My 7th fairy crown for late May was created at our cottage on Lake Muskoka, a few hours north of Toronto. It features native wildflowers and fruit: red-flowered eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), common blue violets (Viola sororia), wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana), lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium), the poet’s narcissus (Narcissus poeticus var. recurvus) and a little weed for good measure, yellow rocketcress (Barbarea vulgaris).
If my city garden takes a somewhat naturalistic approach to gardening, it is nonetheless situated in a traditional urban neighborhood. It might be the most flowery front garden on the street, but I’ve worked to make it fit in with the lawns up and down the block by having a hedge as a side boundary; by retaining old clipped boxwood shrubs on either side of the front stairs; and by paying attention to pleasing floral succession, from the earliest snowdrops to the last asters. And my neighbors do love it. In contrast, the meadows and garden beds I created atop Precambrian bedrock at our cottage on Lake Muskoka a few hours north of Toronto are truly wild-looking – and there’s no need to fit in with any neighbors. (I wrote about gardening at the lake in my extensive 2017 blog titled ‘Muskoka Wild’.)
I don’t grow tulips there — they’re just not right for the lake — but my fairy crown for May 20th features the last daffodil of the season, the poet’s daffodil (Narcissus poeticus var. recurvus).
Daffodils grow amazingly well in the acidic, sandy soil here since they love to dry out in summer, popping up each spring amidst the big prairie grasses and forbs.
Besides the poet’s daffodil, one of my favourites is the highly scented Tazetta variety ‘Geranium’, below.
My grandchildren have all experienced nature on Lake Muskoka. This is Oliver exploring another perfumed daffodil, ‘Fragrant Rose’.
And there is nothing more satisfying than a bouquet of perfumed daffodils on the table in April or May.
On many occasions, I’ve tucked a bunch of daffodils in my bag as I head back to the city.
Daffodils flower concurrently with our little native common blue violet, Viola sororia.
Viola sororia is native to Muskoka, as it is to much of northeast North America. It doesn’t take up a lot of room and grows wherever it pleases, but always with a little shade and moisture at the roots.
Apart from violets, the landscape here features a large roster of native plants, including the lovely eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) that pops up in the lean, gravelly soil where many plants might struggle. I try to sow seed of this species, being careful to leave the seeds uncovered since light is necessary for germination.
But wild columbine is very particular about where it wants to put down roots, and always surprises me when I see the first, ferny leaves pop up in a new location in spring.
Hummingbirds are said to enjoy the dainty flowers of eastern columbine, but I confess I’ve never seen them doing so. I would have to lie in wait on rocky ground by the shore, not as much fun as sitting comfortably on my deck watching them fight over the ‘Black & Bloom’ anise sage (Salvia guaranitica).
Muskoka and wild blueberries just go together naturally, and somebody’s grandmother always made the very best wild blueberry pie in August. In our family, it was my husband’s mother, and she taught her grandkids her secret recipe, including my daughter. So I’m always happy to see the queen bumble bee pollinating those first wild blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium) flowers in May.
But just in case the chipmunks find our berries before we do, we always make a stop at the wild blueberry stand on the way to the cottage from town.
Wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana) bloom in Muskoka now, too, and on parts of my path above the lake they form a perennial groundcover so dense that I am sometimes afraid to step into their midst, lest I damage them.
But there are always enough strawberries ripening months later to make my grandkids pause on their way to the lake to sample the fruit…
…tiny, admittedly, but oh-so-sweet and juicy.
Similarly, May is when the dark-pink flowers of black huckleberry (Gaylussacia baccata) adorn the shrubs in the shade of the white pines along the lakeshore. The deep-purple fruit will ripen in August and though somewhat seedy, it is sweet and good for eating raw or baking.
There’s a native serviceberry here at the lake too, but don’t expect to see billowing clouds of white flowers like those big species further south. Its Latin name Amelanchier humilis gives a clue as to its shape, “low, spreading serviceberry”. Still, native andrena bees love nectaring on it in May, as do the bumble bee queens, which nonetheless must remain wary of crab spiders looking for their own meals.
My crown’s golden jewels are flowers of the common European weed in the mustard family, yellow rocketcress (Barbarea vulgaris). In Europe, it’s called ‘rocket’ or ‘bittercress’, suggesting a strong-tasting, edible green. Indeed, my foraging friends would recommend picking the basal leaves as they emerge in spring or the rapini-like flower buds (raab) to cook in recipes. Failing that, just wait for the mustard-yellow flowers to appear and wear them in your fairy crown!
I use my smallest vases to display these delicate blossoms of spring on the table – a welcome celebration of nature’s return to the shore of a lake that was thick with ice just weeks earlier
A fairy crown. A flowery tiara. A chaplet. A corona for Corona-virus times! When I got the brilliant idea to mark another gardening season with a series of “What’s in Bloom” floral wreaths for my head, below….
…I was not inventing something new. People have actually been crowning themselves with flowers and greenery for millennia. Take Dionysus, for example, the Greek god of all things wine and too-much-fun (the Romans called him Bacchus). This is how Caravaggio imagined him, circa 1598, with a Bacchanalian wreath of grape leaves.
During a visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles a few years ago, it was a painting by the Victorian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema that made me peer a little closer. In ‘Spring’, from 1892, the artist had created a procession of celebrants wearing floral crowns wending their way through the streets of Rome. The Getty’s website says: “It is unclear exactly which festival Alma-Tadema meant to depict, but the many references from ancient Rome all indicate a springtime celebration of fertility and abundance, perhaps most resembling Floralia, honoring Flora, goddess of flowers. British May Day traditions were also rooted in the Floralia festival and were revived during the 1800s to celebrate spring and nature in the face of rapid industrialization. On May 1, children decked themselves and their village with flowers, danced, and crowned a May Queen.”
When I was a little girl, I attended a Catholic convent in Victoria, B.C. called St. Ann’s Academy. It was on a beautiful property filled with gardens and orchards that the nuns tended… religiously. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). In my 3rd grade class photo from 1956 (!) below, you can see the massive rhododendrons behind us. Today, St. Ann’s is a Provincial Heritage Site and ‘events venue’ with a small museum. But my point here is that every May 1st, or May Day, we girls would have a procession through the grounds carrying flowers to a statue of Mary while singing “Mary we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May”. Thinking back now (as an atheist), it still seems like the most beautiful idea, the floral crowning part at any rate. Who wouldn’t want to be “queen of the May”?
It was her own Catholic iconography that Mexican painter Frida Kahlo invoked when she painted her 1940 Self-PortraitDedicated to Dr. Eloesser. From the Frida Kahlo website: “Frida’s necklace of thorns is just a single strand, but it draws even more blood. In the background, leafless broken-off twigs profiled against an opalescent sky look like the dead twigs woven into Frida’s necklace in the self-portrait with the hummingbird. No doubt the dry white buds that mingle with the twigs (and that droop from Frida’s headdress as well) likewise refer to her desolation. Although Frida has flowers in her hair and wears the earrings in the shape of hands that Picasso gave her when she was in Paris, she looks like someone dressed for a ball for which she has no escort. Frida’s work from the year in which she and Diego Rivera were separated demonstrates a heightened awareness of color’s capacity to drive home emotional truths.”
My photo project, on the other hand, was dedicated whimsically to the Goddess Flora…..
…. as featured in Botticelli’s famous Primavera, circa 1482, with its 500 identifiable plant species. How many can you identify?
*****
After seeing one of my spring crowns, my son said I was ready to go to Coachella. I had to look up why that would be. Ah…. a music festival in California! Of course, they wear flower crowns there and it’s all groovy, except, most are fake flowers! That would never do. And I did note that some famous floral designers had designed massively ornate headdresses for garden muses to celebrate 2019 Garden Day in the UK. They were lovely, but not really what I had in mind. I just wanted to celebrate the flowering cycle for my garden by…. putting it on my head! It seemed like my inner child was whispering to me, as if Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell had made a perfectly reasonable suggestion about head-wear. So I decided to call it a ‘fairy crown’, and my first edition for April 7th features the earliest spring-bloomers in my Toronto garden, common snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis), purple and orange crocuses, bright-yellow winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis) and the sweet, hard-working little Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’. (Some friends suggested I do the series as “how-to make fairy crowns”, which made me laugh. My crowns last as long as it takes to make a selfie, then proceed to fall apart everywhere.)
After five long months of winter, the return of spring to my Toronto garden is a glorious time. Endorphins rise in me like sap in a maple tree. And while it’s not quite time to retire the snow shovel and winter coat, everything that’s magical about gardening lies in the weeks and months ahead. Each spring I make little bouquets of my first tiny bulbs to create that joyous feeling indoors, too. It’s often still chilly in the garden and cutting a few flowers for the kitchen table lets me explore them up close with my camera – and my nose! And it always starts with sweet-scented snowdrops. I made this image for a project a long time ago, using a crystal shot glass from an antique “gentleman’s travelling bar” that my father-in-law gave to my husband. The caption is dramatic, but not far off reality. By late March, the gardener is parched for beauty; spring lets us drink it in.
But spring teases in our part of the world, thus the common name for snowdrops.
For the past decade, I’ve kept track of the date of the first snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) to bloom in my garden with the earliest appearance being March 7, 2012 and the latest April 16, 2014. That’s a difference of almost 6 weeks, illustrating the vagaries of winter in the northeast. No matter when they bloom, there’s still a chance that a late snowfall will cause them to close their petals and serve as an appropriate reminder as to how they earned their common name. Snowdrops are easy to grow from a small bulb that should be planted in autumn as soon as they become available, since they deteriorate quickly. But I’ve moved flowering clumps around in spring with great success, something that can’t be easily done with other bulbs. They prefer humus-rich soil in part shade, but like to dry out in summer.
But when they flower with all their sweet-scented goodness after the dearth of winter, there is nothing like a pristine clump of snowdrops, which is why the gardening world has so many “galanthophiles” who grow, rave about and trade various species and cultivars of snowdrops.
Though I appreciate that kind of obsession, for me the common snowdrop is perfection, though you must either get down on your knees or pluck a few for a nosegay to truly appreciate the shimmering, white flowers with their green-edged inner tepals. The bonus? They emit a delicate perfume – much easier to savor in a bouquet than in the garden.
Within a few days of the snowdrops opening, the silken, purple “Tommy” crocuses (Crocus tomassinianus) appear. Here they’re joined by an early showing of the Dutch hybrid crocus ‘Pickwick’ whose fellow hybrids usually appear a week or so later.
A few days of spring warmth and sunshine encourage all the crocuses into bloom together. When that happens, my front garden looks like the Easter bunny arrived to sprinkle crocuses, instead of hiding eggs – and it becomes a favourite spot for passersby to click photos. Because my front garden is never ‘tidied’ much in autumn, it’s a trick to get out and cut back the old stems of the prairie perennials from last year while the soil is still frozen so the little bulbs can shine. But they always come up through scattered leaf mulch and stubble – all good food for the earthworms and soil organisms.
Here are four of the Dutch hybrid crocuses, their names lost in the mists of time. When I originally planted the crocus bulbs en masse in the 1990s, many were dug up immediately by squirrels. In fact, a few days later, the garden looked like the craters of the moon. Now I immediately mulch bulb plantings with leaves (even getting some from my neighbours’ boulevards) and water them down so the squirrels don’t have a ‘nose’ for the freshly cultivated soil.
When it’s warm enough to fly (15C-59F), honey bees seek out the pollen-rich crocus flowers. They’re especially fond of Crocus x luteus ‘Golden Yellow’.
Look at this happy vignette, with crocuses joined by Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’.
Of all the spring irises I’ve tried and lost, this little iris is a true survivor, shrugging off harsh winters and late snowfalls to show off her indigo-striped, pale-blue flowers alongside her crocus companions. Hardy, easy and beautiful, she makes good-sized clumps over the years and is an attractive cut flower in a tiny vase. A small caveat: she does tend to get a virus that causes blue splotches on her petals and is transmissible to other members of the iris family. But since I have none growing near her, I don’t bother about it.
Gardeners in the northeast are accustomed to spring sputtering forward slowly and occasionally backtracking to winter (like this year). It’s been known to happen in my garden, and I shared the rhyme below on my Facebook page on April 3, 2016.
There once was an iris named Kate
Who sulked when winter stayed late:
“I’m tired of the cold and this foul April snow.
Had I known, I’d have remained well below!”
It happens to crocuses, too, but they have adapted to cold, snowy weather by keeping their flowers closed and their pollen protected.
Winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis), those lemon-yellow flowers in my fairy crown, have evolved a similar adaption to protect their pollen from inclement weather, as you see below.
The odd snowflake aside, spring has now sprung in my garden and the robins are seeking out earthworms once again.
And if you don’t feel inclined to make your own fairy crown, you can always cut a few stems of these tiny treasures to bring indoors and appreciate at nose level. Spring is here at last!
I once wrote book reviews for a gardening magazine. I told the editor, my friend, that I wanted her assurance that if I found fault with a book, I would be free to state that. She agreed, but I’m not sure the publisher felt the same way since books promoted in popular magazines always get a lift in sales, and that’s just a good business relationship to cultivate. But if I’d been given ‘Under Western Skies’ to review it would have been a 5-star rave, even if I hadn’t been thanked in the book acknowledgements. And to think… it’s all because of Facebook.
Let me back up a bit. I’ve been a Facebook member for almost 12 years. Apart from old friends, neighbours and family, pretty much all my 2700+ ‘friends’ community shares with me a love of gardening in some form. Writers, photographers, nursery owners, garden designers, plant breeders, active enthusiasts – they hail from all over North America and Europe and New Zealand, too. But it was a chance conversation in the Idaho Botanical Garden in September 2016 between my husband Doug and Boise garden writer/radio host Mary Ann Newcomer that put in motion a sweet event that happened three years later. We were heading home from visiting friends in Sun Valley via Boise and a pre-arranged meet-up with Mary Ann, one of those Facebook friends I’d never ‘met’ in real life (or IRL as they say on FB) but I’d ‘known’ virtually since 2014. After touring much of the garden (you can read my blog on Idaho Botanical Garden here), I decided to meander to the top of the wonderful Lewis & Clark Trail snapping shots of the Plants of the Canyons, below, while Doug and Mary Ann relaxed at a lower level.
During their conversation, Mary Ann mentioned writing a story in 2013 for Leaf magazine about a famous British Columbia garden, Cougar Annie’s Garden, below (photo by Janis Nicolay). I had once told her that Doug and Peter Buckland, who now owns the garden via the Boat Basin Foundation, had been good friends since the 1960s. In fact, Doug remembered meeting Cougar Annie herself on a visit decades earlier.
And that is how, a few years later in May 2019, Mary Ann contacted us to say a California photographer named Caitlin Atkinson was interested in photographing Cougar Annie’s Garden for a book project she had developed. As it happened, Doug and I were finalizing the details of an early autumn trip that would take us to see family in British Columbia before flying to San Francisco– and Peter had long wanted me to visit the garden. To make a long story short, the stars aligned, and in early October we met in Tofino and chartered a small plane to fly us 20 minutes north to the garden.
Doug sat in front with the pilot; Mary Ann had her phone out to make sure….
… she captured some of the stunning landscape of Clayoquot Sound below….
…. and Caitlin sat in the rear.
Just a few hours later, luggage stowed in our rustic rainforest cabins, Peter was giving us a tour of the property…..
…. that included Cougar Annie’s house….
…. and explaining the significance of logging zones in the first growth forests on the mountain slopes nearby.
We went our separate ways and met late in the afternoon in the Great Hall of the Temperate Rainforest Study Centre.
The property is completely off the grid with minimal propane use for cooking and washing up, so dinner in the hall was by candelight.
The next day, Peter toured us along the Walk of the Ancients, showing us 700-year old red cedars and “canoe trees” carved out by First Nations people. Beyond the inner history and relatively recent saga of Cougar Annie’s Garden, this ancient forest seemed to me to be Peter’s real story, his love and appreciation evident in his understanding of its ecology….
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…. and the 2300 feet of hand-hewn cedar shake boardwalk, below, on which we trekked through giant trees to reach our cabins. To say it was a life-changing two days seems trite, but it was. And I felt compelled to write my impressions in a 2-part blog which you can find beginning here.
Throughout those two days in early October 2019, Caitlin disappeared with her camera and we would only see her at dinner. Her images and Jennifer Jewell’s words (Jennifer is well-known for her NPR radio show and podcast ‘Cultivating Place’) comprise the last story in the book and do Cougar Annie’s Garden at Boat Basin and Peter Buckland great justice.
The Rest of the Book
The book’s subtitle is Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast, and it spotlights 36 such gardens from the Southwest, Southern California, Northern California, the Intermountain West and the Pacific Northwest. In the Southwest section, there are sophisticated desert gardens in Phoenix and stunning wildflower gardens in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Santa Fe. But I was delighted to turn the page to find the Albuquerque garden of my New Mexico Facebook friend, landscape designer Hunter Ten Broeck and his wife Barb featured. Caitlin’s photos brought his garden, developed through xeriscaping principles reflected in his company’s name, WaterWise Landscapes, to life.
In the Southern California section, I was absorbed by the story of tech executive Dennis Mudd whose mountain biking in the hills near San Diego inspired him to research the endemic native plants near his Poway home and ultimately restore nature to his garden, telling Jennifer Jewell “I’m living in a truly interconnected web of life.”. But it was while reading the story of landscape architect David Godshall’s Edendale Garden in Echo Park in Los Angeles that I did a double take, seeing the name of a dear Toronto friend mentioned. As Jennifer wrote: “Reading City Form and Natural Process: Towards a New Urban Vernacular by Michael Hough taught him that most standard landscaping supports almost no life, a ‘searing’ revelation.” I interviewed Michael Hough (1928-2013) over many months 26 years ago for a magazine profile, accompanying him to his Environmental Studies classes; tagging along on site visits with his students; visiting his ecological landscape designs; sharing a glass of wine in his garden; and listening to him talk about his regeneration plan for the Don River, below, one of Toronto’s three watersheds.
In the Northern California section, it was a delight to come upon ‘Sebastopol Local Love Story’, featuring the garden of my friend, native plant specialist Phil Van Soelen and his wife Mary Killian. When we were planning a trip to the Bay area and wine country in spring 2014, Phil suggested we build on our Facebook relationship and meet “IRL” and that’s what we did, visiting him in the lovely garden he then had, below, within sight of the garden Mary owned behind him, to which he moved in 2015. Caitlin’s photos feature some of their fabulous native plantings. Later we went for dinner, two Facebook pals and their spouses getting to know each other better.
That week we also visited Phil at California Flora Nursery, which he opened with Sherrie Althouse in 1981. It was a rainy morning in Sonoma, but I’m so happy we got to see him in his element there, since he sold the nursery a few years ago.
In the gardens of the Intermountain West, Mary Ann Newcomer’s Boise garden is featured, as well as the Idaho Botanical Garden. Renowned Colorado designer Lauren Springer’s name pops up in a few gardens in this section, most prominently in the Niwot, Colorado garden of Mary and Larry Scripter. Once again, Facebook and the Garden Bloggers group I joined through it, allowed me to visit the Scripter garden on a Denver trip a few years ago and it was a pleasure to be reminded in Caitlin’s photos of their enchanating prairie meadow garden overlooking their extensive hayfields and the Rocky Mountains. This is a garden I meant to blog about, but never quite got around to. So here is my photo of Mary and Larry, as accompaniment to the piece in the book.
I found Lauren Springer’s famous breadseed poppy Papaver somniferum ‘Lauren’s Grape’ growing there, too.
In the Pacific Northwest section of the book, Harborton Hill, the lush Portland garden of my Facebook pal Bob Hyland and his partner Andrew Beckman is featured. I also met Bob “IRL” in 2018 when I visited his shop Contained Exuberance, adjacent to Portland’s famous nursery Xera Plants. He’s in the photo below flanked by Xera’s co-owners, Paul Bonine and Greg Shepherd.
That was the day I also met a gaggle of Facebook gardening friends ‘in the flesh’, including from left below, Ann Amato, Vanessa Gardner Nagle, me, Kate Bryant and Patricia Cunningham.
Facebook friend Evan Bean’s plant-rich garden near Washington’s Mount St. Helens is featured in this section, as is the Indianola garden of Nancy Heckler, also a Facebook friend. Prominent in this section is the renowned Heronswood Garden on the Kitsap Peninsula. I saw Heronswood in September 2005, when I picked up my mom and drove south from Vancouver, white-knuckling the freeway winding through Seattle towards the Bainbridge Ferry, on a garden-viewing adventure. Founded in 1987 by plant explorer Dan Hinkley and his partner, architect Robert Jones, Heronswood had been sold by then to Burpee Plants and was being managed by Dan, whom I photographed below (on his birthday). But, as Jennifer Jewell writes of what was a dark chapter in west coast horticulture: “By 2006, the Burpee company had declared bankruptcy and stopped maintaining the property.” The garden fell into disrepair until 2012, when it was purchased at auction by the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe. Today, Dan Hinkley is director and the garden is managed by the Port Gamble S’Klallam Foundation, with Joan Garrow as Executive Director. Caitlin’s photos capture its great beauty and the groundbreaking horticulture for which Heronswood has always been known.
The Pacific Northwest section ends fittingly in Canada with Cougar Annie’s Garden at Boat Basin. Have I been dropping names in this blog? Oh yes, I certainly have, and also celebrating the many wonderful relationships I’ve made through Facebook. We are all reminded constantly how bad social media is; how it manipulates our lives. Perhaps, but I have a different view: it is the quicksilver that flows throughout the world, connecting passionate gardeners who would never have found each other without it.
So, is this an unbiased review? Of course not. Buy the book! Give it to a friend or family member on the west coast and inspire them with these 36 spectacular gardens and gardeners of the golden west. Oh, and Merry Christmas!
I adore Carole King. And I admit that I saw ‘Beautiful: The Carole King Musical’ three times: twice on Broadway (2014, 2015) and once in Toronto (2017). My favourite versions were the two that featured Canadian actor Chilina Kennedy, below, who played Carole to perfection from her teenage years in the 1960s in New York City as a young wife, mother and co-writer of hit pop songs, to the 1970s in Los Angeles and her own mega-hit album Tapestry (You’ve Got a Friend, It’s Too Late, I Feel the Earth Move, etc.)
Chilina Kennedy as Carole King in the Broadway production of ‘Beautiful – The Carole King Musical’
Like all the songs from Carole’s song-writing partnership with and marriage to Gerry Goffin (when she was 17 and he was 20), below, Carole wrote the music and Gerry penned the lyrics. From that partnership in New York’s iconic Brill Building at 1619 Broadway came songs like Take Good Care of my Baby (1961 – Bobby Vee), Will You Love me Tomorrow (1962 – The Shirelles), The Loco-Motion (1962 – Little Eva), It Might as Well Rain Until September (1962 – Carole King and Bobby Vee), Go Away Little Girl (1962 – Steve Lawrence), One Fine Day (1963 – The Chiffons), I’m Into Something Good (1964 – Herman’s Hermits), Don’t Bring Me Down (1966 – The Animals), (You Make me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (1967 – Aretha Franklin) and Pleasant Valley Sunday (1967 – The Monkees). In 1962, Carole also wrote the music for The Everly Brothers’ Crying in the Rain with a different lyricist.
Carole King and Gerry Goffin in the Brill Building, New York
One of my favourite songs from Carole King’s long career – and the one that features in this 19th #mysongscapes blog – is ‘Up on the Roof’, written in 1962 for The Drifters, below. In a Rolling Stone story about the song, Gerry Goffin recalled, “Appropriately enough, the song was born among the rat-race noise of a crowded city street.” Carole came up with the melody in the car. Gerry thought it could be about a place to be alone. Carole ventured ‘My secret place’, the song’s original title. But in time it was changed to ‘Up on the Roof’.
When Carole King was celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honours in 2015 alongside President Barack and Michelle Obama, her friend James Taylor sang the song for her. (I saw Carole and James in Seattle singing the song in May 2010 during their Troubadour Tour, one of the best concerts ever).
But perhaps my favourite version of ‘Up on the Roof ‘ is this 1982 rendition by Toronto’s a cappella singing group The Nylons. I had them on cassette tapes in the 1980s, saw them in concert and knew many of their songs off by heart, singing them at the top of my lungs around the house when my kids were little. The lead singer here with the beautiful tenor is Marc Connors; tragically, within a few years, he would die of HIV- AIDS. So for me, it’s bittersweet to watch him and the three others celebrate that special place to get away from ‘the rat-race noise’ in such a proudly Canadian way.
UP ON THE ROOF (Gerry Goffin & Carole King, 1962, Screen Gems – EMI)
When this old world starts getting me down And people are just too much for me to face I climb way up to the top of the stairs And all my cares just drift right into space
On the roof, it’s peaceful as can be And there the world below can’t bother me
Let me tell you now When I come home feeling tired and beat I go up where the air is fresh and sweet I get far away from the hustling crowd And all that rat race noise down in the street
On the roof’s the only place I know Where you just have to wish to make it so Let’s go up on the roof
At night the stars put on a show for free And darling you can share it all with me I keep on telling you
Right smack dab in the middle of town I’ve found a paradise that’s trouble proof So if this world starts getting you down There’s room enough for two , up on the roof Up on the roof, oh come on, baby Everything is all right Everything is all right Up on the roof
******
Up on the Roof in the Garden
All right. Time to finish up my Carole King love-in and move on to the garden side of my blog. If there was a rooftop that I looked at and thought, “Ah, this is a lovely place to get away from the rat-race below,” it was Clarissa Morawski’s roof deck garden in Toronto. I photographed it for a book series I was illustrating in the mid-90s. At the time, Clarissa’s career was all about the three R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. (Today she’s a consultant in waste minimization). And her rooftop was the perfect illustration of the three R’s. There was an actual main-sail for a sunshade; wooden crates filled with veggies and herbs; and bushel baskets filled with flowers.
While a rooftop deck with planters is a relatively conventional gardening scenario and has been around for a long time, an actual “green roof” is a bigger technological endeavor, one that North America was slow to pick up on, compared to Europe. Green roofs buffer rain water, cleanse the air and cool ambient temperatures, acting as natural air-conditioning for buildings, thus saving energy, both in winter and summer. They’re also beautiful and bring wildlife and pollinators to urban spaces. When we arrived in Amsterdam in 1999, I snapped a shot of the sedum-planted green roof spanning the departure terminal at the Schiphol Airport; at the time it was more than ten years old. The roof was recently redone by a Massachusetts firm, retrofitted with solar panels and now features a hardy succulent plant mix called “Sedum Carpet’ especially formulated for green roofs.
Later in that 1999 trip to the Netherlands, we visited a town called Alphen aan den Rijn to see an experimental Dutch model community called Ecolonia. The buildings utilized sustainable construction material; green roof technology was used, below; wetlands were restored and made a focus and a central storm retention pond became a feature. Conceived by Lucien Kroll of Belgium, it was similar in concept to the New Urbanism movement in North America.
There’s a green roof in my neighbourhood in Toronto, atop the workshop of the house owner and adjacent to the art studio used by his wife. Designed by architect David Lieberman, I photographed it in 1998 as it was being installed by my friend Terry McGlade, then managing his own green roof company called Gardens in the Sky, now part of Flynn Canada. A few years later, I came back and nervously climbed up the ladder so I could stand on the roof and photograph the now-mature plants and the resident cat. Then I wrote and illustrated a story on the roof for the magazine Gardening Life, below. The photos after that show the steps in its creation (though there are now modular components that take the place of the Styrofoam).
The roof was covered with a waterproof, single-ply EPDM membrane surrounded by a 30 cm (12 inch) high metal parapet. The perforated drainage tube would be laid around the perimeter and connected on overflow pipe. Note that the white things on the outer wall that look like portholes are actually vents leading out from an airspace between the roof and the insulated ceiling of the workshop below, designed to keep the soil frozen in winter and the plants in dormancy.
Then an 8-10 cm (3-4 inch) layer of Styrofoam pellets was distributed, covered by filter cloth to prevent plant roots and soil from entering the drainage area.
Next, a 15-23 cm (6-9 inch) layer of lightweight, compost-rich, soilless mix was spread on and watered thoroughly.
Then a palette of low-maintence hardy perennials was planted: sedums, perennial geraniums, strawberries, phlox, thyme, calamagrostis, liatris, echinacea. Hostas were planted on the shady east side.
A few years later, I returned to check out the plants. The family cat eyed me with interest. Everything did well except the echinacea, which seems to prefer sandier soil.
From a little flagstone path on the rooftop, I could look down on the ground-level deck below. I have learned that this rooftop had to be redone in the past year or so, which means it had a 20-year life. Presumably newer technologies would have extended that lifetime.
The sloping green roof atop the Dembroski Centre for Horticulture at the Toronto Botanical Garden was planted in 2005 by Terry McGlade. At slightly more than 2400 square feet, it was a critical factor in the TBG gaining a Silver LEED designation for the building itself. The plants used on the initial roof planting are a combination of drought-tolerant sedum species: Sedum album, S. sexangulare, S. spurium and S. kamtschaticum.
The flat part of the TBG’s green roof features native wildflowers such as penstemons, coreopsis and other meadow-like, drought-tolerant perennials.
The TBG also has a small straw-bale building with a sloping green roof.
It features prairie grasses, coreopsis (C. lanceolata), columbines (Aquilegia canadensis), hairy penstemon (P. hirsutus) and…
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…. the occasional nesting goose.
I photographed the 3rd floor rooftop herb garden of the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel in Vancouver back in 2010 for a story I was proposing on urban beekeeping.
I loved walking through the garden, which evidently saved the kitchen thousands of dollars each year in herb costs.
I was able to sample those herbs in a honey-themed lunch served to me by the Fairmont.
But my real interest in the Fairmont’s green roof was the apiary set in a miniature meadow overlooking Vancouver’s Coal Harbour. At the time, it featured beautiful hives hand-painted by students at Emily Carr College of Art. Alas, the meadow also harboured ground nests of yellow-jacket wasps that frightened guests (unlike the honey bees) so the following year the meadow was removed and replaced with a conventional garden that was not nearly so appealing. Note the Vancouver Convention Centre across the street; I’ll get to that green roof in a minute.
I did a big photo shoot of Graeme Evans, the hotel’s beekeeper, who at the time was also Head of Housekeeping. He had proposed the apiary to the Fairmont chain and was a natural with the bees, never wearing protective gear as he checked the frames or harvested honey.
The resulting story, which also featured profiles of beekeepers in Chicago and Atlanta, was published in a 2012 edition of Organic Gardening magazine. Alas, like a lot of other gardening magazines, it is no longer around. (Yes, that’s a queen bee surrounded by her worker nurse bees in my photo of a brood frame from the hives at the hotel.)
Back to the convention centre. At the time, this was the largest green roof in North America, at 6 acres (2.4 hectares). It was planted with 400,000 native British Columbia plants from 25 species. To achieve a west coast meadow look, there were 40,000 bulbs, including nodding onion (Allium cernuum) and camas (Camassia quamash) plus 128 kilograms of flower and grass seed, including Idaho fescue (Festuca idahoensis), red fescue (F. rubra) and sheep fescue (F. vulgaris). As well, 80,000 sedums were planted on the hottest part of the roof on the west side. It has become a haven for nesting birds and a rich foraging site for pollinator insects.
The Hugh Garner Housing Cooperative green roof in Toronto was featured on a Garden Bloggers’ Fling tour in 2015. The South Roof, then 5 years old, featured a combination of raised planter boxes and actual green roof technology beds to produce a beautiful space for residents, with pergolas and community garden space.
There was a photo display showing the engineering processes used to build the roof. The specifications from the project’s web page include a “Cold Applied Rubber roofing membrane with ILD leak detection system; polyethylene sheet root barrier….
…. 4″ extruded polystyrene rigid insulation; 2″ Pontarolo storm water reservoir; filter cloth; and ballast consisting of reused concrete pavers, wood decks, planters and planting beds (ranging from 6″ – 18″ in depth).”
Interestingly, the architect on the Hugh Garner project was Monica Kuhn, a founding member of Toronto’s Rooftop Gardens Resource Group. I photographed her own little Cabbagetown rooftop way back in the mid-90s for my newspaper column. I remember that she cautioned me to be careful because she didn’t have her railings up yet!
…. to photograph the textural meadow that grows on the roof.
During that bloggers’ fling, we also toured gardens on Ward’s Island in Toronto and I liked the effort put into the miniature green roof on this toolshed.
In 2017, a sodden morning of rain didn’t deter these media folks previewing the Toronto Botanical Garden’s garden tour route from trying to get a better view of the green roof over a garage at one of the gardens.
I found my telephoto lens worked well to take a closer look. I see lots of bearded irises up there!
In 2018, during a symposium in Chicago with my Garden Communicators (Gardencomm) group in Chicago, I was privileged to visit a 25,000-square-foot rooftop farm at McCormick Place West, run by the Windy City Harvest program out of Chicago Botanic Garden.
In this garden, apprenticeship graduates from the program work with Savor (the building’s food service operators) to focus on rare heirloom crop production and rooftop-appropriate varieties of vegetables, native fruits, herbs, hops and edible flowers. The rooftop farm features microgreens production, honey bee hives and vermicompost bins.
Some of the Windy City Harvest produce also goes to a local farmers’ market.
I’ll end my musings on ‘Up on the Roof’ with one of the most famous green roofs in North America – though many visitors might not guess that Chicago’s beautiful Lurie Garden and Millennium Park are actually “situated over a network of underground parking garages, pedways, and commuter electric train lines”. As the Lurie website says, “This unique engineering and location situation presents special, but manageable, plant care challenges. Visitors are often surprised by the presence of large, mature trees in Lurie Garden given its relatively shallow soil depth and construction as a rooftop garden. Horticulturalists at the garden have become highly skilled in managing plant growth and development in the challenging environment of a rooftop garden.”
This is the 19th blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading it, have a look at the others. And please leave a comment if you enjoyed any of them.
Water in the garden. What garden doesn’t benefit from the sound of water, the reflective qualities of water, the ability of water to create a shimmering focus in any scene? Monet was a master at water in the garden; in fact, he was obsessed with trying to capture the light as it played on the water where he grew his famous water lilies. I watched the light play on his garden when I visited one spring.
And water, of course, brings an abundance of wildlife to drink and bathe. Even a simple birdbath adds life to the garden. (The one below was custom-made for the gardener.)
My friend Marnie Wright has a birdbath in her garden near a bench where, if she’s quiet, she can watch them bathe.
Her birdbath is a little piece of art in itself.
But Marnie also has a meandering pond where she can indulge her love of aquatic plants and moisture-loving marginals. Have a look at my blog on Marnie’s beautiful garden in Bracebridge, Ontario in the Muskoka region near my own cottage.
Visiting public gardens can be inspiring for ideas on water gardens. At Chanticleer Garden in Wayne, PA (I wrote a 2-part blog on this, my favourite North American garden), the pond garden is large, with complex plantings. Here you see one side through a scrim of alliums….
……. and here through variegated water iris, I. laevigata ‘Variegata’…..
….. and then looking right into the pond at the water lilies (Nymphaea) and the pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata) on the far side.
Chanticleer’s ponds meander through a damp area with moisture-loving primulas and carnivorous plants just beyond; but the planting in the other direction is inspiring and very floriferous.
Near Chanticleer’s entrance, the Teacup Garden features a different take on water gardening…. a simple, sophisticated, overflowing “teacup” fountain.
At New York Botanical Garden, the Native Plants Garden makes extensive use of water, and moisture-loving plants like Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium) and cardinal plant (Lobelia cardinalis). If you want to read more about this wonderful garden in the Bronx, have a look at my blog.
At Wave Hill in the Bronx, it’s always fun to see the formal pool with its elegant lotuses. I included this gorgeous water feature in my blog on Wave Hill.
At New York’s fabulous High Line, water is introduced in a subtle way in the Scrim water feature. Moisture-loving plants flank this artificial wetland, where visitors – especially children – are known to cool their feet on hot summer days.
When I visited the Missouri Botanical Garden one incredibly hot July day, I enjoyed seeing Dale Chihuly’s blown glass ‘Walla Walla onions’ floating on the pond surface beside the large, platter-like leaves of the Victoria water lilies (Victoria amazonica).
At Filoli near San Francisco, formality dictates the perfect axis of the ornamental pools that lead the eye across the next garden room to the spectacular green hills in the mist beyond.
In my visits to Portland’s serene Japanese Garden, I’ve been impressed with the variety of water features, from the very large, below, to the small water basins. These all represent specific symbolism in Japanese landscape design.
This is the yatsuhashi zig-zag bridge, meant to deter the evil spirits that might follow you.
At Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden, a zig-zag bridge leads across an arm of the pond to the impressive Southern Hemisphere collections.
My favourite part of The Butchart Gardens just outside Victoria, B.C. in the sunken Japanese garden. Here is a wealth of water features, including a stone basin and bamboo spout fountain in a shady grotto…..
…. and a shishi-odoshi “deer-scarer” fountain that clacks regularly as the bamboo spout fills with water…..
…..and a few serene ponds, including this small one with a waterfall.
At Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Hillwood Estate in Virginia, the Japanese garden arrayed down a hillside features several water features, including these dancing water spouts.
In Austin, Texas, I was enchanted with the wonderful garden of Jenny and David Stocker. In one of their ‘garden rooms’, a galvanized stock tank is used to grow aquatic plants.
But their swimming pool almost seems to be a water feature in itself, given the flowery landscape flanking it. How wonderful it would be to swim lengths beside all those blossoms! I wrote a blog about the Stocker garden.
Fun-loving Lucinda Hutson might know more about tequila than anyone else in North America! The Austin garden of the woman who wrote the best-selling book Viva Tequila is a colourful trip into the fantastic, indoors and out! Naturally, Lucinda got her very own blog. Her little pond and its trickling fountain occupy a corner of a siren-themed patio, below.
Garden writer Pam Penick also features a stock tank in her garden (yes, I wrote a blog on Pam’s garden too) but she’s added a little faucet fountain to enjoy the trickle of water and keep the tank aerated.
Pam also has a pretty blue urn fountain, one of many blue touches in her Austin landscape. It requires a receptacle below the rocks so the water can re-circulate, but is a less labour-intensive alternative to a pond.
My Denver friend and plantsman-extraordinaire Panayoti Kelaidis has a rectangular pond abutting his plant-filled patio at the base of a rock wall filled with alpine plants. Naturally, the pond features myriad plants as well! I wrote about Panayoti’s garden in a June blog last year.
Although Tatiana Maxwell’s stunning Boulder CO garden featured a large pond, I loved this little touch of water using two overflowing bowls. This also utilizes a below-grade receptacle to circulate the water.
There were a few water features in the Fort Collins, CO garden of Carol and Randall Shinn, but I especially liked this Corten-and-concrete wall fountain because it’s such a good example of how to bring the splash of water into a restricted space. You can read my blog about the Shinn garden here.
In Rob Proctor and Dave Macke’s exquisite Denver garden, a little faucet fountain poured into a watering can, below. That was just one feature of hundreds of perfect vignettes in this well-known garden about which I blogged last year.
In the colourful, art-filled Englewood, Colorado garden of Dan Johnson (of the Denver Botanic Garden) and Tony Miles, there were a few brilliant touches of water. I adored this container water garden surrounded by a large plant collection…..
…. and look at this tiny little gesture, below. Anyone could do this, with a small pump and some ingenuity! (Okay, maybe some glass cutters and some silicone, too….)
Chicago Botanic Garden’s Evening Island is a landscape surrounded by lake, so water is always part of the view here. I made a video of my lovely August morning on Evening Island a few years ago.
Garden designer Kellie O’Brien’s lion’s head wall fountain in Hinsdale, near Chicago.
Further afield, my 2018 garden tour of the north and south islands of New Zealand offered lots of design inspiration. Naturally, the spectacular pond of Di and Ian Mackenzie’s Akaunui (my blog on their garden is here) might be a little ambitious for most of us, but it does point out the beauty of the reflective quality of a large body of water.
In the Cloudy Bay area of Marlborough, Rosa Davison’s large pond at Paripuma (see my blog here) has no reflection at all – but then she installed it as a sanctuary for grey ducks which, of course, appreciate all the duckweed on the surface!
At Upton Oaks near Blenheim, which I blogged about in 2018, Sue Monahan carefully sculpted a circular hedge to echo the contour of her formal lily pool.
The Giant’s House, Josie Martin‘s otherworldly Akaroa garden is filled with her mosaic sculpture (see my blog here) and water is used cleverly in a few places. But I loved this water feature surrounded by “mosaic swimmers”.
At Penny and Rowan Wiggins’s garden The Paddocks near Auckland, a simple sphere sculpture burbled with the splash of water. There are many such fountains available in a range of sizes and styles.
Back in Canada, this large reflecting pool at the Montreal Botanical Garden features a collection of stainless steel “island containers” planted with moisture-loving flora.
At the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, Ontario, the reflecting pools also feature aquatic flora, but planted in containers below the surface.
At the residential level, I’ve stayed at James and Virginia Mainprize’s pretty bed-and-breakfast in Niagara-on-the-Lake where I admired their little water garden, which was nicely integrated into their border.
Garden tours are excellent sources of design inspiration and this Cabbagetown garden in Toronto inspired me with its Japanese-themed bamboo and copper spouts spilling into a small pond. However, the mechanics here might be a little beyond my skill level!
Speaking of vertical wall fountains, the Toronto Botanical Garden where I spend a lot of time photographing has one of the coolest water walls. Designed by PMA Landscape Architects , it offers the element of water without using a lot of space.
No matter what season…..
….. it adds a lovely splash to the entrance courtyard at the TBG.
On the Westview Terrace behind the front part of the Toronto Botanical Garden’s building, a lively focal point is the diagonal water channel that begins at a waterfall tucked between two raised plantings abutting the rear portion of the building. A stone slab bridge lets visitors cross the channel.
For parties at the TBG, they’ve been known to move containers into the channel.
In autumn, it’s particularly lovely when the grasses are in flower and the shrubs turn colour. That’s Indigofera kirilowii with the bright yellow leaves on the right.
Oh! I wonder how this old photo of my daughter and her groom got in here? (Didn’t they look lovely? They’ve got three kids now…)
So… that brings me to my own pond. It’s pretty old now. I dug it myself in 1987, acquiring a shoulder injury that required nerve surgery along the way! But it continues to be the main focal point in my garden as it visually anchors the dining patio.
It has been rebuilt once after the liner failed.
At that time, I added the boulder fountain, drilled through to admit the PVC tubing leading from the pump.
It looked pretty and worked for a few years, but the pump eventually failed and was replaced by another pump, which also failed. Do you sense my theme? Ponds like this are not low-maintenance.
In fact, if you’re not going to pay a pond service company to clean out all the leaves and debris that a pond like mine collects each season – as well as replacing the rocks that fall in during the freeze and thaw periods – you’ll have to do it yourself. And from personal experience (those boots are mine), it’s not a job for the faint of heart.
Even though the only book I’ve written was called Water in the Garden, on behalf of Canadian Gardening magazine (1995), I would recommend thinking small on water features.
But I will add that, despite the work involved in keeping it somewhat clean-looking, my pond pays me back in spades on that spring or summer morning when I look out and see the birds taking turns to bathe in it. Because the cardinals and robins simply don’t care how messy it is.
*****
Okay, let’s get to the title of my blog How would someone “Bring me little water”? Maybe as the waiter did in the rainforest in Costa Rica, with a sweet stick insect sticking to the side?
El Remanso Lodge; Osa Peninsula; Costa Rica
Or maybe someone would bring me a little water in song. For me, the ideal person to do that would be Moira Smiley. A singer-songwriter, composer and teacher with her own group called VOCA, I would want her to use her famed body percussion (clapping, stomping, bodybeats) to “bring me little water”, as she did with these young people at the Los Angeles Choral Workshop, teaching her own version of the 1936 song composed by Huddie Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly (1888-1949).
And here she is with her own singers doing her official version of “Silvy”.
If you want to learn how to do body percussion, Moira will teach it to you, too!
When I was 12, my mother took me to see Harry Belafonte in Vancouver. He sang ‘Sylvie’ as a plea from an incarcerated man to his lover, the lyrics lamenting that Sylvie “brought me nearly every damn thing, but she didn’t bring the jailhouse key”. Here is Harry Belafonte singing the song from his Live at Carnegie Hall album that very same year.
And here’s the very rustic inspiration by Lead Belly himself. When he wasn’t in jail or on drugs, Ledbetter sang to earn his money. He said ‘Sylvie’ was inspired by his farmer uncle calling for his wife to bring him water out to the hot fields.
BRING ME LITTLE WATER SILVy (Moira Smiley, orig.Huddie Ledbetter, Lead Belly)
Bring me little water, Silvy
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Bring me little water now Bring me little water, Silvy Every little once in a while
Bring it in a bucket, Silvy Bring it in a bucket now Bring it in a bucket, Silvy Every little once in a while
Silvie come a runnin’ Bucket in my hand I will bring a little water Fast as I can
Bring me little water, Silvy Bring me little water now Bring me little water, Silvy Every little once in a while
Can’t you see me coming? Can’t you see me now? I will bring you little water Every little once in a while
Every little once in a while Every little once in a while Every little once in a while
*********
This is the 12th blog (marathon?) in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others beginning with
