Piet Oudolf in "Garden Design"

I enjoyed this month's Garden Design magazine (February 2008). The issue's main feature stories cover European gardens, including Piet Oudolf's famous Hummelo garden.

Oudolf has been a great influence in my own gardening, and we even have a bed that we used to call the Oudolf border.

Now that I've let it go more or less naturalized, I call it the wild garden, and treat it like the meadow. This means we just mow around it and have stopped weeding, edging and controlling the plants - they just fight it out now.

What has always intrigued me about Oudolf is the fact that so many of the plants he favors are North American natives, which, of course, makes them perfect for country gardens in Canada and the US.

What he likes about our plants is their stamina, looks, late-flowering tendencies, fall colors and winter textures. This is exactly the look that I came to adore through his example.

When I began my garden here, it was with plant lists take from Oudolf's books, as well as those of James van Sweden, of Oehme van Sweden fame. They are my garden design heros.



© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Want to start your own nursery?

Our hoophouse during our plant selling days
When we first bought our country property - which we did mostly because we wanted more space for gardening - we grew a lot of perennials and native plants from seed to populate our large gardens. Then my husband got into rock gardening and started growing a lot of alpines.

Of course, growing our own, we ended up with lots more plants than we needed, so we started having an annual plant sale, which lasted about four or five years.

At the time I was toying with the idea of starting a small boutique nursery of choice perennials and native plants, but a friend of mine, Doug Green, a former nursery guy turned garden writer said flatly: "You're crazy." I listened and I'm glad we didn't go that route.

Anyway, we gave up the plant sales when they got to be too much, and don't miss them because the sale days were always in May when we were also busiest in the garden.

I know I'm not the first country gardener to fall love with plants and dream about starting my own nursery.

If that sounds like you, here's an interesting post on the topic by Trey Pitsenberger, who runs The Golden Gecko Garden Center in Garden Valley, California, and who calls himself the original blogging nurseryman.

And if you're serious, here's the book to get, So You Want to Start a Nursery, by Tony Avent of Plant Delights Nursery. You can buy it through this link from the author himself.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

April in January

It got up to 16 degrees C (60 degrees F) today and was still 14 C (57 F) when we went to bed. Virtually all the snow that was here since the beginning of December has melted.

So we've got mud season in January. I prefer snow. But we always get a few days of mud season in January, and it appears to have nothing to do with global warming.

According to David Phillips, senior climatologist for Environment Canada, (who was being quoted in all the papers today) southern Ontario has experienced a January thaw every year since 1937, the earliest year for which records are available, except for 1977, the only year we did not have a January melt-down.

For us temperature roller coasters are quite normal in January, but one of the most dramatic happened three years ago: on Jan. 13, 2005, the temperature reached 17.6 C (63 F). Five days later it dropped to -25 C (-13 F). I remember it well because the golf course across the road opened up for play for about a week.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Gorgeous snow day

I took this picture of my neighbor's little courtyard garden after this morning's snowfall.
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

What is it about people and trees?

Branches ripped off our spruce trees
I got very upset yesterday as I walked down the road right beside our pond and the neighboring tree farm. A day of so before there were a couple of guys out there in a pick-up truck (hunting maybe?) and, of course, as it's been mild around Christmas and it's just a snow-covered dirt road, they got stuck.

So what did they do to get themselves out? They ripped branches off our spruce trees to put under their wheels to give them traction.

I was livid when I saw the broken, driven-over branches. Too bad we didn't catch them in the act. My husband John tells me that they got stuck very early in the morning, but he didn't see how they got out.

I've also caught women getting out of their cars where our property fronts the road ripping branches off our trees and shrubs for Christmas decorations. What makes them think they have the right to disfigure trees and shrubs that we have planted and that we care about? This sort of behavior drives me around the bend.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

My coolest gardening gift

My favorite Christmas present this year was a pair of Cray print secateurs given to me by my sister-in-law who was visiting from London, England. "Cray" is a famous chintz design by William Morris from 1884.

The pattern comes from a volume of wallpapers now housed in the Arts and Crafts Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. If you want your own pair, here's a link to them.

I haven't blogged much since the upheaval of the fall when we embarked on a renovation of half the house, which included a new kitchen and took two months, plus a month of move-in and recovery.

The picture here taken in the new kitchen shows the triumphant cook, whose locally raised free-range turkey roasted in the new convection oven was the best Christmas turkey ever.

In any case as the new year is almost upon us, I'm now ready to start thinking and writing about gardening again.

Quick end-of-season drought note

The season's unprecendented drought, which I wrote about obsessively all summer - the driest it's been in almost 50 years in southern Ontario - never really broke.

The fall continued to be very dry, and we didn't get a decent rainfall until after US Thanksgiving (Nov. 22). Then - just before the cold weather arrived - we got more than two inches on two rainy days. This weekend, we're in for a winter storm with freezing rain. Not good!

And what's ahead? More cold: Environment Canada predicts that the weather this winter could be the coldest in nearly 15 years. It will be interesting to see how the trees survive the drought followed by serious cold.

Noted: Nice things take effort

Our four-square garden, which takes a lot of effort
Kelvin Browne writes about gardening, architecture in homes section in one of the Toronto papers, the National Post. The following excerpt is from his column today entitled, Nice things take effort:

Regardless of how fancy the house or garden, owners today want them to be low maintenance. Like low taxes, it's assumed to be a right. Just as spoiled children want rewards without work (and, of course, the truly entitled get them), homeowners now require grandeur without lifting a finger.

The most obvious example is summed up by the stupidest phrase in the English language -- "low-maintenance garden." A garden is all about maintenance in varying degrees. It's about nurturing something to become what you envision it should be. There are gardens that require less nurturing than others, but the idea remains. You start somewhere and expect, with dedication or at least periodic attention, to arrive, a few years later, somewhere else. The garden needs you. You're complimented on your stewardship, not your ability to pay for hundreds of perennials. When someone says they like your garden, they like more than your choice of landscape designer; they admire how you worked with him or her to achieve something that matters beyond its ability to increase your home's property value.

The low-maintenance blight has examples indoors, too. Napkins, for instance. You don't expect young people in their first home or with young children to set the dinner table with linen napkins; it's admirable they'd even try to have you over. But after that, paper napkins are lazy. Hosts often let themselves off the hook by saying they're not formal types but you're nonetheless eating in a dining room, having multiple courses and subjected to the husband talking about how good, a.k.a. expensive, the wine is. It says either they're lazy or you're not important enough to bother with. Low maintenance rules.

We've always taken "effort" to heart in garden, but not so much in house. Time to take more care there now that we have renovated. You can read the rest of this excellent column here: Nice things take effort.

Rain update - a good total for the week

Things are looking up: the past week brought us 9/10ths of an inch of rain over two days. It's amazing how quickly the lawn responds and starts looking good again. (Yes, unfashionable is it may be, I care about my lawn too.)

The fall colors are coming on in the trees and shrubs, and they are looking pretty nice, not just brown, as I feared. Still, the general dry trend continues, and next week's predicted daily high temperatures are around the 24-degree Celcius mark. That's 10 degrees above normal. (For you F-folks, that's 75 degrees, and almost 15 degrees warmer than is normal for the first week of October.)

It may be October in a couple of days, but that darned summer just won't quit.

Unbearably hot, but we got a bit of rain

It was bloody hot yesterday, about as hot as it gets here on the worst days in mid-summer, about 90 degrees F. But with the humidity, it felt a lot hotter: just what our trees needed in the face of the long drought of 2007, which still ongoing.

We have many patches of dead lawn now, and we can only guess how much permanent damage there will be to our trees. One bright spot: a thunderstorm last night brought 4/10ths of an inch of rain, and the cold front promises to cool things down a bit beginning today and tomorrow.

Temperatures for the next week will still be above seasonal norms. I long for sweater weather.