When planning our trip west for two weeks at the end of August, we had to incorporate Drumheller, come hell or high water, as we had kids in tow, and one in particular is a 9 year old boy that has been dreaming of this place forever.
It's a short drive out from Calgary to Drumheller, through the flat, flat prairies, which I can't help but love. The colours and the lines.
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From the Vedauwoo we continued along I-80, passing north of the big fire raging through eastern Colorado. It would have been perfect timing to go through the Snowy, but we had timeline to keep to' and I had this obsession to see both penstemon yampaensis and p. acaulis in the wild not perfect timing for flowers, but just to know what the habitat was like.
I-80 travel along the…
I received requests from the Portland chapter of NARGS and the independent VIRAGS of Victoria, BC for late June, 2012. This timing works well for us as shipping and spring sales are complete. Daughter Esther can manage the nursery alone.
I had in mind for this trip that I wanted to see penstemon acaulis and its close cousin, p. yampaensis, in the wild. I would have preferred to start…
Running a specialist nursery that depends on the offerings of seed collectors and the oddities that may appear in any garden, provides both excitement and agitation. We never ever follow the business plan exactly. Some of the "odds and ends" end up on a sales bench, and mostly depend on a spur of the moment sales talk to the buyers present - like a bazaar. Here are a few of those plants that…
It's hard camping at the usual campgrounds. Maybe if you live in the city it feels like you are 'getting away from it all', but when you live out in the boonies, like outside Kerwood (pop. 200), you don't want to go to a bush where you are forced to be 20 feet from other grumpy people's tents and conversations. So for the second year, we headed up to Algonquin, where you canoe away…
Yesterday I was uploading and organizing pictures of the plants along the Maitland River, and the harbour beach in Goderich where we visited 2 weekends ago. That day was calm - in what is called Ontario's "Prettiest Town". As corny is it sounds, it really is beautiful small town, with an octagonal road around the Court House and old architecture everywhere you look. You still…
A second day at the Pinery, at the southern tip of Lake Huron. First hike of the morning is to the Black and White Oak Savanna (apparently one of the rarest habitats in North America) and the dunes. It is a 2.3km circular trail, with the option of shooting off for a 1km hike through the dunes halfway through the loop...who'd say no to another trip to the beach?
This was a…
Coming back from the recent NARGS Annual meeting in New Hampshire, we took a side-trip to stay with Robin & Juliette Magowan for a couple of days, knowing that they will be moving to New Mexico in the winter.
What a surprise on driving in the lane to the front entry. Greeting us before this curious, stiff 3-story New England style house is the most exuberantly luscious display one…
Aside from the great swaths of poison ivy, this was a wonderful place to be 30 minutes from our home/nursery. Why?
The Pinery has the largest Oak Savanna woodland remaining in North America Even though the Pinery is directly North of our nursery, it experiences a frost-free period 2 weeks longer than our area near Strathroy. This is the Northern most fringe of the…
We live in an area that some call "the barren wasteland." Flat cash crop land that is thankfully interrupted with a small bush (woodlot, for you Americans!) here and there . The odd ditch, or maybe a river is a novelty.
Not that this bothers me...I kind of like it (or am comfortably used to it). It's small town rural Ontario, and so are the people - Alice Munro's short stories nail it…
Karen Perkins operates Garden Visions, the nursery that propagates and sells Darrell Probst's collections of Epimedium species and the hybrids he has created. His lecture on searching in China was most enthralling; and, having many of the plants available on the Karen's sales table added more to the obvious interest of the audience. To our great delight,…
I don't know how Stephanie Ferguson persuaded me to do a tufa planting/trough planting/plant sale for the Calgary Rock and Alpine Garden Society - I must learn to say no. It was a surreal drive across the mid-continent, somewhat like Napoleon's retreat from Moscow - with plants, 600 pots and 16 baskets of rooted cuttings! Three days and 2500 miles we were in Cochrane, AB ready to set…
We were on summer vacation towing 200 tons of rock in our trailer. Harvey was delivering tufa and stone troughs to Robin Magowan, Peter George and Bruce Lockhart. Combined with garden visits we were in for a good time.
We arrived at Peter's after 12 hours of driving. Peter has a large rock garden; astounding, almost impossible. At one end…
