Tag: gardens
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Be like a writer: Stop and smell the lilacs
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When I was growing up, we had a lilac shrub in the back yard, and each spring my mother would clip panicles of the lavender flowers and bring them inside. Sitting in a vase in the living room, they would fill the house with scent. The smell of things is…
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Libraries and Third Spaces
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During the first COVID lockdowns, when you couldn’t walk around a neighbourhood without people crossing the street to avoid you, I found myself gravitating to our local botanic garden. I drove by one day, just escaping the four walls of our home for a little while, and found the parking…
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Gather ye rose-buds
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Image: blush pink rose at the Niagara Falls Botanic Garden – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved Roses are beautiful. But like all things with great beauty, over the millennia they’ve incited great passions. If you think of them only as an expensive flower to give at Valentine’s, or send…
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What is biophilia and why is it trending
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My hubby and I don’t have a lot of natural green in our house, largely because I can’t grow anything. People who give me plants do so at their own risk, so to speak – I usually warn them that their gift probably won’t survive. I do have one plant…
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Background material: seeing the world around us – Gardens
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Having just read about a peculiar “Euro-Western” phenomenon called “plant blindness”, I wanted to write about how important it is for authors to pay attention to the world around us. Even when you’re creating your own fantasy world, the way that our environment functions can provide essential clues for populating…
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You say viridian, I say verdigris
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Did you know that there are 171, 146 words1 in use in the English language, plus another 47,1561 obsolete words? For writers, language is a rich and delightful playground. Like the great old radio dramas (The Shadow, Philo Vance, Dimension X, and the famously infamous War of the Worlds), we…
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The artistry of gardens
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“If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly our whole life would change.”– Buddha Irony: “a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result” (Oxford Languages) As in, how ironic is it that someone who…