Hyacinth
Those chandeliers of fragrance / so charmed me that four trips / and so many phone calls to try / to find a bulb was a worthy price.
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Christmas lights in March
They’ve been dangling for weeks. If it was up to me, I’d have been on them in January, but the boss says it is better to keep ladder jobs until the end of winter. No point in slipping when you don’t have to. Still, all those forgotten strings of lights in the park are looking…
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Rest and renew
With October long behind us, the bright colours from the trees around our home have faded, and their leaves gather on the ground. In the next few weeks, the snow will come and create both beauty for the eyes and barriers for the wheelchairs. So for now, I bundle Rachel and Janneke in their warm…
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Better farms, not bugs
Heather Looy and John R. Wood’s article “Save the planet; Eat bugs: Why it’s time for the West to embrace edible insects” (CC, Sept. 20) inspired this column. I agree that the Biblical story about Peter and Cornelius and the vision of the lowered sheet is not about clean or unclean foods: it is, as…
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Nature hates neat
A commentator from the U.K. says this about our landscapes: “It’s about wildness, whether we’re talking about our gardens or the wider countryside. Nature hates neat. What wildlife needs is often the scruffy patches and the bits around the edge. Across the country, we’re losing a lot of our scruffiness.” A friend of mine (now deceased) used…
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The lawn as wasteland
This Spring, Louisa and I got rid of our front lawn. We tore out the sod and had it replaced with cedar bark chips, planted some shrubs, and installed a bench on which to sit during warm summer nights as the sun sets. We think it looks quite nice. Classist grass Have you ever wondered…
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Wasteland garden
My wasteland was overgrown. Fifteen years ago, we moved into a new house in downtown Ottawa because we thought our growing family couldn’t possibly fit in our charming two bed-room apartment. Our eldest was turning two, and I was six months pregnant. The new house was surrounded by apartment towers, but it had plenty of…
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It’s complicated
My back aches and I am tired. I just finished planting a pollinator garden in my front yard. Far more exhausting than the physical labour was the year-long struggle to get permission to do a good thing. This experience showed me how complicated it can become when we try to improve how we care for…
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Beware the chickadee
Albert and Marjorie bought a house in a subdivision and perhaps didn’t read the fine print. Their small back yard was shaded, so they made very neat gardening beds in the front yard to grow their organic vegetables. Neighbours complained, citing a subdivision ordinance that front yards must have x-amount of lawn and the rest…
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Mail-order tree
This morning, my doorbell rang, and a man handed me an apple tree. I’d ordered it from the local nursery and been surprised to learn that they could deliver it by mail. Now it is sitting in my kitchen, all wrapped in brown paper with red cotton stitching at the top like a bag of…
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High hopes
A kid in a candy shop – there I stood in front of the rack of flower seeds. Any of them would look spectacular in my garden. Decisions, decisions. But really there was no contest – sunflowers were the obvious choice. Tall. Tenacious. Irresistibly cheerful. They would stand rustically elegant in front of the cedar…
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Pigweed Prayers
I really would like to have “just the right number” of dandelions in my lawn. And I’d like to exert this control with organic, non-chemical means. But if I succeed, I may find that I still have a problem: No hyssop growing in the cracks of the sidewalk. The Hebrews apparently were more tolerant of…
