On Friday and Saturday Chicago got the biggest November snow storm in 120 years. Which is strange, because for about three weeks November had been doodling along acting like a nice October. Then suddenly there’s a wild mood swing and it feels like we’re in January.
OK then, let’s visit another of the gardens included in the Toronto Garden Bloggers Fling. This one was located on a bluff near Lake Ontario, northeast of downtown.
The recent atrocities in Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad brought to mind two novels I read a couple of years ago: Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie; and Birds Without Wings, by Louis de Bernières. Both books are about fictional small towns that contain people of different ethnicities and religions.
These stories are separated by decades and by thousands of miles. However, they both start with communities that enjoy a harmony that, while imperfect, allows for occasional friendship, love, even intermarriage across religious and ethnic lines . It also allows a subtle blurring of the distinctions between the two groups.
Here’s another garden we got to visit in the Forest Hill section of Toronto. Again, remember that this is early June.
Now seems like a good time to revisit the wonderful Toronto Garden Bloggers Fling, held in early June.
OK, maybe Piet Oudolf didn’t design the landscaping around my local Burger King.
In the normal course of events, November is one of the two most dismal months of the year. At least, in my part of the world. An inky blackness falls by 5 PM, the leaves are dead, and a penetrating chill is in the air. (The other most dismal month is February.)
While visiting our friends in Maryland we also made an excursion to Annapolis, a small city of 40,000 on the Chesapeake Bay. Annapolis is the state capital and quite old by American standards, having been founded in 1649.
On our second day visiting friends near Baltimore, we visited the battlefield at Gettysburg, which sprawls over a large area of fields, woods, and hills in southeast Pennsylvania. Pretty much the whole thing is included in the National Military Park.
It was a warm October day, though fairly overcast. We drove through the suburbs of Baltimore, then Pennsylvania farmland.
Many of us have entered the season during which we gardening mostly in our heads. We are thinking about what plants to add, move, or replace. We are poring over old garden books and catalogs (the 2016 catalogs have yet to arrive, but the 2015 issues sit in a convenient pile by my side of the bed).
Unfortunately, this season exposes a household rift in gardening philosophy here at Gardeninacity. I enjoy changing things around. Or put another way: I NEED to change things around.
gardeninacity 