Fall planting of hostas

We've had a mild October this year, it was +20 C yesterday and most of the previous two weeks; however, it is raining today (on Saturday) and the coming days will be in the +10 C range. This means it's been great weather to get out and work in the garden, in my case moving or transplanting hostas. One of the advantages of perennial plants is that they are perennial, you buy them once and not only do you have them year after year, but they multiply, and then you can divide them and have more of the same plants; plus, you buy them only once so you aren't paying for them a second or third summer. Perennials are the gift that keeps on giving... Frugality is something the government of Canada needs to learn as we are now half way to a trillion dollar debt. Meanwhile, annuals look great for one summer and then, in October, they end up in the compost or the garbage; I've seen piles of geraniums thrown out, still in bloom, they could easily have been overwintered indoors and planted the following spring. 

    About five years ago I planted four hostas in the front of the house, as a border to the walk, as well as other hostas planted in the backyard; I decided to move two of these plants to the back yard garden and that's what I did last week. In fact, I also moved a few other hostas into this same long row at the very rear of the garden, it has the effect of pulling the whole garden together. This backyard, my Canadian cottage garden, is not very large and it doesn't get a lot of sunlight except where the house abuts the backyard and even what sunlight I get isn't guaranteed, it depends on the time of day; in other words, nowhere does this garden get twelve straight hours of summer sunlight on a single day as do the gardens of some of my neighbours. I don't have a great love for hostas; I like hostas, but... so, planting these hostas was a matter of convenience and even necessity, it is all that will grow where I planted them; also, they are perennials and there are many varieties of hostas, they will grow and flourish in the shade and I like them well enough. 

You can see where two hostas have been removed, they were the same size as the hostas on either side of the remaining hostas; by the way, hostas are easy to dig up, even four or five years after first planting them the root ball was more or less intact. It is also easy to divide the root ball prior to transplanting them.

Here we see the row of hostas only half planted; this is very poor soil and it's beside some cedars and below an apple tree, so not the greatest place to grow anything.

Here is the completed row of hostas, they'll look better next year or the year after next. It was only after planting them that I realized how they completed the garden; the hostas gave a sense of enclosure to the garden as a whole, a sense of completion. 

I planted these hydrangeas and the hostas in the foreground last summer when I also dug this small island in the backyard. It isn't a lot of work to dig up small sections of grass and, one thing I've noted, is that an island also creates green space surrounding it, it creates paths. I enlarged this area this summer and, recently, I moved the hostas further away from the hydrangeas. By the way, the hydrangeas were moved from the front lawn area where they were too plentiful. I don't throw out any plants or bushes. 

The Cape Cod Cottage

Casa Bella on Belmore Avenue, July 2021

I think of cottages as being cosy places and there is a lot to say in favour of being cosy. For years I've read detective novels and it's the cosy detective novels that are my favourite, this includes Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot novels. There are hard boiled detective novels but, basically, the detective genre lends itself to being cosy; Dorothy L. Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels tend to be long-winded but to some extent they are cosy. Are Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, or Colin Dexter cosy? They may not have cosy content but they are excellent to read on a winter afternoon when you have little to do but stay in-doors and drape a blanket or throw over your legs while lying on the couch. That is cosy.

A cottage is cosy because by definition it's small while a house is a house is a house. We don't speak of an English country house, it's an English country cottage; a house suggests something bigger than a cottage. A house is not cosy but it can have cosy rooms in it, a cottage should be nothing but cosy. Our home, named Casa Bella by my wife when we moved here, is one of many cottages all looking the same and built for returning soldiers after World War Two; it was inexpensive at the time and these cottages were called, euphemistically, five and ten houses, in other words, alluding to the old five and ten cent stores, Kresge's and Woolworth's, and they sold in the 1950s for anywhere between five and ten thousand dollars. A house is meant to house people, a family, so its primary purpose is functional and it isn't necessarily warm and cosy; these post-War cottages were functional and also housed families, they were a way to help veterans get started in life, they were starter houses. We bought our cottage in 1997 just after the second referendum for Quebec's independence or separation from Canada; real estate agents couldn't give houses away in those days because when there is political instability house prices collapse; instability in society threatens the value of people's homes.  

These specific cottages, I am referring to post-war cottages including the one in which my wife and I live, were called Cape Cod cottages although they have nothing to do with Cape Cod, but a Cape Cod cottage refers to certain characteristics of the building; the cottages were meant to house two adults and their two children, they are detached, they have one and a half stories and a basement that one day can be finished, they have maybe 1200 square feet, and they have a backyard. The construction of these cottages was mostly very good as it still was in the old days and builders had possibly better materials than are found in some properties today. These cottages have one important requirement that is lacking in most construction these days, they are quiet, and quiet now costs money; no one buys an estate to have to listen to neighbours talking outside but noise is a part of low income living; there is noise from neighbours, trucks and cars, and people with loud voices playing loud music heard through walls that are paper thin. When we moved here some of the people living in these cottages had lived here since the 1950s and 1960s; they loved their homes.  Now, the area is being gentrified, you see Mercedes and BMWs parked outside these formerly humble houses that are renovated and have lost all of the original floor plan. They are no longer cosy, They aren't even nice.

These Cape Cod cottages are also in demand because there aren't many detached houses in this Montreal neighbourhood, we live in this least stylish area of a stylish neighbourhood. There are mostly four-plexes, duplexes, and semi-detached homes in the stylish areas and most of these homes are very nice, they have hard wood floors and hard wood trim, French doors opening into the living or dining rooms, a working fire place, and they have large bed rooms. I grew up in one of these four-plexes not far from where I now live and it was very pleasant to live there; however, I doubt that a single-woman, or a single parent, raising a family on one income could afford to live there today, which is what my mother did, she kept us living in a nice place after my father died in 1956. Now, here is the ironic thing; I remember my mother saying, many years ago, that she should have moved to a less expensive neighbourhood, perhaps to a little house in Verdun by which she was referring to a Cape Cod cottage in that working class city adjoining Montreal. It was fate that I should end up living in Casa Bella.

Casa Bella, 27 May 2021

Container gardening

The extent of my gardening where we now live used to be flower pots on the patio; that is, container gardening. For the last few years, with the larger cottage garden, I don't have much time for the patio although I still have a few pots of flowers there. One of the problems with container gardening is that I can no longer find clay or ceramic flower pots; my wife used to buy really nice clay and ceramic pots at a local garden centre; now, all they sell are plastic pots and they aren't inexpensive. Although some of these plastic containers are made to look like clay or ceramic pots I still don't like them, they aren't what you want if you are aiming for something natural, not plastic. Plastic garden ornaments, gnomes, Buddha meditating, giant grey squirrels, two foot tall mushrooms, and so on should be avoided. One of my objections to plastic flower pots and plastic garden ornaments is aesthetic, gardening requires some kind of aesthetic sense. Plastic flower pots look cheap and obviously fake even when they are pretending to be clay or ceramic; of course, I also dislike plastic because it is a major pollutant and it doesn't degrade for many years, it's polluting the oceans and landfills are full of plastic that will be there even in 2500 AD.  However, if a few large plastic containers is all you have to bring flowers and gardening into your environment then use them as flower pots. Better to recycle a few plastic containers if you have limited time or space, or physical mobility.  Photos from 2011 and 2013. 

Here is the patio in early spring.

Patio in mid-summer

These are all annuals

My preference is for clay or ceramic pots, not plastic

 

The Demise of Vincelli's Garden Center

I guess it was inevitable, more condos being built, now on the site of the former Vincelli's Garden Center. Vincelli's will be missed by many people, by regular customers who love gardening and others. News of the closure was in an issue of The Suburban last fall, it was a bit silly saying that the new 250plus unit building would act as a noise barrier for other residences in the area... well, do you want to live in a place beside acres of railway tracks that is advertised as a noise barrier for other people? I can hear trains at night all the way over here on Belmore Avenue between Chester and Cote St-Luc Road, steel wheels on steel tracks. Even I, who love railways, would not want to live a few feet from the source of this noise. And the new condo is out in the middle of proverbial nowhere, not a lot of parking, not many buses, a small strip mall and a daycare across the street, at the end of Westminster Avenue, beside an increasingly noisy rail yard, and now an influx of at least 500 people into the area. I would not be happy about this new condo if I were a resident of that area. 

To the Vincelli family, thank you for a hundred years of service to the community. You sold the best plants, including our ginkgo tree that is flourishing on our front lawn where you planted it about ten or eleven years ago. We love that tree. Most of my perennials were purchased from your garden center and they have brought me a lot of happiness to this very day. You don't know me, I was just an anonymous customer, but I loved your garden center. 

Photos from last week.

A Canadian Cottage Garden

My plan is to write about gardening here, it is one of the activities where I find real happiness. There is a lot of happiness seeing birds in the bird bath, a lot of happiness seeing flowers growing and blooming. Uncovering a plant that was covered by mulch, after the winter is over, is seeing again something that was gone but has been found. Hello, little plant! Fireflies on a summer evening, beautiful! 

These photographs were taken at the end of June, 2021.

 

Farewell Vincelli's Garden Centre

Farewell Vincelli's Garden Centre, they're gonna build a 250 unit condo complex on this land. It's Vincelli's land so they can do what they want with it, but that doesn't mean I like it. In fact, we are inundated with condo development, every spare lot is getting its own condo... and, of course, municipal government likes condos, it's much needed tax revenue. I was at Vincelli's Garden Centre an hour ago and there isn't much left of the place. Farewell Vincelli's, an institution in this area for the last 75 or 100 years...

The Garden in early August

I never throw out any plants, I just begin a new area to garden, so I conserve what I have and increase it. I wanted a traditional cottage garden, a garden where my grandmother would feel at home if she could visit. I am not opposed to grass and lawns but it isn't at the top of my gardening priorities; last year I extended the perimeter of the garden and I plan to enlarge the garden as long as I have surplus plants or go out and buy more. I am now thinking of islands; for instance, where I have the bird bath which also has hostas and a hydrangea beside it. As for plants, free or a gift is always best for adding to the garden; I like an anecdote, the human element, to go with a new plant. A few years ago I found what might be hostas that I hadn't planted, a sumac appeared this year, and ground cover has migrated from a neighbour's yard. When I began this garden I decided to grow only perennial flowers, daisies, day lilies, irises, ornamental grass; I also have lilacs, raspberry canes, and roses left by the previous owner from twenty-five years ago. I have a few pots planted with annuals and I've had pots for many years; it's a good quick way to have a garden in places where otherwise there would be no garden. I like hanging baskets of flowers. I collect rain water and water and dead head flowers every day. Visiting gardens can be like looking at photos of someone's vacation, even I gave my mother's garden a more or less cursory visit, and she worked hard on that garden with plants that she had returned with from visiting relatives in Woodstock, ON; for instance, rhubarb from Ruth Laflare; now I wish I had some of her plants, they would mean a lot to me. This year has been exceptional, hot, rainy, and the garden has flourished. In the evening fire flies are everywhere, a few days ago the hummingbird moth appeared in the bee balm, honey bees in the cone flowers, big bumble bees and the occasional skunk passing through, and so on. And if you sit quietly there are birds in the bird bath, they have a great time splashing around, completely submerging themselves in water. When I open the gate I leave behind the noises of the street and I think to myself, this is like the Garden of Eden!