Gardening Life articles from March 1997

Gardening Life archives from March 1997

Few classic spring favourites.
March 22, 1997... David Tarrant is the host of CBC-TV's The Canadian Gardener. He has been the Education Coordinator for the University of British Columbia's Botanical Garden for 23 years and is the author of several books -- including Highrise Horticulture: A...

Easy-to-grow greens.
March 22, 1997... AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, we all feel the urge to eat something fresh and green from the garden. If you have a warm, sheltered spot in your garden, encourage the soil to warm up even earlier by placing a temporary coldframe over it. This will be...

Delicate blossoms and seductive fragrance make sweet peas an early summer favourite.
March 22, 1997... Lovers of cottage-garden flowers agree: there can never be too many sweet peas. These classic blooms of early summer hover like flirting butterflies, the frills and flounces of their delicate petals catching the nuance of every breeze. But...

Summer room: living moves outdoors for a few balmy months.
March 22, 1997... When is a backyard not just a backyard? When it's a summer room, complete with cosy sitting area, food preparation and grilling space and the look and feel of an extension of your home. The only difference is the blue sky above and the...

Cleansers and toners made with garden-grown ingredients ...
March 22, 1997... Long before there were drugstores or beauty counters, looking for something to wash your face with meant visiting the garden. The Egyptians gathered plant oils, the ancient Greeks picked petals for rosewater, the English preferred herbs....

From terrace to sunroom and back, a garden sensibility blossoms year-round at Indoors & Out.
March 22, 1997... Gardeners and decorators have been doing it for years--dragging furniture and decorative objects meant for the outdoors, indoors. And vice versa. So the minute store owners Deborah Chitiz and Jacob Verkade opened their Toronto shop dedicated...

Vertical growing is a breeze with these decorative and practical trellises.
March 22, 1997... TIPS FOR TRELLIS PLANTING What to Grow * Many annual vines make dramatic displays on a trellis. Morning glory (Ipomoea `Heavenly blue') and passion flower (Passiflora caerulea) are classic favourites in blue. For yellow blossoms...

Smart gardens: the software industry has a crop of programs for designing a garden.
March 22, 1997... Your days of scribbling garden plans on the backs of envelopes are over. While these garden design software packages are not a replacement for moving plants about or hiring a professional, you may find them intriguing. And you can learn a lot...

Books for the western gardener: horticultural advice, design ideas and plant folklore.
March 22, 1997... Northwest Garden Style: Ideas, Designs, and Methods For the Creative Gardener Jan Kowalczewski Whitner, Sasquatch Books, 1996, 192 pages, SC $27 Gardens are different in the West, and author Jan Kowalczewski Whitner catches every...

Season's best colours.
March 22, 1997... INDIVIDUAL COLOUR PREFERENCES are as personal and as idiosyncratic as one's taste in books or favourite foods. So we were intrigued though not surprised when one of Canada's most well-known fashion designers, Alfred Sung, revealed to us that...

Made to order: faced with a former parking lot, fashion designer Alfred Sung transformed his blank-slate backyard into a formal, custom-made Eden ...
March 22, 1997... FASHION DESIGNER ALFRED SUNG DIDN'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT GARDENING WHEN HE moved into his downtown Toronto house last spring. But he knew exactly what kind of garden he wanted. By the time a small army of landscapers arrived to transform his...

Scent and sentiment: ... lilacs spring to life in cold-climate gardens.
March 22, 1997... IF SCENT IS THE GREATER PART OF MEMORY, THE FRAGRANCE OF lilacs is the essence of spring remembrance. The American garden writer Louise Beebe Wilder described their scent as "the most memory-stirring of all the fragrances." No other garden...

In her fashion: ... Jardins de Metis.
March 22, 1997... "Here of a summer's night, when there is one of those rare all-pervading stillnesses and the world seems wrapped in a sacred silence, broken only by the slow rhythm of the sea lapping its waters upon the shore; with the moon, silver clear in...

Step lively: craft your own mosaic stepping stones with broken tiles and ready-made patio stones.
March 22, 1997... SET INTO A LUSH LAWN, nestled in a bed of wood chips or fitted into a non-descript patio, these mosaic stepping stones add colour and interest to a garden. Use one alone to accent a shady corner or line up several to create an inviting...

Beyond the button: ... the mushroom sheds its side-dish status.
March 22, 1997... It all started with the oyster mushroom. Exotic enough to jazz up a pasta and sufficiently abundant to satisfy commercial growers, the oyster became a familiar sight on produce shelves in the mid '80s. Then along came the spindly white enoki,...

Garden memoir: in praise of the wildflower.
March 22, 1997... Excerpted from I Bless You in My Heart: Selected Correspondence of Catharine Parr Traill, edited by Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins and Michael A. Peterman, published by University of Toronto Press, 1996. Catharine Parr Traill...