

March 11, 2021 – Thanks to a dear friend who dropped sourdough starter in a jar on my front porch, I’ve made my first loaves – with olives! (The fad doesn’t last with me – I don’t want to be a slave to yeast. But I take up focaccia instead!)

March 31, 2021 – I wrap up my 5-month daily pollinator project and make a giant montage.

April 2, 2021 – Vaccination #1 at Sunnybrook Hospital less than a mile from home. #2 would be Moderna two months later.

April 12, 2021 – The news remains dire with the 3rd wave.

April 13, 2021 – The spring garden is in bloom and I have a crazy idea. Instead of creating a bouquet with the blossoms, I make a floral tiara. I decide it’s going to be called a ‘fairy crown’.

By the end of the fairy crown project, there will be 30 versions. In 2022, I’ll do a blog for each one, celebrating the flowers and garden chapter that made each possible.

April 16, 2021 – It’s our 44th anniversary – and we celebrate with take-out from Zee Grill.

June 12, 2021 – Barber shops and hair salons are closed so darling Lena, my daughter’s hairdresser, comes to the backyard and does open-air cuts – including one for poppa.

Nov. 16, 2021 – It’s been a while since I was on a plane but I take the opportunity of a reduction in cases and isolation measures to fly to Vancouver to visit my brother and sister. The mask is hard to get used to for 5+ hours but that’s the rule now.

Feb. 11, 2022 – Almost after the fact, a giant anti-mask and anti-vaccine policy protest convoy is organized by truckers and sympathizers from across Canada and ends up closing down our capital city Ottawa. It goes on for days and days as the protesters call for the prime minister to step down — while honking horns day and night in the 18-wheelers that block the streets around the parliament buildings. It is surreal. And people are fed up.

Feb. 18, 2022 – Things get serious when the government uses the Emergency Act to seize assets of the protestors and give the cops extra powers to end the protest.

May 27, 2022 – By now, all the Covid test kits that were handed out to companies are gathering dust on shelves. My local greengrocer throws one in with my order as a bonus.

June 12, 2022 – My niece Lily Frost is a singer and single mom who hasn’t had many gigs for 2 years so I invite her and her band to perform a concert for my neighbours and family. It is a perfect day, the band is sizzling hot and such fun.

Lily and her band Thelonius Monk give a wonderful performance for 2 hours.

Aug. 31, 2022 – On the last day of August, we fly from Toronto to Edinburgh, below, on the first leg of what will be a memorable trip. Masks are mandatory in the airport and on the plane, but when we line up at customs in Edinburgh, not one person is wearing a mask. Days later, we leave for 5 days in Florence before celebrating our son Jon’s beautiful wedding to Marta in the Tuscan hills. After that, we take part in a wine tour of Sicily that lasts until the end of September. It feels almost… almost… like things are returning to normal.

It’s been a remarkable three years. As of now, I am the only one in my family (along with the grandkids) who hasn’t had Covid. Yet. But it’s still flying around and finding people who thought they’d dodged it completely. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll have to add a postscript to this journal. In the meantime, another spring has arrived, reluctantly, with snowflakes, and I’m ready to get back into the garden!

POSTSCRIPT: On June 9th, in the middle of a much-anticipated garden tour in England, I tested positive for Covid and had to depart the tour. Fortunately, I have a son living in London and he could take in his poor mom and make her tea and soup. But I was sad to miss the last wonderful gardens.