Snow-Gardening

Hey, it's too early for daffodils and too late for Christmas lights. What can you do to fill the seasonal gap in your home landscape?

How about some ephemeral but uplifting Snow-Gardening? Sure, it will be gone tomorrow (this is Vancouver after all) but in the meantime, let our on-call staff of professional and discrete snow-gardeners transform your winterscape.

Seize the Snow-Day! Call us 12 hours ago. (Too late for 2011, but keep us in mind for next year!!)

Products include:

Candle-lit Snowball Igloos (small, medium, and large).

Floral-Themed Snowmen or Snowladies*.

*Snowladies cost extra.

[We emphasize the ephemeral nature of our products. Our "Rosie" prototype (pictured above with discrete Snow-Gardening staff) did a face-plant approx. 5 hours later due to a sudden warming trend. This in no way reflects her structural integrity, or lack thereof.]

Icicle-Gardening 2011

Glace-ial stone...



It's a bit of a novelty when the temperature drops below freezing around here, and we experience things like ice and snow. I personally keep an eye out for impromptu ice-sculptures, for which I can take no credit. Here are some more surprising and magical formations found while rock-hopping in Lynn Creek...

Bellflowers...

Ice-trumpets...

Glace-ial stone, again, on a different setting (how cool is that?!)...

Hardy Signs of Life

We're getting our cold snap now, so I've only been venturing out in the sunny gaps between snow/hail showers to prune/see "what's up" in garden land. Snowdrops are up. So are the little reticulata irises at Roswitha's...

I wonder how they've fared the last couple nights. Even the hellebores in my garden are rethinking their early start...

So were Andy and Jono (intrepid arborist and right-hand man), who started recurving this laurel hedge one frosty day, while I prepped, protected, and stuck up for the perennial beds below.

Andy's actually great (which is why I recommend him to help in my gardens whoo!), and brought a wide ramp that he braced between two ladders so that cuttings/boots didn't crush the garden beds. He says "the older I get, the more tools I need" and I say I wish everyone brought the right gear to prevent damage to plants. I agree though, that a person can spend years in gardening, performing feats of strength and endurance out of sheer joie de vivre, and not really have to consider body-and-plant-saving systems until the big 4-0, or so.

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While I have them in the shot, ye olde apple trees have produced a lot of new growth since their restorative pruning last year. Jim & Ro have an old friend/sculptor who comes in from the Gulf Islands to prune these trees (I imagine a woman in rustic robes, with long wavy hair threaded with grey and perhaps a sickle) and who, last year, performed quite a drastic reduction, removing several large old branches. So last summer resulted in a lot of vegetative growth, and perhaps this year we'll see more flower buds and a better crop yield by next year. Learnin' from experience...

Self-Propelled: The Next Generation

Another random sighting--this time in Coal Harbour, where Transformers come out for a jog on a Sunday afternoon.

2011 Hobbit Houses

I took these pics shortly after wiping out on ice (in slow motion, a la bicyclette) and landing in goose poo in Stanley Park today. It was worth it. I looked up...and saw these.


Updated from 2010 models, these are possibly the most statuesque Hobbit Houses I've seen yet. They probably have a real name--something quaint and British like "twiggeries"--but I either call them "wigwams" (neither quaint nor British) or Hobbit Houses, for reasons obvious to me. These particular houses will support large patches of tall Phlox.

This post is mainly for my own How-To benefit, for future reference. In fact, if I kept pics like this under wraps, I could probably take credit for inventing Hobbit Houses. Whenever I build them in clients' gardens, they think I'm absolutely brilliant because they've never noticed them before.

Case in point: notice the random gentleman, below, oblivious to the presence of Hobbit Houses.

FMI (For My Information): the gardeners here used entire saplings (retaining side branches instead of stripping the main trunks into poles); they bend opposing saplings into archways to form the main structure, then interwine the side branches as well, for bracing. Nice work. And you thought putting up a tent was hard.

February Valentine Bouquet-in-a-Bowl

Really, if you had to go out into your garden (or someone else's) and pick something for your sweetie (or yourself) at this time of year, you could come back in with a scented bouquet of Sarcacocca and Helleborus, also known as Himalayan Sweetbox and Lenten-Rose that rivals the more traditional/blah bouquet we have been brainwashed to expect. This bouquet is best displayed in a bowl, because most Hellebores are noddy and look down, so you have to snap off the head and float it face-up, like so...


Notwithstanding the fact that presenting a bouquet of Helleborus and the staccato-sounding Sarcacocca sounds more like you are pronouncing a curse rather than declaring your devotion, the overall effect is pleasing, and merely an issue of marketing. Simply present the bowl, like an offering, while describing the contents as "Himalayan Sweetbox and Lenten-Roses", intoning something to the effect that you'd be willing to "give up" (get it? "Lenten") anything to be with so-and-so. I should mention that Sarcacocca smells like jasmine--that is the scent lingering in the air these days, usually in shady plantings near entrances of buildings. Even if you are not performing the above recommended ritual, bring a bouquet inside. It will fill a room with scent.

So here's a somewhat surprise-guest, taking the place of my afore-mentioned Amaryllis in my window. Yes, my African white lily is blooming again, on Valentines, two years after leaving Ghana (snooooo-ork). That's me, blowing my nose (because I have a cold, not because I'm having a romantic relapse). Buut, the point being: flowers hold very strong emotional memories, and I see no reason why red roses should monopolize the love-market. If your sweetie picked a spontaneous handful of Scabiosa or Farfugium or dandy-lions the first time, that's how it is. That's all I'm sayin.

One Love (makes the world go 'round)

Mutant Ninja Squirrels

What's with the squirrels this year?!

Here's a new take on "While the cat's away, the mice will play"...

Between my sporadic winter visits, the resident/hoodlum squirrels are trashing Roswitha's flower benches: the driplines usually sit on the surface of the soil, but are being seriously undermined here! The rodents in question are (allegedly) tunnelling after the purple tulips that have naturalized in the benches, between the roses/azaleas etc. They have never done this before, usually restricting themselves to newly-planted bulbs (which I habitually protect with chicken wire).




This is where I planted those fabulous Fritillaria bulbs last fall--I put the metal screens down more as a mild deterrent, because squirrels don't even like fritillarias (which smell skunky). I merely suspected that squirrels would be curious enough to dig into freshly-dug soil, in hopes that I'd hidden something tasty. As it was, these little cretins dug in from the sides of the screens and tunnelled around underneath, looking for the long-established purple tulips (of which I found bits and pieces) but did not dig deep enough to disturb the fritillarias.



Why are the squirrels so short on food this year that they're going for "reserve" supplies? (The fact that squirrels have a backup plan and remember tulip stocks they've ignored for years is a little bit impressive.) My theory is that the past two winters haven't really been cold enough to force the little b*ggers into semi-hibernation, so they're still hopping around with high-season appetites, and not enough food to sustain them. They've also been after all the crocus--established and newly planted.



So what to do?

• Start restricting tulips and crocus to containers/pots that are easy to protect with a "lid" of chicken wire? I may be suggesting this in the future!
• We may have to plant early-flowering bulbs/corms that squirrels don't like in places that are too labour-intensive to cover with chicken wire. There are still lots to choose from: Narcissus (daffodils), Hyacinths, Grape Hyacinths, Dutch Iris, Fritillarias, Alliums, Anemones, Snowdrops...and those bloody invasive English bluebells. Why don't squirrels dig after them? Bluebell bulbs look white and crunchy and delicious. Maybe it's just marketing.
• Another thought--what if we bought *cheap* peanuts-in-the-shell and "planted" them for the squirrels, in hopes that our flower bulbs would be spared?
• Start eating squirrels (See The Joy of Cooking).
  

Oh, can't wait 'til spring...

Painting Rocks

This is a painted rock.

Two friends have milestone birthdays this weekend: Liz is turning forty, and Anne is eighty! Seemed a good time to resurrect my long-lost art of stone-painting. When I first moved to North Van (almost 15 years ago!), I spent a bohemian winter (read: semi-starvation) painting and wandering the riverside trails of Lynn Valley. Among other survival tactics, I painted river-rocks and sold them at the Vancouver Art Gallery gift shop.

Here's the 30-foot pool (below):

Ooo. Pretty rocks. So here's the process:

Go for hike in valley. Wear good boots for skidding down the short-cut bank instead of following touristy trails. Wear a backpack. Scramble along shoreline for 300m or so, scouring shallows for pretty rocks.

Pick rocks with interesting bumps and colours, relatively smooth, of reasonable size. Avoid granite, which is too pixel-y. Set them on high boulders to pick up on your way back. Make sure the rocks will stand firmly on a flat surface, with the most interesting face exposed. You'll need more than you think you need.

Hike out with your backpack full of small boulders. Consider the merits of painting something lighter, like bark.

At home, scrub rocks to remove any sliminess. Let dry, then paint with Polymer Medium (Gloss), a glaze you can find in art supply stores. This will bring up the mineral colours, though not as bright as fresh-from-the-river colours.

Then, as time permits, stare at rocks every which way (possibly for hours--this is a non-lucrative art form). Wait for rocks to "speak to you." Maintain total faith that you will see something. When it happens, it's uncanny how the existing shapes and crevices "fall into place." That's the thrilling part. Don't give up.

Sketch in forms with chalk. Paint them. Ideally, I try to let the natural colours/shapes of the stone define the form as much as possible, and bring it together with as little paint as possible. Pretty zen.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After (again):

Sometimes I glaze over the whole stone again, after painting, but this time I just glazed certain elements, like the moon/leaves/waterfall for special effect. I also glued pieces of flattened recycled bicycle tubes to the bottoms so the rocks can sit on surfaces without scratching/sliding.