Lilacs, Etc.

Our lilacs are in full bloom!

I'm sure the civilized world's lilacs have already come and gone, but ours (Zone 3) have finally arrived in all their mauve glory.

I don't know the variety in our garden, but they have a gorgeous double flower that I've rarely seen: 

While walking last evening, I saw dozens of lilacs in bloom and stole a few from our back alley.  Most are the more common variety with single flowers:

Here are the last of our white apple blossoms.  They remind me of home since my parents' property is full of apple trees:

We have every imaginable colour of apple blossoms in the neighborhood.  These pretty pink ones are from the back alley too:

David and I have been hard at work on our perennial beds, reorganizing, dividing old perennials and adding some new ones.  We had almost no snow this winter and low temperatures (no insulation), so there was a lot of winter kill in our garden. Many perennials have died off.

(I will share photos once they are more than 12" tall)

In the meantime, our furnace stopped working today.  It is cold and rainy, so we are waiting for the repairman with cold noses and cold hands.  I have to work on my project for my final colour theory class, which will involve about 3h of painting.  I hope the repair guy gets here soon or I may need mittens.

Have a happy week and hope it is warm where you are!

The View from Here

So I am stuck indoors today.  

Besides the ongoing headache saga, I have had a bout of labyrinthitis (fluid is not draining in my inner ear) for the past two weeks, which gives me episodes of dizziness and weakness, as well as a sense of fullness/pressure in my head.  On top of the headaches, this is a bit distressing at times.

So I decided to post a couple of photos from inside the house!

Here is a little wool felt (handmade) winter white pillow I bought in Paris.  I think it is quite darling:

It sits on our new reading chair (I don't always use the back cushion).  The mirror in the background is also from Paris:

I love the relationship of the golden mirror with the antique painting frame.



Outside, our front yard is also a study in white:

I am nesting today and almost tempted to put on the Christmas music (but not quite yet!).

Hope your weekend is filled with happiness...

Vintage Finds & A Kitty Story

Yesterday, we made a little road trip to Nanton, a small town south of Calgary, with David's mother, brother and sister-in-law.  The town has a few antique stores, a candy and ice cream store, and a quaint little cafe for lunch.  It was such a fun day, although good antiques are quite scarce here in western Canada (unless you are in the market for a wagon wheel or 100 ft of old barbed wire).  

I managed to find a couple of pretty vintage finds for fair prices (also rare).

Generally I don't buy pressed glass, but I loved the shape of this urn vase.  I loosely arranged some Masterwort, which is blooming in our garden right now, along with some ferns:

Cicada original etching from Etsy here

I love its neo-classical lines (my favorite historical look):

I also found a darling little Dresden porcelain pot, ca.1910, which mirrors the lines of the antique Eva Ziesel Haviland pot I bought (and blogged about) a short time ago. I am totally into this shape right now and can see the beginnings of a collection:

The detailing on the pot is different all the way around.  This is the back, which is also very pretty, with more white showing:

We had a fantastic day, but heard a rather sad story on our trip.  While visiting the local historic hotel, we stopped to say hello to the resident kitty who lives at the hotel bar:

 He looks like an old boxer, with his big paws, fierce stare and cauliflower ears.  

I asked the owner what happened to his ears and he said that during a drunken winter visit to the bar, a nearby hockey team STOLE THE CAT and took him with them on their bus.  That is bad enough, but then they dumped him out far away in the middle of winter (it can easily be -35C or -31F here in winter and there are miles of open prairie between towns).   

I am not sure how long he was missing but luckily a passerby recognized him as the Nanton hotel cat!  His ears were frostbitten! 

 Poor little guy!  

Luckily, he didn't seem too fazed by his misfortune.  He looked pretty relaxed and I suspect he gets a LOT of attention every day.  But still...I felt pretty bad for the little guy.  I am a serious cat lover and think people who do this kind of thing to defenseless animals should be taken out and shot (after being treated the same way themselves).  Ugh!

*

Hope you are having a nice holiday weekend.  It is Canada Day today!  

Happy Canada Day to you!

And Happy 4th of July to all my American friends!

xo Terri

The Late Garden

Living in a cool, arid climate (in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains) means that gardening is a serious effort!  Our season is late and short.  I am an avid gardener, but doing battle with the climate can be rather exasperating.  However, with a lot of patience and experience, one can get a garden to prosper by say...late June!

For the curious (all those of you with peonies and hydrangea already), I thought I would share with you our truly SPRINGTIME garden, just come into bloom...

The last of the snowdrops:

My clematis is going strong now that the sun has come 'round this side.  This is a Group C clematis, the kind you cut back almost to the ground each spring.  We really need to install a proper trellis (next year I will get my gardener to do it!).  Yes, that is a hydrangea struggling in the foreground:

Clever little chives have seeded themselves on the wrong side of the fence.  I think they are wonderful, so I will leave them here:

This poor little Masterwort has finally come to life after I moved it out of the shade.  I love the almost ancient-looking Masterwort flowers, so pretty in a cut arrangement:

Next are some pots of annuals.  Due to my terribly bad back, David does most of the "potting up" for me.  Oddly, I like to put smaller flowers in the big urn as they are elevated and I can see them better!

One of my favorite annuals is the English daisy, which I call English Daveys as David loves them. These will overwinter (supposedly), so I will move them to a bed come autumn:

My favorite pot in the yard was handmade by a potter friend.  It weighs an absolute ton and sits in front of the potting shed.  The red flowers in the basket on the shelf were not chosen by me (I don't care for reds) but are loved by someone else who lives here:

Our shade bed is thriving.  It is full of several varieties of ferns and hostas, including Japanese painted fern and Ostrich fern (from which fiddleheads come...).  There are pink bleeding hearts at the near end:

One of my favorite perennials is the tiny Sweet Woodruff (the little white flowers), a meadowland ground-cover that does phenomenally well for me.  It does NOT like to be trampled underfoot (and will promptly die off and not return next year if you do):

This columbine has arisen from the dead.  I planted it four years ago and it did nothing (no flowers, almost no growth) and now has suddenly sprung to life, flowered, and seeded itself in a few other places in the bed (the lesson here...don't give up)! 

I planted a couple of white bleeding hearts last year in hopes of giving some interest to the space beside the tree.  I like that the shade bed is mostly green and white!:

I love this little pot of bright annuals in the Mayday tree.  If you look closely you can see David's rhubarb behind the tree and goatsbeard (not yet bloomed!) to the left:

Here's another batch of chives in our herb bed.  So far I've only planted basil and rosemary but must plant more next weekend.  Behind the chives is our long cedar box full of dwarf conifer shrubs planted for winter colour (an ornamental graft caragana sits in the middle):

Here's a final happy container, on the window sill of the garage.  I convinced David to let me buy a white geranium (which he thinks is boring)...so we snazzed it up with some pink double-flowered petunias (which are absolutely bulletproof)...

I hope you've enjoyed your little tour of our back yard!  Happy gardening...and special thanks to David who keeps everything watered and fed while I come home with something new every week...

The Painted House

The front of our house is a work-in-progress, but I was long overdue to share the new paint colours with you. I was holding out for our tree pruners to finish the front yard, but regrettably we're still on the waiting list for service...(if you're an arborist, Calgary needs you).

So, without further ado, I'll share the photos I took right after the painters left...complete with overgrown spruce. We love the new colour, a custom greige (i.e. taupe) I struggled over for weeks, together with crisp black on the shutters and doors:

In case you've forgotten, this is where we started. We were so tired of green and pink (which the previous owners also used throughout the interior)!:

After the painting was done, I updated the front planters with these lovely little boxwoods and got a new mat. I am still on the hunt for a great lantern and promise to show the whole thing in a future post:

The back garage and fences also look better in the taupe and black, which matches the existing iron work in the garden:

Our little potting shed looks so great in its new colours. The deck must be replaced next year (there's always something!) and then I'll buy some proper outdoor furniture:

Although our house is from the early 70's and only has so much curb appeal potential, I finally feel like we've at least arrived in the current century with the paint colours!

More to come...

Slow Progress on the Front of the House...

Well, I've made a little more progress on the front of the house.

I picked up two gorgeous boxwoods for the front stoop and think they look smashing with the black door, even if it isn't perfectly symmetrical.

I searched high and low for black pots, but found nothing inspiring (end of season...). I really like the shape and colour of the two clay pots from Chintz & Co. I am definitely the only one to notice that the semi-circular detail on the pots relates to the semi-circular window in the door.

I also added a small rubber mat, which I really love. I won't be able to hide the key under it now...

I will show you more photos of the front facade, with the new paint job, once we get the trees pruned (next week) and hopefully I will have a new lantern (still hunting for this...so I may have to post "in progress" photos).

The Spring of My Content

With apologies to Shakespeare, I do believe this is "the spring of my content" after an arduous winter of my discontent. Calgary generally has a long cold winter, but not so much snow. This winter was an outlier, as it was longer than usual and snowed constantly, like the typical east coast winters of my childhood.

Spring usually seems too brief and then it turns into summer. Calgary has a semi-arid climate (Zone 3 for gardeners). Our humidity is low, so summer here is a pleasant mild blue-sky affair, with lots of weather in the 20's and occasionally days in the 30's C (mid-80's F).

However, this has been a long, cool wet spring, and I am thrilled! For the past two months, it's been raining almost daily and the days are cool, around 20C (68F and below). As a result, our gardens are vibrant and green (and don't need constant watering) and the air is damp and cool. Call me crazy, but as much as I love a sunny day, I adore cool weather, rain, and stormy days.

Today, I thought I'd share some photos of our shade bed, which is doing better than usual for this time of year. This bed gets dappled morning light - otherwise all shade. We've planted various hostas and ferns here, together with white and pink bleeding hearts (the columbines died):

My favorite addition to the bed is the groundcover in the front (little white flowers), called Sweet Woodruff. I think it is my favorite thing in the garden, as it reminds me of a shady meadow. It does NOT like being stepped on, and I have replanted it once already. We often plant some shade-loving annuals here for colour, but didn't get around to it this year:

In this bed, we have several varieties of hostas and ferns, as well as a Lady's Mantle. To the left, under the tree is the glossy green Bergenia (Elephant's Ears), flowering now, and which stays green all winter. I can't seem to find many colourful perennials that will survive in this bed, so do send ideas if you have any (keeping in mind we are Zone 3!):

Our Mayday tree always gets a pot of annuals, for summer colour. Behind the Mayday is a large bush of Goatsbeard, which gets a gorgeous ivory lace fan-like flower in mid-summer. It reminds me so much of raspberry bushes:

Here is our conifer bed, in a cedar box. The conifers give us winter interest. The umbrella-shaped leafy tree in the middle is a grafted caragana, which is just starting to get its yellow flowers. There is a blue star juniper in the foreground, followed by a dwarf spruce shrub (left), followed by yellowish barberry (right) and so on. The bed is symmetrical around the umbrella caragana. We add annuals for colour:

One of my fun favorites is my small herb bed where I grow cooking herbs and spearmint for tea. We have a serious crop of chives (Allium schoenoprasum) ready to bloom. They come back each year. I love their funny purple flowers:

I hope you've enjoyed the tour. Later I will show you the other half of the back yard, which contains our sun-facing beds with their bounty of summer flowers...

~ Plum Perfect ~

We have a double-flowering plum in our front yard that I adore.

 I think it's the most beautiful shrub on earth, thanks to its ample pink blossoms crowded onto heavy stems.

I always cut a few stems and bring them inside this time of year.  

I take its picture, but can never quite capture its quiet beauty...

It has an elegant Asian look, a simple grace that I love...

I think if it were edible it would taste like strawberry mousse ice cream with a hint of lemon...

The View from Here

We had a cool, blustery day here.  I had an appointment this morning with a pain counsellor to talk about my chronic headaches (she is so insightful and helpful) and then I met with my sister-in-law at a garden center to discuss low maintenance and hardy options for her new flower beds.

We need hardy species here because this can happen - we got wet, heavy snow this afternoon and evening!  

 Our stunning double-flowering plum (below) just broke bud this week and then today it was snowed upon!  Poor little plum...

I love its little pink pom poms:  

We also have a lovely ornamental crab apple tree that is trying to leaf out (in the background above).  Not having much luck.  This tree has a very popular bird feeder (which you can see if you look closely)!

Look at the wet snow laying on our neighbour's lawn and in the shade of our cotoneasters!   Isn't that mad?  But we desperately need the moisture - it was an unseasonably warm, dry winter here.

I went for a long walk this evening and came home soaked through.  It is often so dry here that I long for rain days - I love everything about the rain but somehow snow seemed a little disheartening when the daffodils are barely up!

But, you know what they say about April showers....