Lena Carroll

Experienced gardeners know that now is the time to assess the failures and successes of the summer garden. Now, while mistakes are fresh in your mind – or still visible in the garden – is the time to plant for spring. The first step is to take stock. Be generous to yourself. What worked? What […]

Imagine the perfect garden. Close your eyes for a minute and picture it. See the colours, the shapes and the forms. Now, ask yourself: “What am I seeing?” Do you see your own yard, in its present state? Do you see what was? What could be? Do you see a neighbourís yard? Do you see

Are you becoming obsessed about your garden? There are certain telltale signs. Take this easy quiz and find out. 1 You burst into tears when a houseplant dies. And you hate houseplants. 2 You shovel three feet of snow from your compost pile just to see whether itís ready to turn. 3 While your neighbours sleep the sleep

It is an extreme form of cruelty to label Mar. 21st the first day of spring. Only in Canada do spring celebrations involve snow shoes, a toque and only one layer of long underwear. This can be a difficult time for gardeners. You’ve gone through the catalogues three times, Martha Stewart advises it’s time to

I had thought I’d write an article entitled “How to Walk through the Forest,” extolling the beauties and mysteries of the woods at this, or any time of the year. And I still want to write it, but autumn beckons, and I sit, typing at this computer, watching through the window as the yellow and

What does it take to make your garden perfect? Well, first of all, maybe thereís a problem with using the word perfect and garden in the same sentence. We all want our yards to look beautiful. And we define beauty in our own way. For some, itís a perfectly mown lawn, clipped to within an

Mid-summer and we have just returned after checking a design project we did for a beginning gardener last year. We felt guilty every time we drove by the property, prominently located on a main street in Mount Forest, because all we could see were weeds. But buried underneath, like living gold, were the plants she

There’s nothing new under the sun. Or so the saying goes. But don’t tell that to a gardener. The never-ending hunt for what’s new is the lifeblood of many a gardener’s existence. That may especially be true in the long, white winter months when the plant promotion season is in full swing, when imaginations are