I am an urban gardener through and through. My current garden is small, bowling alley-style yard in Toronto. Prior to this I maintained four very urban spaces: The rooftop of my building where I have been growing a wide assortment of edibles in containers for over a decade, a Guerrilla Garden on a very busy urban street corner (also about 10 years in the making), a community garden plot, and a local yardshare (new for 2010).
In late October, once most of the houseplants had been moved back indoors for the winter, I posted a series of photos to my social media accounts documenting the main spaces in my home where plants are kept. I thought I’d post them here with some explanatory text. As I have written before, my living …
Garden season is underway and a sudden burst in activity has prompted a frenzy of posts to my social media accounts. I’ve made several quick minute-long videos and thought I’d share some of them with you here. The first set of videos were shot impromptu from my kitchen counter and are quick little snapshots highlighting …
Both Davin and I regularly document the garden’s progress throughout the year with quick and easy cellphone shots taken from specific vantage points. We’ve been doing this since year one in this house and we both post these updates to our respective social media accounts (links below). He takes photos from the kitchen window at …
Davin took this photo of me standing in the garden the other day, on the occasion of my 43rd birthday. It was drizzling at the time, but I was elated. It has been unbearably dry and hot here in Toronto for some time. I have never appreciated rain more than I have this summer. In …
Here it is, the seasons of my garden for the calendar year 2015. If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, I regularly post overhead shots of the garden taken from an upstairs window. Well, my spouse Davin Risk records the garden from a different vantage point via the kitchen window nearly every day and …
As mentioned in my last post, we’ve hit that time of the spring when the garden is coming alive faster than I can keep up with. There’s lots to do, and my enthusiasm after a long winter matches my to-do list. I’ve already suffered from a bad case of “can’t stop gardening even though I …
We’re well into that part of the season when there is more going on in the garden than I can document. I could do one of these posts daily! This is the garden’s fourth year — a proper walk-through tour is sorely overdue. Unfortunately, I have a tendency to put off proper photos, telling myself …
Clockwise from Top Left: 1. I bought two dwarf gingko trees last week: Ginkgo biloba ‘Mariken’ and G. biloba ‘Troll.’ Neither grow to be more than 3 feet within 10 years. At their current size they’d only get lost in the foliage of the garden, so I’ve potted them up into containers that are a …
Organic Gardening magazine recently unearthed a personal piece by me that was originally published in their February 2008 print edition. Some confusion was created by the timing of the story’s promotion. Many people, including in-real-life friends thought it was newly written and couldn’t comprehend why it fixated on gardens that I have long since moved …
It’s not a particularly good photo, just a quick snap of some houseplants sitting on a table on my back patio. There’s bits of grit on the table that had been earthed by the squirrels, water rings on the metal table, and volunteer geraniums underneath the bay laurel tree — little messes that I might …
Two nights ago Toronto was hit with an ice storm. Anything that didn’t move during the night was encased inside a thick, vitreous ice. Trees, bushes, leaves, grasses, clotheslines, metal structures, fences, birdhouses, empty planters… they were all turned into crystalline sculptures. I have never experienced this phenomenon as a gardener, and I am equally …
“He who plants a garden, plants happiness.” – Chinese Proverb Inspired by this quote are a few recent scenes from my small patch of earthly joy.