Baby’s Breath has sentimental meaning for me; a favourite aunt of mine had baby’s breath growing in the flower bed under her kitchen window and it was always the first sight that I saw when we got to Brandon from Regina.  The summers that I spent there were magic.  My aunt was loving, strict, and had my best interests at heart.  My uncle was just…fun.  Even as I write this I can still hear him singing “Clang clang clang went the trolly”.

Gypsophila is a great plant to attract bees and other pollinators, developing into an almost shrub-like mound of tiny white flowers that have a sweet, sometimes sickly scent.  The first time I planted it was in the northern most end of my west flower bed, and a daylily that went in beside it would thrust up a blossom spike through the white creating a great contrast of pale white and rusty red flowers.  I’ve left them to cut back until spring because two springs ago when I started weeding I accidentally pulled up the shoots of the new plant that was put in the following year on the south side of the bed.  My bad.

The plant is seen in a lot of ditches around the province now and has the reputation of being somewhat of a weed.  The story my grandmother told me was that in the 20’s and 30’s, people would include gypsophila in floral arrangements that they left on graves during funerals.  Some of these bunches had seed pods, and the rest is history.  Now random bunches of baby’s breath can be seen in ditches all over the province.

So the next time you see wild flowers in a ditch, and think they’re beautiful, just remember:  they could be there because of dead people.

Now I know many of you won’t know what sun dogs are.  This is a picture I snagged that shows what looks like some kind of distortion created and caused by the camera lens.

It is not.

This is what it looks like in the sky.

This is a visible sign in the sky that means if you go outside unprotected your private parts will turn black and fall off.

It is also a sign that it is not a good idea to plant anything outside.

This is why house plants are important when you live in the prairies.  Something someone told me a few years back that I’ve taken really seriously (especially the last couple of years) is that winter is hard on us.  No kidding when we live in a place that the wind can make your face hurt.  The point is creating a space where you will have things around you that draw you back into summer.  Best thing I ever did for myself was move my work space from the basement where I got no sunlight into my room where I get sunlight flooding me in the early morning, warming me up, but also letting me grow geraniums, amaryllis, a bougainvillia, an olive, figs, spider plants, and an aquarium that loves sunlight and gives me great plant grown as a dividend.  Take a little of the green with you like an ark to keep you going.

Ok course rye helps as well.

Right now, currently in Regina, the temperature is about minus 30.  With the wind chill…well, here’s what Environment Canada has to say about the weather right now:

10:30 PM CST Sunday 04 January 2015
Extreme Cold Warning in effect for:

• City of Regina

A prolonged period of very cold wind chills continues.

A frigid Arctic airmass has settled over the Prairies. Very cold temperatures combined with brisk west winds are giving extreme wind chill values of minus 40 to minus 45 throughout much of southern Saskatchewan tonight into early Monday. Extreme wind chill values are expected to ease Monday morning as temperatures moderate somewhat.

Coincidentally, when I was looking at gardening web pages today I saw that the city of London, England is expecting a high of plus 10C.

To put it into perspective, the only thing that grows at minus 40C is hope.  For those of you who’ve never experienced cold this chilling, picture driving down a road, hitting a pot hole too hard, and your wind shield spider webbing from a small chip you didn’t see in the summer.  Picture throwing a cup of boiling water into the cold air and watching it fall to the ground as powder.  Powder.  My dog can walk for about a block before I have to pick her up and warm her feet. Along the streets today people were boosting each other and tow trucks were as numerous as the cars parked along the side streets.  If you can’t plug your block heater in right now, you’re screwed unless you’ve got a good battery and prayer.

I remember hearing my social studies teacher talking about taking the high school basket ball team down to southern California for a tournament, and the people there wondering why his car had an electrical plug hanging out from the hood.  He told them up north in Canada, we plug into parking meters and at the end of the month, the city just collects it out of the bank.

I think about hearing stories about people at the time of my grandparents who homesteaded out here in Saskatchewan and would have to spend cold days like this in bed because it was literally too cold to get out of bed.  Things have changed.  Sitting here at my desk looking out into the cold night, I can feel the heat kick in and make my feet all toasty.

Around February, I notice a change in people’s attitudes.  Not necessarily for the better, but for the worse.  There’s a lack of patience, a kind of edginess that just travels around the population like a virus.  We’re all on edge; the snow is lingering, we’re getting tired of the white.  Some people can afford to travel to a sunny beach further south for a week or two to break the winter blah’s.  I don’t have the luxury.  But I do have something that gives me hope and keeps my spirits up.  The gardener’s spirit.

The gardener’s spirit is like those trees out in the park that I can hear cracking from extreme cold:  the winter can crack you, but it doesn’t break you if you hold onto hope.

Today I trimmed down my amaryllis and took a deeper look into the pot.  Surprise of surprises, the one bulb has now got two baby bulbs sprouting out of the side that I’ll be soon trimming off and repotting.  The bulb from last year hasn’t bloomed yet but I am keeping my fingers crossed.

We have to catch out moments of spring in ways like this, and keep hope.  I think about people in London gardening year round and yeah….I’m a little jealous.  But the cold weather provides us opportunities and conditions, unique challenges of patience and frustration that aren’t the same in warmer climates.

Oh who am I kidding.  Any good looking single guys in the UK want to pay my air fair over?  I’d make a great house husband/gardening fool!

Ok, so I’ve walked some back alleys and taken some looks in to see what other gardeners are doing:  the raised bed idea, I think, is going to be a winner.  On that note!  I shipped off an order to Heritage Harvest Seeds and have got some interesting heirloom varieties coming.  So….here’s what we have coming in!

Lovage, sneezewort (I just love that name!), Maltese Cross, Swamp Butterfly Weed, Cupani’s Original Sweet-Peas (because my Gramma Mac loved sweet peas), French Breakfast radishes, King of the North peppers, Risser Sickle peas, Red Wethersfield onions, Costata Romanesco squash (they’re zucchini…I think), Red Stalk celery, and something a little different!  Barley.

Barley?

Here’s the thinking.  Barley, grown in a bed, will not only look beautiful as it greens, even more beautiful when it goes golden with those bushy heads, but will provide enough seed to re-plant as well as compost material.  I’m thinking tall hollyhocks, delphiniums, and the barley interspersed around it will give the bed a nice texture…or maybe not.

Even after ordering all these seeds, the reality has set in that a lot of what I want to do will be less about planning (although planning is going to be critical), but the gardens I’ve grown so far have been aloof, random, buying colour and foliage on the fly from garden centres and planting it as I go.  The flower beds, the lilies, and perennials have always looked really good.  The important thing I think will be to strategically place the beds given the sun.  I suspect given the neighbours fences and high trees all around the garden, I’m going to be pretty protected from wind.   But the end of the day will tell:  the best way to know the soil, the garden, will be to spend time in it.

Oh!  And Dave Ledoux from the “Back to My Garden” podcast just sent me some Aunt Mary’s Ground Cherry!  If this is the one that rolls around like he’s talked about, there could be some good comedy ensuing.

Snow’s still falling.  We’ve had some beautiful days of frost that help me to collect my thoughts on the time spent just looking at a sleeping garden bed as opposed to helping it wake up and grow.  

Finals are over.  I’m just a part time student so that doesn’t mean I have the full headache of some of the full time students at the university, but I still suffer from a mild case of pressure and jitters.  All passed, all doing well, and looking forward to just one class in the upcoming winter semester.  I like studying this way!  There’s no pressure and it’s for fun, a way to challenge my brain and keep myself stimulated.

But winter break, a two week period, now becomes the time that I sit down with my newly received seed catalogues.  Again, I’m reliving one of those events that my father used to revel over in a way I couldn’t understand until now.  This is like the Sears Christmas Catalogue for children and some slightly twisted yet fun adults (I’m referencing the vast bulk of my cousins here, some of which have introduced me to the idea of rum, egg nog, and a splash of coke…ok another blog post).

Before I write about what I want to grow, I want to talk about a couple of plants from the same family that I initially loved, then became irritated by, then simply grew to distain.  It is a thriving green, leafy plant that encourages bees and has beautiful pink flowers that cone in heads from about late May right through until the first killing frost…and I’ve seen them continue to bloom after the killing frost right into the first snow.

Need a hint?

I snagged this bad boy off of google, so if you’re the owner of “Pit Bull”, I tip my hat off to you for an awesome picture!  This, my friends, is the bane of my gardening existence. Lamiaceae Nepeta, otherwise know as pussy-crack, kitty coke, fuzzball acid, or catnip.

When I first began growing in my two beds, one of the things I wanted to do was not only grow a few things to make the ground functional for producing food, but also herbs.  One of the places I clean had a cat, and in order to properly set the alarm in the building the cat had to be coaxed into the basement.  As he didn’t like being picked up as a rule (and I have the scratch and bite scars to prove it), we had to come up with a low calorie alternative that would both work for us, the cat, and the owners of the building.  So I grew catnip and catmint, thinking that I could use it to coax him into the basement.  Well it worked.  Unfortunately for me, the catnip and catmint also worked in the garden.  At first, it reseeded itself among the perennials and lilies like the dill and it seemed to be a nice contrast to the long spike leaves of the day lilies.  The bees loved it, and being conscientious of the bees I thought I’d just encourage the catnip.

My first mistake.

Two years ago in an attempt to make the front flower bed as low maintenance and beautiful as possible I let the bed tell me what it wanted to do, and it wanted to grow hollyhocks.  So I let it.  And they were impressive, some of them after fertilizing were almost nine feet tall.  Thinking I would encourage the bees, I moved some catnip from the bed on the west side of the house to the south hollyhock bed.  To my horror, the cats began to come at night.  If they weren’t rolling around in it, stoned, they were being angry at me or interrupting their opium buzz.  A garden hose and an improved aim started to make things easier….

…And then this past spring we started noticing people walking past our front window.  Like two feet from our front window.  It turns out word got around to our neighbours that there was a strange plant that the cats loved to play with, so they started BRINGING them over to watch them act like goofs.  Only at night, when the owners let the cats out, and they would come and fight among themselves would I hear the horrible opera of angry stoned cats fighting for the best spot.  My miniature schnauzer needed tranquilizers.

So I decided once the growing season was over it would be time to rip out the catnip.  Now this is a good thing and a bad thing to do.  It’s good because you can more easily identify the plants and pull/dig them as you need to.  I had quite a few.  In fact, I was able to fill four 35″x50″ garbage bags and still had left overs.  From the street it looked like I had pulled and pulled and stacked and stacked piles of marijuana.  I stopped attracting cats that day but I attracted other kinds of attention I’d rather not talk about.  Once they realized it was catnip, they left…but I met some really strange young people!

The other bad thing about it that I only just realized is in that pulling the plants out, I’ve actually made the situation worse by seeding the beds with hundreds…HUNDREDS…of little tiny catnip and catmint seeds.  Were I going to continue to garden here I’d be very…I’d be in need of some catnip tea to calm me down (it actually works as a sleep-aid…but check with your doctor before you try anything because I’m not sure what a heavy dose would do, and I’d rather not be responsible for prescribing a heavy dose that ended up in something terrible happening).  The thing is, once I leave?  Park Place will just come, dig up the existing beds, scatter the seeds into the lawns, and cover it with crushed gravel and pressure treated boards…so why not leave a couple of hundred catnip plants in their lawn by their own doing?

What killed me the most about the catnip though was what the cat urine did to my plants.  Baby’s breath is a plant I keep to remind me of pleasant visits to a favourite aunt in Brandon, Manitoba, who always had a baby’s breath growing by the back door.  The cat urine decimated it.  The hollyhocks suffered as well, and I’m pretty confident that the lilies were I to leave them in the ground with the other perennials, would eventually succumb to cat pee.  The soil will need, if it’s going to be maintained, to be dug up, removed, and replaced.  I’d much rather look at seed catalogues and plan the new garden, waiting to dig up my plants and transport them over than dig up what’s here.

If you want to grow catnip?  Best advice having had this horror occur to me would be plant it in a pot where it can be managed, and cut the flowers off before they have a chance to seed.  Nightmare, people.  Nightmare.  I can still hear a chorus of cats outside my window, and I still mutter “here kitty kitty” like Elmer Fudd in my sleep…..

Somewhere in the writings of Saint Francis of Assisi is the line that goes “Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.”

This time of year is hard for many of us.  For some people it’s about the joyous time of year when family reunite and celebrate among each other, trade presents, eat too much, and celebrate the season.  But for some of us this is a painful time of the year that we struggle through and hope comes and goes quickly.

Saint Francis also somewhere talked about taking the cell of the monastery with us where-ever we go in the world.  For me, it’s a cloister.  Yesterday rather than dwell on what was troubling me I retreated into my gardening  books, seed catalogues, and continued to plan the forthcoming spring garden.  There will no doubt be challenges that have to do with the purchase of the house, and the learning curve of taking on a larger space, but I know that the challenge is what keeps me going.  Not knowing all the answers is what keeps me going.

Even before I put a spade to the ground to break the earth, the garden is peace to me.  It is an act of meditation to contemplate the placement of plants, to visualize the smells and the colours in the early morning, the cool of the day, the thunder storm, the first frost of fall.  I consider the collection of seeds from my hollyhocks, the digging up of treasured bulbs and plants, the worry about the gas plant and not wanting to disturb the roots too much because I know this is something gas plants don’t like…the choosing of vegetables, the building of paths, the digging of the pond, the choice of water lily, and other lilies, the grid system I’m thinking about using now rather than a parterre, wondering if the roots from the trees that surround the yard will be an issue, wondering if the back space I’ve set aside for a patio would be better suited for a compost bit and maybe a small garden shed, wondering if the statuary I have will function, wondering if there’s a way I can set a path next to the current trees and create that sense of cloister….

The idea of this garden is to force the person to look within, to compress one as they enter, and have a sudden release of compression into a formal space, an ordered space inclusive of wildness.

Even now, writing as I am, I’m focusing less on what I’ve perceived as the troubles before me and more on the challenges that are only a few short months away.  Will my little olive tree come back and overwinter ok in this south window?  Will the bougainvillea bloom again, or just keep branching out towards me, reaching out to touch me at my desk?

And then I look at the little garden on my desk beside my computer and I’m reminded even in winter one can garden.  A six gallon enclosed tank, four small copper tetras, snails, and aquatic plants suitable to low light.  Even someone in a small apartment can water garden this way and create entire landscapes for relatively small costs compared to an acre, a yard:  probably the same price as some container plants on a balcony, and it lasts all year with relatively simple care, changing water and filter cleaning, cleaning the glass every once and a while, making sure it has sufficient light, and feeding the fish as needed.

Even in our despair there is hope, the days will get longer, the snow will melt, the ground will thaw, and we can again plant seed, watch plants creep out of the ground, trees come into bud.

Carol Klein.  Alan Titchmarsh.  Monty Don.  Joe Swift.  James Wong.

These are some of the English gardening greats, and Youtube is filled with videos of their gardens, gardening escapades.  The last few nights I’ve been watching Carol’s BBC series “Life in a Cottage Garden with Carol Klein” via the magical world of Youtube and have been both inspired and desperate for her climate, and her potting shed.  Alan Titchmarsh marched me through 400 years of English gardens, Joe Swift ignited the possibilities of front yard gardens in the “Great British Garden Revival” series (also BBC).

Which leaves us with two presenters…James Wong who is just…ok he’s just hot.  I have no idea what he’s presented, I haven’t watched anything he’s done (YET)…but he’s hot.

And Monty Don.

Don’s series’ have been picked out of my Youtube searches and are not only inspiring, but dangerous for a zone 3 gardener.  I’ve recently ordered one of his books from Amazon to see what kind of trouble I can get up in my own garden.  Look for “Around the World in 80 Gardens”, “Great British Garden Revival”, and his series on French Gardens (which is just a pleasure to watch and as close to delicious for your eyes as one can get).

I’d give my eye teeth for a day with this guy in his garden.

Granted, I’d do the same for a day with James Wong in his yard, but for slightly different reasons….

If I had to write a letter collectively to these people it would be to say that watching you garden in the English climate gives me, someone up to his ankles in snow, hope.  I grant you we are about to experience a very unusual warming trend.  Next week it’s supposed to break zero celsius which means the snow that is here will probably melt.  False spring.

So this morning I’m watching Carol in January as her snowdrops are popping out of the ground and she’s potting up and trimming up and it suddenly occurs to me that what she’s doing in a three or four month period I–that is we who garden in zone 3a–is something I maybe have to start indoors in April under grow lights, and can’t really muck around in until maybe the first week of May, depending if the snow is still on the ground and the dirt has thawed out.  Which isn’t to say I’m not pleased as punch to have the opportunity.  We as gardeners are drawn to the cycles of the places we live, and in a way those cycles are part of that spiritual connection that gardening has.  It draws you closer to the place, to the ground, to the wonderful thing that happens when a seed germinates, or a christmas cactus begins to point out little pink blossoms at the tips of its leaves, or an amaryllis begins to show signs that a flower spike, maybe two, are popping out with new leaves which gives you hope that as the days get longer,  pussy willows will be shortly following, then the little clumps of blossoms on the hills from the wild crocuses.  Our climate gives us certain challenges that, as gardeners in this part of the world, allow us to enjoy a unique beauty.

They’re great gardeners, and their experiences and programs help get through the long winter months.  It’s crack of the soul.  Healthy crack.  But nothing beats walking out into the hills on that first warm day that jackets get put over your arm, the smell of the ground beginning to return to life, and those little purple blossoms.  That’s the real thing.

I can’t wait to spend my days away from the computer. James…call me. ;o)

This is an example of the classic Tuscan Villa garden, Villa Gameraia.  Back in the late 1800’s, a romanian princess named Jeanna Ghyka bought the property and installed these parterres you see above.  Where the pools are now there probably would have been things like grass, roses, or cabbages (somewhere in Wikipedia it actually says there was nothing but roses and cabbages planted here.  Now the thing about Princess Jeanna was she didn’t consider herself very attractive….and apparently neither did her husband, the prince something something.

This is not Princess Jeanne.  It is a close resemblance based upon the multitude of images I found online.  Trust no one.  Especially me when it comes to describing Princess Jeanne’s appearance.

She did however have a ‘companion’, an American woman by the name of Miss Blood.  Yes, Miss Blood.  I’m not making that one up.  You get the impression that strange things happened in the villa?

Actually strange things did.  See, Princess Jeanne was so timid she used to do all her wanderings around town wearing a dark veil so people couldn’t see her, and she would in fact venture out at nights into her garden to swim in those lovely pools you see in the first picture.  So for Jeanne and her companion, the gardens were a place they could retreat to and be themselves.

Most of us don’t have the square footage of the cash to create these kinds of parterres in our own yards.  The trick I think is to pull elements of these spaces and incorporate them into our own.  In considering garden plans for the back yard, I want to do a few things.

1. The Importance of the Spiritual:  The space has to foster a sense of retreat from the world outside.  I’m lucky in that the entire yard is surrounded by tall trees that form a kind of hedge.  I’m not sure if there’s going to be trimming needed, but the back of the garden has four tall spruces with hedges between them.  This section of space commands something contemplative.
2. The Use of Water:  Water in pools, water in the sounds of falling, water in the sense of what it and how it reflects both light and what surrounds it, what lives in it both plant and animal, and how the space reacts to the inclusion of a pool.  I’m considering the size and scope of the pool in terms of the rest of the garden and what makes sense is surely not as massive as Jeanne’s pools, but a simple square or rectangle deep enough for lilies, a few water plants, and to act as a reservoir for the rest of the garden.
3. Choice of Plants:  The difficult part of planning at this stage is not being able to see what the trees look like in full leaf, or how much space they take up.  The little round tree that lives in the middle of the yard might have to be moved or removed.  I think I can create a parterre effect without hedges in how I plant the beds, creating angled “L” shape beds to square the garden around the pond, just not sure where to put the pond again.

Tonight I think the best thing to do after finishing the post is to check out plant species that are good for zone 3, do some more research on creating ponds, water lilies, and start making lists.  I have a book full of graph paper.  I also have a lot of plants that I can more than likely dig up and bring over to the house!  Hollyhocks, day lilies, orientals, my little gas plant, hens and chicks, the delphinium; enough space to also include vegetables, herbs, and I’d love to have an oak tree.

The garden, even before the digging begins, is an exercise in patience and self awareness. It is a secret, sacred expression of one’s union with nature, an attempt to both tame and be tamed by it.  It needs to include statues, rocks, sounds, light, and appropriate places to observe scenes.

Of course, there’s always the obvious alternative to open spaces, that being just cram it full with all kinds of stuff other than grass……

Geoff Stonebanks did this on chalk.  Chalk.  Nuff freaking said.

No, the answer is not the second place winner of a drag queen beauty contest who’s had too much to drink, and refuses to leave your table.

Although I am sure that description could also be suitable for said drag queen.

No, I’m talking about WINTER!

Today I got to take a walk through of the house and yard that my friend is going to be working on all winter, and I got the all clear to start work this spring.  Excitement does not begin to describe how I’m feeling.  Both my brother and I got to see just what Dave is going to be doing to get the house in shape, and he went over some ideas he had for transforming it.  New porches, a driveway out front (parking is at a premium here, and apparently if you park in front of a neighbour’s house street side, they get a bit edgy), new basement floor, paint, new bathroom…it’s going to be transformed.  Excited doesn’t begin to describe how my brother and I are feeling right now.

What got me pumped was being able to get a closer look at the back yard!  My blank canvas…. a very white, blank canvas.

So I was going with the idea of creating an enclosed space, something that was sort-of cloistered.  Luckily, there’s been trees trained around the yard.  I’m not sure what they are (they look like they’re maybe lilacs) but the snow is pretty deep so to traverse towards them would mean getting…my feet at this point were already really cold.  Minus 20 celsius, a wind chill.  You’re lucky you’ve got these pictures.

The back of the lot has several spruces, a reasonably sized garage in the south west corner.  The actual garden plot fits behind the tree centre right of the picture, and goes towards the back.  I’m thinking this’ll be the new pond with a seating area under the spruces.

So far, the back yard looks…well white.  There’s a lot of grass, some planting next to the house that looks like smaller lilacs (but I’m not sure).  Dave, the guy I’m buying the house from, tells me it’s a double lot.  After the driveway goes in front there’ll be about 1/2 open space for grass…or raised vegetable beds and flowers mixed is what I’m thinking long term.  There’s one elm in the front yard next to the sidewalk so I think shade and leaves won’t be that much of a problem.

Winter on the prairies forces otherwise impatient gardeners to be resourceful, and to develop a sense of patience that other gardeners in warmer zones aren’t used to.  Our growing season is marked by this period of stark whiteness, an imposed zen landscape.  This also forces us into maximizing our growing season, maximizing the amount of time and enjoyment we need to get from our green spaces.  I’m very excited to have the opportunity to have a space I can transform.