This is a movement which belongs to no one.
In truth, because the New Perennial movement can belong to anyone and everyone.
First and foremost, it’s about seeing plants in all their four-dimensional splendour and experiencing the slow-motion fireworks, which ensue as they flow and interact.
You don’t need a garden to do that. Just the pupils in your eyes.
I’m delighted to break something of a silence.
Strange wondrous things have been in the works over the past few month. After much commotion, I’m elated to announce a quantum shift not just in my gardening life – but in my naked earthbound reality.
And it means moving up in the world. Particularly in terms of altitude.
After two years of searching for a place of our own here in Ontario, my partner Troy and I found a spectacular piece of land with an old cabin set high atop a ridge in the rolling glacial wilderness of Mono.
It’s now full-on spring in the sheltered woodland of my northern un-cottage garden.
The crabapple tree is weeping shell-pink blossoms as the red lady ferns unfurl from beneath its dappled shadow. Spiky filaments of Camassia and Allium light up the sunnier beds in a wandering halo of purple and blue.
If spring is about new life, it’s also about unearthing fresh ideas. With that in mind, here are my ‘spring theories’ – designed to either stir the imagination or stir the pot, as you will.
A new movement of native planting advocates is showing us how we can help sustain the matrix of biodiversity upon which all life depends – including our own.
To delve deeper, I spoke with Toronto ecological designer and former wild plant nursery owner Charles Kinsley to learn how urban gardeners can create and sustain a native garden.
I’m raising the curtain on something of a secret world.
It’s where for the past decade and more, I’ve immersed myself from early spring until late fall in the making of a different kind of garden. Mine is a naturalistic garden – designed to emulate something of the spirit and feeling of nature itself. And in many ways, the plantings look as if they have simply materialized over time.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
