At 6 p.m. on 26 August 2024

 

Scenes from a Canadian cottage garden

 Photographs taken the evening of September 7, 2023.

Evening, and the light is coming in diagonally and preparing 
for ever diminishing brightness

Phlox are back for a second bloom

 

On the right, that's a sumac tree that self-seeded
and in three years is at least 15 feet high

The brown-eyed Susans are reaching
the end of summer, the cone flowers
are mostly finished

See those little things towards the right?
They are a cloud of little flies one sees 
in the summer

Sometimes the dying and dead flowers
can be attractive

There is that sumac again

A hollyhock, they are a lot more difficult to grow
than they should be; they were weeds in my youth,
now they are biennials and celebrated when flowering

A huge hosta, as though I have some special
ability to grow hostas... well, they grow themselves
and the best advice is to leave them alone and they'll get it right

The house is covered in vines as though old people
who don't maintain their home live here. . . someone tells
me they are bad for the brick work and I plan to cut them back

Some planning can go a long way

Black currants I planted three years ago

This did so well

My wife planted this gingko tree about fifteen
years ago beside our front lawn, it has done well

Snow removal in Montreal

I thought this was a mild winter, but it's not. It's -25 C this morning and getting colder, the furnace runs and runs and runs but the house doesn't warm up. The other night the city removed 25 - 30 cm of snow that they had ploughed to the side of the streets, and then it snowed again, and it snowed last night, not a lot but a white covering on everything. We're a northern people, more northern that anything else because that is our geography and geography affects who and what we are, our attitude to life, our relationship to the world. Living here, even if you are from the Islands or South America, you will become like us, a northern people. Geography has dictated it. Seven weeks to the end of winter, the days are getting longer, and we're Canadians, we'll get through this, we have no other choice.