Upon hearing that my New Perennial pond garden just won a 2020 Honour Award in Landscape Design, the highest such honour from the US-based Perennial Plant Association, I find myself lost for words.
I will instead let the garden speak for itself.
Tag: Roy Diblik
The Wildscaping Symposium: COVID-19 Update
My Wildscaping Symposium in Naturalistic Planting Design is now officially postponed.
Our new target date is fall 2022. Same place. Same time of year. A new sense of urgency to reconnect with our fellow humans and the natural world.
In the year of the virus almost no one saw coming, spring itself appears to be on hold.
Fogbound: Inside the Veiled Garden
I had plans to write a post to unveil my new two-year old garden. It was going to be whimsical, poetic yet measured, with a splash of horticultural detail to bring life to the inner story.
Well, scrap all that.
Instead, I woke this morning and walked down to the pond to find that my garden had been transported to another dimension.
Suspended in a halo of fog, the plants beckoned forth in perfect stillness, and I stood there, spellbound.
The Red Trowel: A Journey with Piet Oudolf & Friends
I pursed my lips in quiet victory. At the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m. on a Friday morning in April, my trowel and I glided through U.S. Customs to dig into my New Perennial opportunity of the year: a chance to help plant out a Piet Oudolf-designed botanic garden in Delaware.
One week later standing in his future meadow, I had the chance to ask Piet Oudolf himself that most basic of questions: “So Piet, how do you like to plant?”
The Tao of Roy: Planting Deep from the Heart
Here at the cabin, rumours of spring are still buried arctic deep in the frozen ground.
I spy distant traces of the season to come: the rust-tipped tendrils of green moss backlit by the setting sun on forest trails; the first blades of exploratory growth in the native Seersucker sedges (Carex plantaginea); Marsh marigolds (Caltha palustris) shyly poking their heads above the muck in the wetlands.
Thankfully, there are bright spots of human warmth amidst the chill. I recently caught up with mid-western prairie whisperer and great garden friend, Roy Diblik who returned to Toronto in March to speak at two local botanical gardens.