On Saturday I attended my first Master Gardeners Technical Update, held at the Toronto Botanical Garden. It was my first time visiting the TBG and I admit that I was hoping very much for at the very least, a brief walk through a greenhouse. I’ve been craving that greenhouse smell, the green and earthy aroma that is ever present inside a greenhouse. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

Under the umbrella of “The Practical Gardener,” the topics of discussion presented were:

The Importance of Soil: Getting it Right – Darrell Bley, Instructor and Curator of Woody Plants at Niagara Parks Commission talked about soil texture, soil composition, soil amendments and touched briefly on soil testing, as well. I took a lot of notes during this talk and I’m planning to expand upon what I learned here on the blog in a future post. To sum up, soil is really, really cool, and there are some practices I need to change in our own garden beds.

Durham Master Gardeners puzzle over identifying a selection of twigs.

Sonia Day gives her entertaining and controversial talk, "Perennials: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"

One of the other highlights of the day was seeing the name Helen Battersby on the name tag of another attendee and recognizing Helen before running over to introduce myself. Helen is a fellow garden blogger and writer who has always been so lovely and kind to me on Twitter, where we’ve exchanged words, and I was really pleased to meet her. Helen and her sister Sarah write a terrific garden blog called simply, Toronto Gardens. I didn’t know that Helen was also a Master Gardener, although I should’ve suspected it, so bumping into her was a real treat.

Botanist, naturally.

My neighbour and friend Terri, who lives across the way from us, grows some really beautiful roses. Terri’s rose garden is as neat, organized and orderly as the inside of her home is. She doesn’t follow any of the traditional “rules” that exist for growing and keeping roses, other than feeding them regularly and pruning them back in the fall. There are rarely any stray petals at the base of her plants. She deadheads her roses as soon as they begin to look unkempt, which is why her plants always look so beautiful.

I’ve only just begun to try my hand at keeping roses, with my first purchase this season, in fact, when I took Terri for her first visit to Kingsway Greenhouse in Oshawa. She bought two roses that day and I bought an English rose. One of the roses Terri chose was called ‘Hot Cocoa’.

A funny thing happened to one of Terri’s roses. Last summer she bought a new yellow rose and this year, was disappointed to see that the rose had died, with only the grafting stock surviving. The graft rose was a wild variety with small, creamy blooms. I thought it was pretty, but it wasn’t Terri’s style. She dug it up and brought it to my house. I’m still not sure if it will survive, but I found a spot for it back near the compost and potting bench.

This rose has a really unusual growth habit, the way the flowers come in clusters.

I’m really beginning to see the appeal of roses lately, and until now they have always seemed intimidating to me, as though only a “real” experienced gardener could have any kind of success with them. I think my garden needs a few more, and I think I have Terri to thank for my new found appreciation in these beautiful blooms.

One of my favourite flowering plants in our garden is this beautiful poppy. I don’t remember the name of it, and I really should dig through my unwieldy collection of plant tags to see if I kept the one for this beauty.

The blooms are so short-lived…I watch the buds closely each morning as they are approaching bloom status. Then suddenly one morning, they burst into bloom. The petals are clean and white with a pink edge and a very pale lime green throat.

The flowers last about day before they look raggedy and fade away, leaving the seed heads behind. This year I had two blooms on this plant. I keep hoping for more.

(Any poppy aficionados out there who know the name of this one? I’d love to hear from you!)

Have you ever fallen in love at first sight…with a plant?

I would normally completely agree that at first glance this is a silly question. However, it recently did happen to me when I fell in love at first sight with this Asiatic Lily, ‘Tiny Padhye.’ I saw her at Kingsway Greenhouse, where she was grown from a bulb on site in sterile soil. Doesn’t that sound romantic?

I was drawn to her white petals, seemingly splashed with a deep red stain that looks almost like blood. I knew she would stand out as unique in my garden.

Normally I stay away from Asiatic Lilies. The last time I had them in my garden they became overrun with lily leaf beetles, and as I am not a gardener who enjoys squishing insects, I decided to simply get rid of the lilies, instead of the beetles. When I saw this lily, I decided that Asiatic Lilies might be worth another shot in my garden.

Have you ever fallen in love with a plant and just had to have it?

The Siberian Iris (Iris sibirica) is in full bloom right now. I love the way this plant looks just as it’s about to burst into flower. The buds are actually a deep red before the surprising purple blooms emerge.

I have this plant in my perennial border in full sun and it is one of the first perennials to come into flower in our garden.

Growth Habits of the Iris (I. sibirica or I. germanica)

Features: spring, summer and sometimes autumn flowers; attractive foliage
Flower colour: many shades of pink, red, purple, blue, white, brown, yellow
Height: 4″ to 4′
Spread: 6″ to 4′
Hardiness: Zones 3-8

(Source: Best Garden Plants for Ontario, by Liz Klose and Alison Beck, Lone Pine Publishing, 2005, p. 58.)

The Peony Festival in Oshawa over the weekend was, in a word, lovely.

I attended on Sunday and sat with two other gardeners at the Master Gardeners tent and talked with the visitors to the garden as they wandered through the peony beds.

The Canadian Peony Society had a tent set up beside ours, and they were selling beautiful stems of peony blooms for two dollars each. Aren’t the yellow peonies especially gorgeous?

There was a silent auction and peony show inside Children’s Arena. At the end of the show, the stems that were entered into the show were brought outside and sold by the Peony Society, too. I managed to get one especially beautiful coral bloom to take home. I gave it to my neighbour who has recently discovered how amazing peonies are.

There were over 300 varieties of peonies on display. A few, like the tree peonies, had already bloomed, but for the most part, the festival seemed very well timed this year. There were hundreds of varieties in bloom, and a few yet to burst. It’s not too late to go and see the peonies in all their traditional glory.

Some of the blooms were as big as (or even bigger than) my hand.

A few more photographs of the peony festival are available for viewing here, or check my Twitter stream for more photos of several varieties of peonies, including ‘Coral Charm‘, ‘Firebelle‘, ‘Do Tell‘ and ‘America‘.

Earlier in the week I noticed a lime green sign posted on a hydro pole on my way home from picking up my son from his caregiver’s home. “Perennials for Sale,” it read, indicating the address. I made a mental note to check it out.

I stopped by 68 Scugog Street in Bowmanville to shop at another local perennial plant sale.

Muriel is the gardener who lives at this address, and she is selling perennial plants from her garden for bargain prices! She had hostas, sedums, Polygonatum (Solomon’s Seal), geraniums and other healthy-looking perennials set up on a table near the curb at her home.

I bought a very pretty, lacy-leafed perennial geranium from her for $1.25. I did a search on the Heritage Perennials website to try to find out the name of the variety; this geranium is unlike any I’ve seen before. Its foliage is very delicate and almost burgundy. The tag that Muriel put on the plant says that the bloom is fuchsia, but that is a common bloom colour for hardy geraniums, and not enough information to narrow down the 86 species listed online. I will have to keep an eye out for it at the local garden centres in order to identify it.

Muriel’s plant sale is a fundraiser to benefit the Long Sault Snowmobile Club. Hers is another wonderful source of locally grown plants for a cost that, short of giving the plants away, cannot be beat.

Every year I drive by this sign with interest, intending to stop in for a look around, to see what exactly is being sold, and every year the planting season gets away from me and the sale is over before I have had a chance to investigate. Finally, this year, I made it to Violet Cook’s perennial plant sale.

I saw phlox, columbine, hostas, lilies, lupines, sedums, violas, just to name a few. Violet, or “Vi,” as she called herself, has her work cut out for her. This annual perennial sale of hers is clearly a labour of love.

“You’ve painstakingly dug up every little lupine from your garden, haven’t you?” I asked her. The lupines were tiny but looked very healthy. “Oh yes,” she replied with pride.

From her large property, Vi divides and sells her healthy perennial plants in her yard for really great prices. I bought three pots of purple-flowering low-growing phlox to add some interest to the garden in spring, and two small sedums that she assured me would bloom a pinkish-red colour, all for eight dollars. If you need perennials to add to your garden, head to her place on King Street East in Bowmanville (just west of the Bowmanville Zoo, before you get to Mearns). Watch for the signs.

Violet’s husband makes really cute bird houses too, starting at $15.00.

I love getting perennials from local gardeners, not simply because they are almost always a great deal less expensive than the local garden centres, but also because you know that they grow well in the local climate. If those purple phlox will grow well in Vi’s garden down the road, I can be sure they’ll do okay in mine.

A few days ago I was taking the long way home from doing some errands. I had Nate in the car with me and he was having a good snooze in his car seat, and I didn’t want it to end early. I just kept on driving. In my travels I came across a little plant sale not too far from our home. I made a mental note to check it out later on, maybe on a walk with the baby.

Later that evening Graham and I decided to take a walk to the store for an ice cream after dinner, and after we picked up our treat, we continued on to the home and plant sale I had noticed earlier.

There were campanula, lilies, perennial geraniums, hostas, ferns…the lady of the house had divided all kinds of her perennials and set them up for sale in her front yard. Most were $2, but some of the larger pots were going for $5.

We got talking about the plants as I asked her some details about a few that she had. “Oh, you know your flowers!” she said to me when I asked her what colour bloom her pulmonaria (lungwort) would sport. “How do you know so much about plants?”

I told her I had been gardening for several years, and just learned as I went, and that I was always on the lookout for unique plants for our garden.

“This is something special,” she said, and pointed to a pot containing a plant with tongue-shaped leaves, deeply veined in burgundy. “I don’t know what it’s called, though,” she went on. She had lost the plant’s tag years ago and hadn’t been able to identify it since.

“That’s bloody dock,” I told her. I had just acquired it myself last weekend at the You Grow Girl plant swap. She was absolutely delighted to learn the plant’s name, and said she’d be going inside to look it up on the internet.

I bought a pretty deep red hens-and-chicks and a perennial geranium with a red pattern on the leaf before we continued on with our walk, and introduced myself to her. She’s been gardening and composting for forty years. She offered to show me her garden sometime.

It’s always such a pleasure to meet a fellow gardener, especially in my own neighbourhood.

We have a lot of projects on the go in our yard this year, as is usually the case. We seem to like to bite off more than we can chew. Take, for instance, the fact that we recently tore up our deck. The wood has been laying around the yard in piles such as this one.

This wood pile is special, though. At its feet lays a lone tulip. Did I plant that tulip there? No. Do I know how it got there? No. I have a sneaking suspicion that some dirt got moved, the tulip unwittingly scooped up and displaced. Or perhaps a squirrel dug up the bulb and “hid” it over there. Or perhaps I threw what I thought was a dead bulb into the compost bin, where it fell out again. Nobody knows! It’s a tulip mystery.