Fling Experience - Toronto Style

I have been asked many times about the Garden Blogger Flings that I attend. In a nutshell a Fling is where the hosting Garden Bloggers find wonderful gardens, public and private, to show off their city/region. It involves a lot of work, coordinating times, schedules, buses, locations, food, and 80+ Garden Bloggers. 
Those of us who attend these Flings take away so much more than garden design, plants, and landscaping. Imagine an annual pilgrimage to get reacquainted with many of your fellow gardeners. Friendships are formed, nurtured, and bloom. (like the gardening metaphor?)
First we check into a grand intown hotel. This year's hotel was quite grand indeed. We stayed at the Fairmont Royal York. A brief history of the hotel can be found here.

My fellow traveling companions were game to explore the city upon arrival. 

Julie, Marian, Helen, Karin, and Julie

It is nice to get a lay of the land before we start our whirlwind of activities. Toronto a city on Lake Ontario, is the provincial capital of Ontario.

From just about everywhere the CN tower is in view.

Since the Toronto Music Garden wasn't on our list of many gardens we checked it out. Certainly worth a look if you visit Toronto.

Once the Fling was underway it was time to catch up with fellow bloggers from near and far.  The camaraderie is wonderful. Each year I look forward more and more to seeing my friends from Texas, and England and Wisconsin and Minnesota and Ohio and California and and and..... you get the idea. It is a giant talkfest.

We document our gathering with regional blogger photos. Seeing a city through the eyes of someone who lives there is special....but so is getting to know fellow bloggers. Toronto has great vistas...many include the CN tower.

Julie, Lisa, me, Marian, Karin and Julie

 Traveling with so many gardeners lends itself to many garden views, each gardener sees something different. When we get home and share posts and photos of the Fling there will be something in a photo that one of us has missed. Eighty gardeners can see a garden and come out with 80 different views. A few will take photos of this dragon.

Dragon sculpture on Wards Island

 Some views will be shared multiple times...who could resist this kind of photo opportunity?

View from Algonquin Island

 Meal gatherings tend to grow as another blogger joins the group and then another. By the time this meal was done our table looked like a Hungry Hungry Caterpillar table...adding more and more round tables together. Luckily our waiter was nonplused by our ever growing group.

Photo angles can be all important, one learns from the best on how to achieve that best shot.

Janet and Barbara

 There were questions from passersby on the street as to who this group might be. What? Doesn't your neighborhood have dozens and dozens of folks with cameras taking pictures? Many people wanted to know about blogging, asked for information about our blogs so they could read about what we have seen in their city.  This dog didn't ask.

We saw more than gardens. Those who like architecture would have loved seeing Cabbagetown, a section of Toronto that was once home to many Irish immigrants. It is known as the largest continuous area of Victorian homes in North America. 

There was a nice dose of history in our tour of Toronto. The Evergreen Brick works is a reclaimed brick factory and quarry. The wall art depicts the waterways through Toronto that feed into Lake Ontario. The quarry was site to archeological findings of a second Ice Age. 

Brick Press

Remaining ductwork in the furnaces

Seeing so many aspects of this city was really amazing. Big thanks to our planners, Helen Battersby, Sarah Battersby, Lorraine Flanigan and Veronica Sliva. We made new friends, saw incredible gardens, learned a bit about Toronto, rode the ferry, and chatted with all sorts of Torontonians.

Dog parking station at Evergreen Brick Works

 Did I mention the fun bloggers? Each Fling is a unique blend of garden bloggers. Wish we had time to get to know each and every one of these fun gardeners. Once home I realized there were some folks I didn't get a chance to spend time with. Guess I will have to find them next year in Minneapolis.

Maya and Beth

 Flings have been like a big family reunion, a family of friends, a family of gardeners. These are the people you feel comfortable with, you can laugh and be silly with, THESE are the people you take selfies with...in pink sunglasses.

Judy, me, Tammy, Karin, Brandon, and Julie

 Flings are times you get to check off a bucket list item - Niagara Falls

And did I mention all those wonderful fellow bloggers? Miss you all and looking forward to next year!

©Copyright 2015 Janet. All rights reserved. Content created by Janet for The Queen of Seaford. words and photos by Janet,The Queen of Seaford.

How Do You Know?

You plant and you plant. Some are shrubs, some are trees, some are perennials, and some are bulbs.... one would think shrubs and trees are visible in the garden. HA! In my garden  I have a lot of baby plants. When I say baby, I really do mean teeny tiny.  See the palm leaf? The stem to the left of it? A small beautyberry 'shrub'. Callicarpa dichotoma 'Issai' was transplanted to an area where the weeds, grasses and rushes, are taller than this little guy. He needs to be marked, and remembered.

Another area in my garden, lots of oak and hickory leaves cover the garden. I am not going to rake out the leaves...they are just there. But the question arises, where are the plants? 

I use various forms of marking where plants are located in the garden. Above you see a bamboo stake with a plant tag, pretty straight forward. It is marking where a deciduous azalea is planted.

 Sometimes I don't have a plant tag so I use whatever is handy. For this struggling Mahonia eurybracteata 'Soft Caress'  I used a stick. I have a lot of sticks that have fallen into the garden. Seemed like a good choice.

Last year I ordered some plant labels because I have a lot of bulbs planted all over the garden. I forget how many I ordered -- maybe 100, maybe 500- I don't know. Whatever the number, it wasn't enough. In the photo below is an Autumn Crocus...hence the AC.  It helped this spring when I was looking for new growth emerging. I have stepped on a few of them though, breaking off the top. I found more than one wayward plant label snapped off. Oops. 

Sticks also make a good defense against critters who like to dig up newly planted Hellebores. Sadly I didn't realize I needed to put up a small barricade, so I lost two out of the three newbies.  

I was lucky enough to receive some ferns from a friend from Virginia when he and his wife visited. His ferns came with plant tags-- since they are deciduous ferns, having the location marked is helpful. 

New trees and shrubs needed a new way to mark their locations in the woods. I ordered some bare root Cornus florida, Dogwoods, and Hamamelis vernalis, Witchhazel from Missouri Department of Conservation. I think it was 10 seedlings for $8.00 - a bargain in my mind. These seedlings are not small, averaging about 3 feet tall.  

See the purple ribbons? Yes, my latest tool for marking my newest plantings. 

After soaking the bare rooted seedlings, I tied a purple ribbon on each one.  After planting them around the woods,  I looked back, checking to see if  I could 20 seedlings in the woods.  See the ribbon below? It does stand out in the landscape enough to find each of them to water them and check for new growth.

My missing Chionodoxa alba finally appeared. I really need to mark its location.

Again, up by the street I used a wayward stick...marking some Gladiolus. Seems pretty straight forward early on, but now that other plant material has grown and filled in, it was a good idea to mark the spot.

Back in the backyard new ferns were marked with sticks as they were planted. I ordered some New York ferns, Thelypteris noveboracensis. After planting I found the notes from a talk my friend gave on ferns....his take was New York ferns were on the aggressive side. Oh man. Well, looking for the sticks wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. Ordered five ferns, dormant, bare-rooted. Planted about seven (the bare-rooted ferns were easy to divide). So now I had about to find seven sticks marking bare-root ferns. I found some and planted them in planters. 

So far I haven't seen any of them come up. Since then I have done more reading on Thelypteris noveboracensis, apparently the further south, the less vigorous they are. Hoping some of them come up.

As you can see, this post was started a while ago...daffodils were still blooming. The garden has filled in but still no New York ferns to be found. Feels like they should be up by now. How do you mark your bulbs or shrubs or bare-rooted saplings or ... or? I think I will find another way to mark new plantings as the sticks seem to disappear over time.


©Copyright 2015 Janet. All rights reserved. Content created by Janet for The Queen of Seaford. words and photos by Janet,The Queen of Seaford.

Winter Walk-Off 2015

As winter winds down to a close, I am finally back to writing a post here. It is time for Les' Winter Walk-Off 2015. I have participated in this annual event every year he has hosted it. You can find my older posts here- 2014, 2013, 2012, & 2011.
The 'challenge' is to take a walk and photograph your sightings....nothing to be photographed from your garden. Not too tough to do. Over the years my walks have gotten shorter as my friends have gotten older and less interested in a long walk. They like eating grass on either side of the road. Maybe they are part cow? Newton, on the left, is now 13 + years old, and Skyler on the right, is 11 years old. Chasing bunnies and deer gets them running, otherwise they like to mosey.

Our neighborhood is still a quiet place and our walks are generally uninterrupted by cars.  Just past our property is a stream that runs under the road and into the lake. The frogs are always singing up a storm. Love how the sunshine is dappled through the woods - you can see into the forest a good bit before the undergrowth fills in.  Looks like I need to clean my lens. 

The wildflowers that pop up this time of year are so sweet. I enjoy the sea of purple along the roadside. I have shared pictures of this little beauty on Facebook and had to do a little more investigation to get the correct name. Common name is Bluets, botanical name, Houstonia pusilla.

Small four petaled little blooms, hardly a couple inches tall...but en masse--spectacular.

As I was looking for the name, a site I use quite often is namethatplant.net. listed it as H. pusilla. For some reason I saw it listed somewhere else as Houstonia caerulea and thought I had misnamed it. Oops, not unusual, but hate to do that. I apparently misnamed it last year in my Winter Walk-Off post.
More research and  I found that these beauties, above, are in fact Houstonia pusilla, one of the distinguishing features is a red eye. Check! Then I noticed that there were some that didn't have a red eye....and they were white.

 
See all those white little blooms and a pale blue one in the midst of them? White ones with a yellow eye are Houstonia caerulea and the pale blue are H. pusilla. The common name for the white ones is Quaker ladies, cute name.

Hard to photograph something so tiny...here is a side by side comparison.

Larger plants are coming to life as spring is really just about here...TOMORROW!!! The maples in  the woods have that reddish glow as their blooms emerge. The grasses from last year are still that lovely blonde but at the base you see new growth starting to show. The winged elms, Ulmus alata, have already blooms and will be leafing out soon.  They are a scrubby tree and quite abundant in our area. Luckily the pines haven't released their pollen yet, thought the river of yellow will be coming soon.

Another sign of spring on our walk is the blackberry brambles starting to leaf out. They are everywhere! We do get some blackberries but the birds and other wildlife get most of them. I pull out those brambles in my garden all the time and have thorn snags on my jeans to show for it.

Please check out Les at A Tidewater Gardener to see other Winter Walk-Off posts from various blogs.

©Copyright 2015 Janet. All rights reserved. Content created by Janet for The Queen of Seaford. words and photos by Janet,The Queen of Seaford.