Tag: native plants

Chris Mousseau

going to seed…

This time last year we had already had our first frost – not unusual around here – but this year, summer started late and it’s just now starting to cool down.  Today’s high is 11 but the next two weeks, if you believe the forecast, will be in the high teens and low twenties.  With […]

Continue Reading "going to seed…"
Chris Mousseau

In Praise of a Not Very Spectacular Native Shrub

Snowberry.  Doesn’t the name conjures up images of large, juicy, creamy berries produced after pollinators have spent the summer happily buzzing amongst fluttery, multi-petaled white flowers? Then you add the botanical name, Symphoricarpos albus, and reality sets in.  Latin can really be a buzzkill sometimes. For me, the Snowberry is a memory pant — a […]

Continue Reading "In Praise of a Not Very Spectacular Native Shrub"
Chris Mousseau

7 Early Fall Favourites

In this first week of autumn I realize there’s nothing new left to come up in the garden – no new flower buds to open, no new unfurling of leaves, no more sudden growth spurts of stalk and stem.  The final Hollyhock flowers – those at the very tip of six or seven foot spikes […]

Continue Reading "7 Early Fall Favourites"
Chris Mousseau

Six ‘Weeds’ My Garden Can’t Be Without

  As Irish novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford wrote in 1878 (in her book Molly Bawn), “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  When we bought our parcel of land it was a field surrounded by trees.  The field had tall grass and, according to some, a lot of weeds. Now, 15 years later, I’ve […]

Continue Reading "Six ‘Weeds’ My Garden Can’t Be Without"
Chris Mousseau

Favourite (almost) Fall Flowers

More than three weeks left in summer.  Officially.  But with days getting noticeably shorter and temperatures several degrees cooler than average (single digits when we got out of bed yesterday – Shileau came down the stairs with me but then just curled up on the couch!) it really is beginning to feel a lot like […]

Continue Reading "Favourite (almost) Fall Flowers"
Chris Mousseau

Native vs Non Native gardening

I recently started following the Royal Horticultural Society on Twitter (@The_RHS); I’m not sure how this feed came to my attention, likely it was Twitter itself, that clever creature, that suggested it.  It was a good suggestion.  Even though it’s a British organization, and the information they share is abut British gardening and British plants […]

Continue Reading "Native vs Non Native gardening"
Chris Mousseau

Time to revel in Rudbeckia

When I first started gardening (eons ago, it seems) in my tiny Toronto backyard, one of the first flowers I bought was a Black Eyed Susan.  It was lovely – small, hairy leaves with bright orange-yellow flowers in late summer.  I planted it in an area that started out in full sun but gradually, as […]

Continue Reading "Time to revel in Rudbeckia"
Chris Mousseau

mid summer report – happy happy joy joy

Nothing has died. That kind of says it all.  This time last year the fields were brown, the Larix were dead, the Rudbeckia was just not flowering. Copious amounts of rain this spring and an average amount so far this summer has brought in the garden great joy to all things growing and, I suspect, […]

Continue Reading "mid summer report – happy happy joy joy"
Chris Mousseau

Directions from Nature

When early pioneers were rolling their way across the tall grass prairies of North America, sometimes, in mid summer, they would come across a towering plant with huge basal leaves that often were oriented on a north-south axis.  They called it a Compass Plant.  In later years scientists speculated the leaves point that way to […]

Continue Reading "Directions from Nature"