At Canada Blooms

(Via Country Gardener)

Posted by admin to Canada Blooms garden show on 2008-03-13, 08:04:00

This year Canada Blooms theme is 'Flower Power', with psychedelic '60s theme and lots of emphasis on what they call "the eco-savvy future of horticulture in Canada." I can't say the show turned me on much, but it was good to see flowers in bloom.

Andy Warhol theme with a wall of Campbell's soup cans

Paul Zammit's entry garden display

Visitors were encouraged to vote for the best front garden in a series created by a number of gardening and other "celebrities" (I'm not sure we actually have bono fide celebrities in Canada). My favorite was the one above designed by Paul Zammit, a wonderful plant enthusiast from Toronto's Plant World garden centre.

The cutest idea I saw was this fountain designed by Toronto landscape architect Christopher Clayton, whose small garden display was a masterwork of clever reuse of old garden and other stuff.

With so much writtern from an anti-lawn point of view in the gardening and other media these days, turf had its own public relations billboards, which extolled the environmental benefits of grass. Hey, plants are good, and guess what, grass is a plant.

I can't imagine my 10 acres without some lawn. No lawn and no mowing would amount to a quick reversion to the mess of burdock, thistles and buckthorn that we found here 10 years ago.


© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener