Start your gift list: Toronto Gardener's Journal

Toronto gardeners (or those who know and love them) need to go further for a great little gift or stocking stuffer than The Toronto Gardener's Journal now updated for 2011.

I first wrote about this information-packed gardening journal back in 2009. Besides the timely tips for each week beside your journal entries, the book is worth its $24.95 cost, if only for its fifty, densely typeset pages of general gardening and Toronto-specific suggestions and contacts, updated annually, and including:

• Great gardening books
• Online resources (including Toronto Gardens!)
• Educational programs
• Local events, shows and tours
• Great Toronto (and Canadian) gardens to visit
• Horticultural and specialty plant societies
• Local services such as arborists and designers
• Plant specialists and nurseries

And, as they say, much, much more.

It's a valuable gardening tool, and easy to hide in your sock drawer till gift-giving time. Purchase it online through the link at the top of this story.

(Full disclosure: Although we were treated to a complimentary copy this year, you can tell by our past review that purchasing the book in the past didn't make us like it any less. And we're not alone.)

No front yard veggies for Toronto?

Well grown vegetables can be highly ornamental

As Sonia Day writes in the Toronto Star, a Toronto family has been ordered by the City to replace their front yard vegetable garden… with sod. Yep, sod. It's a bit of a shock, with all this talk of food security.

The garden clashes with a transportation by-law, apparently. If visibility is an issue, why not simply ask them to conform to height restrictions? Many an unkempt hedge cuts off the view of oncoming traffic. So why pick on the veggies?

Ironically, the City of Toronto Public Health website has a long scroll about Food Policy, that mentions urban agriculture and community gardens and is full of words like "spearheaded" and "championed" and "pioneered" in relation to the City's good works. But this is one of the great divides between the abstractions of policy and the everyday realities of transportation bylaws.

This isn't the first time the City and a homeowner have conflicted over their interpretation of a garden. Back in 2007, there was an uproar when the City mowed down the 12-year-old natural garden of a past-president of the North American Native Plant Society. Bylaws again. Looks like most of our city bylaws have something to do with transportation.

This all seems appropriate to think about on mayoral election day. Hope you'll get out there and vote. And when your guy or gal gets elected, be sure to let them know what's important to you. We can't blame politicians for the way our city turns out if we don't play a part in shaping it ourselves.

Repetition in the garden: I'll repeat that

The good-things-come-in-small-packages garden of Paul Geary, he of Petal Pushers garden therapy, is around the corner and down the street. To compensate for the petite size of his own garden, Paul has made his city-owned boulevard strip a thing of beauty. Right now the strip is a particularly fetching bouquet of purple and gold.

See how the repetition of the same deep purple draws your eye along the strip? Purple asters (Symphiotricum) complement repeated golden fall foliage in different textures, from the gold in the neighbour's linden tree (Tilia cordata), to the grassy daylilies (Hemerocallis) and the taller, arching stems of the Solomon's seal (Polygonatum) below. 

Solomon's seal is one of my favourite architectural plants, with interest through the growing season. In late spring, the stems sport rows of small pendant white flowers, and the leaves often wear pearls of water after a rain.

For variety, Paul has selected flowers in closely related (analogous) shades of pink and mauve, along with white. While mixing and matching unrelated colours would have made a rich fall display, it wouldn't have given the garden the same unity.

That ability to pull your eye through makes a small space seem larger. From this angle, for instance, some of the purple repetitions are hidden. Compare this to the effect in the second image. Still beautiful, but without that je ne sais quoi (except now you do sais quoi: it doesn't have the same pleasing rhythm.)

Elements to repeat include texture, colour, form and scale, through foliage, flowers, ornamentation, or hardscaping. Once you get the hang of it, you can mix it up by repeating something in different materials. Maybe it's spheres of clipped box, round flower heads of globe thistle (Echinops) and, hey, even bowling balls!

Why not? If something is good, it's usually worth repeating.

Giving thanks for Thanksgiving

Sarah and Izi wait patiently for the photographer

I'm thankful there are still stars in the sky. You're apt to forget about stars when you live immersed in  the light pollution of a city.

This Thanksgiving, Sarah's family and mine celebrated together at her one-room schoolhouse in the country. Urban glare is starting to creep in at the corners of her sky, but it's still inky enough to see the stars. The Milky Way had spilled across Cassiopeia's gown again. The Big Dipper was dipping into the horizon. In the other direction, the seven-star Pleiades cluster made a bright smudge as Orion chased the Seven Sisters above the cherry tree.

In the morning, we went searching for fall colours. That was a surprise. There are more red leaves in Toronto than there are in some rural areas right now. So enjoy the show from those red and orange sugar maples as you drive along the Don Valley Parkway. Frost will soon bring down the curtain.

Meanwhile, here's a little country walk to round out your Thanksgiving weekend 2010. I hope you all had something to be thankful for.

Celebrating Apple Season

A big bag of fresh-picked apples is sitting on my kitchen counter. And I mean a BIG bag. If we had a bushel basket, it would be full to overflowing.

What kind did you pick?, I asked my daughter.  

Oh, lots, she replied. Jonagold, Northern Spy, Empire, some other kinds. It'll be a surprise, every time you take one.

Wonderful! I said, I just found this great recipe for apple butter. You do it in the crock pot.

Why would you make apple butter, when you can make pie? said the baker. She is talented in the crust-from-scratch department.

However, judging by our supply, there'll be plenty left for apple butter once we're fully sated on apple pie. And probably more left over for applesauce, caramel apples, apple crumble, for apples in our salads and grated into cole slaw, baked whole or with pork chops... or for enjoying with a chunk of aged cheddar while they're still from-the-tree juicy and crisp.

Love apples, too? You might find this Foodland Ontario apple link handy, with info about creating and freezing your own apple surplus, plus a long list of recipes to ring in the changes, in time for Thanksgiving. I have a feeling we'll be trying… several.