an amazing week

This has been an amazing week. First of all the autumn tones have finally come blazing into the garden. So many trees such as the katsura just turned yellow and dropped leaves with out hanging about making a glorious display. I complain no more.

The new issue of Gardening Life is out: this is the Winter issue and I have part 2 of my long long story on the wonderful Tom Deacon garden: this is one is about his Colour wheel Garden and it’s filled with great plants and information. He s such a smart gardener.

Yesterday two of the doyennes of Canadian gardening came for lunch: Aldona Satterthwaite (the editor of Canadian Gardening magazine) and Liz Primeau (editor emeritus of same). I really like these dames and though we work for competing magazines in our very nice Canadian way we can have lunch, gossip in a Cone of Silence and still be discreet. It was a huge amount of fun and, as ever, we were able to talk about gardening, writing and editing without boring anyone else to death. They are also terrific cooks and generous at a pot luck meal.

Today Jack and I had lunch with our 9-year-old granddaughter Maddy Batten-Maxwell at a Japanese resto where Maddy, as ever, ate the most exotic food I’ve ever seen go down the gullet of a kid.

We talked about one school project—to make Garden Notes. Her school, Kew Beach PS, has a pretty little garden with plants I and other relatives have donated to over the years.

Maddy is working on adjectives to describe a specific plant: “it looks beautiful, feels damp, makes you feel peaceful and smells kind of eyucky right now. The flower is a pink turning into magenta as it gets old.” What she’s describing here is Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ and she’s absolutely right.

This year Maddy’s Gardening Club got a gift of bulbs: the tiny Narcissus ‘Tete-a-Tete’, elegant Allium ‘Purple Sensation’ and and pure white Narcissus ‘Thalia’ for a lovely white and yellow combination next spring. Hope she comes up with as a good descriptions for them as she did the sedum.