Meadow Made

From the cultivated wisteria of yesterday, we move to the cultivation of a wildflower meadow at Benchscape.  What a delightful vista of wild flowers at the lower portion of the property.  The flowers seemed to float above the vertical stems of green - annual bachelor buttons in blues, pinks, and whites, punctuated by the occasional red poppy.   A great success for our friend, the designer, Lex Parker!

Wishing for Wisteria

Wisteria has captured the imagination for many years.  The oldest wisteria is 144 years old and is in Japan.  It is located in Ashikaga Flower Park and here's the link for the amazing pictures.  If you are interested in the biggest wisteria, it is in Sierra Madre California and here's a youtube video of it. It takes up an acre.  Lucky Californians as it says its blooming period is 5 weeks.  Ours in Niagara is very short - 2 weeks on average, and then the leaves take over and the blooms fade. We are lucky in Niagara. There are many wisteria - often trained as shrubs.  The bottom picture is a shrub version at the corner of my street.  The top two pictures are of the White House in Jordan, about 100 feet long - from end to end, and then it goes around the fence as well, so a lot of wisteria to enjoy.

Piecemeal Design

Can you imagine that the over 1,000 acres of Longwood Gardens had no grand plan?  Longwood's web site says that Pierre S. du Pont built them piecemeal, beginning with the 'old-fashioned' Flower Garden Walk.  He must have had some skill, as the flower walk was 600 feet long.  And his 'pieces' were massive conservatory greenhouses and water fountain gardens on the scale of the Villa Gamberaia in Italy. So today's images are from Longwood Gardens and you can see how wonderfully intense colour appears when there is an overcast sky.  The moisture in the air makes everything 'dreamy' in appearance.  The Love temple image has been processed by nature's own filters.

Roadside Niagara

Yesterday I participated in roadside clean-up.  We all see the Adopt-a-Highway signs with a sponsoring group.  The Rotary in Grimsby sponsor the clean-up of the east and west ends of Main Street - where they are in the country.  If you think about the side of the road in the city or a town, the property owner has a stake in maintaining  cleanliness.  In the country, the property owner doesn't see the garbage or doesn't live at the site, or doesn't experience a need to clean up the garbage, so there it is. There re so many stories roadside:  The soggy plastic-bagged newspapers in deep ditches that failed to make the driveway and really weighed down the garbage bag.  Then there are the Tim Horton's and McDonalds cups that supposedly are recyclables but look like they could last for 10 years on the roadside. The number of cigarette butts is astonishing.  As they don't break down, we see years of accumulation and I left them there.  Sometimes there was a little gathering of garbage:  did the car pull over and they ate snacks, drank beer, threw out the empties, and then left? The highlight find were the accident pieces on both sides of the road.  On the other side was glass, and on my side were pieces of a front grill. There are rules in garbage pick-up:  don't touch anything you can't identify, don't touch air brakes.  don't go onto private property to pick up garbage, don't go out alone, take a cell phone, and so on. Today's images are roadside signs that have decayed over the years.  This was at the Mexican Pub and Grill that once was the White Eagle on Highway 8 near Beamsville.

One Single Tree

We wouldn't see this tree if it weren't on a busy street.  And being on a busy street, the setting is a mismatch for its glorious shape and intense floral display.  It wants to be in a rural setting or on the escarpment. The lone Cypress tree on the Monterey Coast near Carmel is an example of perfect alignment.  On the other hand, this tree on Ontario Street near the QEW is easily accessible with hardly any travel involved.   Here are the 10 most magnificent trees in the world - the only dilemma is that to see past the Lone Cypress you have to answer a survey.  This is the first time I've experienced this. So I'll send you to Wikipedia instead - here.

Sentimental Farm - Plant Sale

We stopped in at Sentimental Farm yesterday and discovered it is their plant sale.  You can see on the sign that they are organic growers of vegetables. There was lots of activity getting all the vegetable plants organized for the event.  I was excited to find heritage tomatoes of all varieties and some specialty plants - the tiny melon called mouse melon and the climbing spinach.  I saw the spinach at the Kansas Botanical Garden Overland Park a few years ago - a red stemmed climbing edible plant that was exotic and interesting in its appearance.  Its latin name is Basella rubra. You can read about it here.

New Gardens at RBG

These Royal Botanical Gardens pictures were taken  before the garden was closed for extensive renovations.   The magic of this garden is its sunken setting.  Like Butchart, one comes to the garden at the elevated entrance so surveys the whole garden.  Then one enters down into its magical paths where flowers, benches, and collections of plants draw one's attention.  RBG's strength was its spring time plantings.  It treated the garden as a canvas to be painted using tulips. I'm going to check it out today.  I'll see a completely new 'garden' in this special setting - a  new look, new design,  new plantings, new building, new everything.  Stay tuned. The RBG arboretum is nearby and has an extensive collection of spring flowering trees.  I hope you have a chance to visit by the weekend.  While our spring is glorious, it seems to be quite short.

This Little Piggy Was at Market

Our images today come from 13th Street Winery - the same setting as yesterday's Magnolia tree. This was taken on Saturday looking to the vineyards with the abundant dandelion crop.  The second is the hood ornament on the Salted Pig food truck - the Hand Made Market was on, so the winery was filled with artists, food trucks, and of course, people browsing and buying. I wondered how one acquires a custom hood ornament.  Here's the Buzzfeedsite with their top 40 hood ornaments. A search for custom hood ornaments reveals many themes - from skulls to swans to star wars and on to gladiators. I guess if you can think of it, then it likely is available.

Niagara Spring

The Niagara orchards are in blossom.  Just last week only a few pink flowers were showing - a little pink glow on the trees.  Fruit tree blossoms open with the warm temperatures and yesterday had both warm and cold.  As our temperatures rise, our spirits soar with the beautiful colours and fragrance this time of year.

Photo Contest Finalist March 2016

There are bees boxes in every orchard that I looked at yesterday and I spent quite a bit of time looking at orchards.  I have something in common with bees -  I can imagine the experience a bee has with the thousands and millions of blossoms.  It is a good thing bees love to be busy.  Today's image is a Finalist in this month's Betterphoto (BP) contest.  The contest has 6400 entries each month with just under 600 finalist photos.  There are some remarkable winning images - here's the link to the contest results.  There's an 'all time' contest underway there, and I've been getting notifications of pictures placing in the Staff Favourites, etc. So something to look forward to there.  Participants on Betterphoto are primarily U.S.-based. So there are mostly images from the  United States - each day the scenes vary across the country, giving one the experience of a living travelogue.   Redbubble, another photography site, originated in Australia, so there are many Australian members and we get to see their distinctive landscape.  Right now we we move through Spring and they move through Autumn, so there's a contrasting experience in the seasons and landscape. I think of Marshall McLuhan'a expression 'The Global Village' and realize this is it.