I couldn’t write on Friday morning because I was busy uncovering all the tender plants that I had gambled with. We did get that late light frost. The grass was nicely white as was the roof of the garage. My reluctance to plant before the 24th of May actually looks like prudence not procrastination. The few things that I did have out don’t seem to have suffered much but they were either up off the ground or protected over night. The Asparagus continues to feed us almost every day and I’m accumulating a nice bag full in the fridge that will become Asparagus soup sometime in the next few days. I spent Thursday morning touring some wonderful gardens. It was the media preview of Through the Garden Gate the Toronto Botanical Garden’s annual garden tour. This year it wanders through 19 gardens in the Lawrence Park district. They have tried to choose many gardens that are developed and maintained by their owners and that leads to a great diversity of styles. For a plant addict like me it also lets me see some amazing plant specimens that might not be seen in commercially created gardens. The entrance to one back yard, through the draping branches a large weeping Beech, was like the passage way to a secret garden. The tour is on the 13th and 14th of June and is a great way to peek into the gardens around some fascinating architecture. It’s also the Toronto Botanical Gardens major fund raising activity for the year and they are a cause well worth supporting.




Earlier in the week a wonderful box arrived. It contained 3 rather dead looking sets of branches. They were anything but dead but dormant bare root Roses are just a collection of brown roots and green branches. These were my new David Austin Roses. New Roses were particularly welcome this year as the very cold winter had taken its toll on some of my old favourites. A new variety they are introducing this year is the The Albrighton Rambler which they describe as having small, cup-shaped, perfectly formed flowers of softest pink that pale to blush. I’m hoping it will cover one of my 2.4M (8') trellises and rebloom through the summer as promised. Many of the David Austin roses, including the other two in that box, Shropshire Lad and Windermere, are now grown on their own roots which tends to make them hardier and thus more welcome in my garden. If it performs as these roses usually do I will show you a much more interesting picture later in the summer. In our part of the world we plant them quite deep so that the graft union is a few centimeters under the soil to protect it from our cold winters.

Now it’s time to answer a few of my reader’s questions. Don’t forget to check the front page of the Website for frequent short ideas for current gardening activities.