Winter has come properly decked out finally and I’m continuing to be fascinated by thinking about where our gardens are going in the next year or so.

5. An emphasis on trees. More conferences, more concern about their condition especially for native trees. Finally we are getting seriously worried about our canopies. Not just the urban canopy but canopies everywhere. Our trees have been assaulted by pollution, lumbering, invasions by exotic aliens.  The latter is being taken extremely seriously by those who want our native forests to survive and thrive.  Trees can’t go very far with global climate change and those that can’t adjust quickly are going to croak.  They give us so much we all have to become stewards of the forest. Forget that epithet tree-hugger, become one.

6. Sustainability has become a confusing term, but we’re going to have it slammed at us in almost everything that has to do with nature (which takes in everything not just gardening). We all need to get up to speed on what it really means and how it affects our gardening, lives, homes and what we can do about it.

7. Hellebores are my personal Plant of the Year:  a never-fail (though it may be slow to get a grip in some gardens), evergreen, glorious, magnificent plant. You can use it as a houseplant;  fill up a container if it’s out of its zone; or have a collection that will bloom pretty much year round. Here’s a wonder Helleborus ‘Pink Frost’ which landed in nurseries last year and should be in everyone’s garden.

8. Self-seeding plants. The whole trend toward having looser, more casual gardens means we’ll be using more and more self-seeding plants without being terrified of them (rampant, and invasive). Learn about a few of them that work well in your area. Start with a palette and then move into the plants that will work with what  you’ve got.  I’m going to write more on this so please sign up for the newsletter.

And here’s  what I’d really like to be doing now: glugging down a lovely glass of Italian wine and watching the sun set over an Italian villa. Join me, have a look at our Italian trip for this year.

The Saturday before Christmas a group of lads showed up late in the afternoon. They got the gigantic earth movers going and then drove them off rather quickly I thought as I turned back to work. When the cop arrived on Monday he asked:  ”Did you notice anything odd over the weekend?”  Of course I had, at 4:35 on Saturday  two giant machines left the site.  ”What did the guys look like?” he asked.   Well, like construction workers: puffy vests, toques, steel-toed boots. “Where are the machines now?” I enquired.  Oh,  on a ship to a foreign land; or off to another construction site.  The contractors were convinced it was organized crime.

It certainly looked organized but it’s hard  to feel sorry for them. Apparently all Caterpillar machines have the same key. All you need is one bent person and you’ve got yourself a $120,000 chunk of metal.

TRENDS

Trends come slowly to the mind when this sort of annoying stuff is going on.  But I’m as willing as the next person to take a shot at it. We used to joke at Gardening Life magazine that whatever we declared as a trend one year, we’d say was out of style the next. Not completely true but now there are so few garden mags, I still like this pretentious little ritual–it  makes us all feel like the season is about to swing over into something new.

1. Vegetable gardening in the front yard or among the perennials is going to be as big this year as it was last. People have fallen in love with growing vegetables, not just for eating but also for the aesthetics. A gigantic fennel or edging of Swiss chard looks great among autumn bloomers such as Salvia bonariensis and other plants of its ilk.

2. Orange has been declared the colour of the year by the fashionistas,  and gardeners have been ahead of the curve on this one. We chose orange tulips, dahlias and echinaceas to marry up with purple and magenta plants a few years ago. This year, we’re trendy.

3. Fewer lazy landscaper gardens:  you know the kind–thirty hydrangeas, 18 grasses et voila a Piet Oudolph garden.  Well, not bloody likely. Oudolph is a genius at colour block planting and I haven’t seen one garden in this style that passes muster. This sort of  dreary garden is so foolproof and so boring that even the most visually illiterate of clients wants it to be replaced by something requiring both thought and individuality.  Most of our work last year at Marjorie Harris Gardens was taking out this sort of egregious mess, moving plants around and adding new and exciting ones.

4. Flowering shrubs. Instead of putting in tall perennials, smaller flowering shrubs are catching the eye of gardeners. There are some staggering beauties coming into the market place and it’s a matter of demanding them at your own favourite nursery. There are such dishy ones as my favourite plant du jour:  Calycanthus floridus an eastern native with maroon blossoms and long tapered leaves.  I’ll have a list and  pix of the new ones I adore coming up shortly.

More trends to come, I hate these blogs when they get too long. I also apologize for having been absent such a long time but between our tour to Italy last autumn and recovering from  knee replacement surgery immediately after, I seem to have been totally preoccupied. I’ll keep this up on a regular basis from now on. And I’ll be sending out the free midwinter newsletter next week. If you’d like to receive it and are not on the mailing list,  just get in touch. And we’ve got the new itinerary for this year’s trip to Italy just hit the button up on the banner and you’ll find it in all its glory.

On CBC’s Fresh Air this morning, I mentioned the newsletter.  If you get in touch with me I’ll put you on the list and send a link to the old one and I guarantee I’ll have a new one this week.

I also mentioned a shrub called Lespedeza which I think if a wonderful autumn blooming shrub. I’ll try and take a decent picture of it and put it up here.

There will also be a new batch of videos on the Globe and Mail web site  called Gardening 101.  I’ll also be better at putting things up her from now on. I cannot be working harder than I am right now. It’s crazy.

During one of the daily excursions,  I found a huge orphan shell stranded on the part of the beach I travel most often. I was thrilled because it is perfect, the inside nacre is untrammel by what’s, no doubt been, a rocky ride. A lady passing said “Oh I have nine of those.” I was stunned. I had made up all sort of symbolic preciousness about this one shell which found me.

An old guy with a metal detector said “If you want hundreds more of those you just have to walk the other way,”

So I did and came across a cache of shells all of them just lying there like a bunch of flotsam. Suddenly my own shell lost some of its enormous luster.

I went back the next day to look at the shell pile but not one was to be seen. “Depends on the tides.” Said a passerby who offered me a small shell in compensation. My shells became valuable again.

So this reminds me of how we love to have rare plants, how when we see the same plant piled up in big box stores it becomes less interesting. But of course this is as foolish as me with the shells. Whatever nature presents us is a miracle of design, of craftsmanship and should be treasured for its individuality.

These shells I like are sea snails, great big slugs one person said. Make sure you get it out or it will stink. But why would I want the home of a living animal? I put a lot of them back because they were still inhabited. Life’s tough enough for a sea snail without some dope dumping them into the sink.

I’ve learned a lot about the beach in these weeks in Carpinteria. And the beach here as every shore is at risk. We were startled by the size of the waves that hit here when the tsunamis fanned out from the horrors of the Chilean earthquake. We got only a small blip by comparison. But the waves were big enough to breach the very large (two storey high)  berm outside our building. Now that’s wave action.

Raising the berm at Carp Beach

This could be idyllic but what’s also happening is that the ecological structure of the beach is being changed. The next morning shore birds were pecking away in the tracks of this machine.  But today they have found their rightful place along the shoreline.

Horrifically it looks like nothing has changed except that the berms are higher and rains are expected.  Those little condos you see on the right are for sale or at least several of them are (we’re taking two bedrooms here). The average price is 2.4 MILLION dollars.

So keeping the sea under control is to their advantage. No one has asked the birds and the animals that live in the sand their opinion.

We have arrived in what can only be described as paradise. Carpinteria (Carp as the locals all call it) is a funky little town in between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles smack dab on the Pacific. On our way to the place we?ve rented here, I kept thinking we?d turn a corner and find ourselves in Beaulieu-sur-mer in the south of France. There is that much of a whiff of the Mediterranean along this part of the coast. The variety of plants (rosemary hedges, lavender everywhere), the crazy palms trees planted over a hundred years ago, the persistent sound of the sea make it feel like we?ve been here before. The crumpled foothills looming over the flats and the beach where we are staying remind me of France.

This is no France, however. This could only be a laid-back almost hippy dippy kind of 60s atmosphere of a California community. And I?m sure it?s absolutely gorgeous when the sun shines. So far we?ve had rain. Much needed, of course, but coming down so fast and persistently it slakes off into the ocean without stopping. Swales are developing everywhere.

This has not stopped us from starting our comfortable holiday life: the daily trek for food, the search for newspapers, the walks up or maybe down the beach. We have wandered into every little junk cum antique store, visited every food depot and, best of all, taken the hybrid bus that goes all over town for 25cents.
It was Ernie the bus driver who told us to go to Zookers for lunch. So we did. I had homemade pasta which was absolutely brilliant. We?re going back there next week (also to collect Jack?s toque which he carelessly left behind). We?ve been to other places that we good of their ilk (surfer paradise for a turkey Reuben anyone?) but not of this calibre.

I am going to try a post a blog each Sunday and more if it?s possible. I?m going to try and put pictures up. I?ve been beset as usual with technical problems and if this sees the light of day it will be a flipping miracle.

But we?ve just watched the most glorious of sunsets and tomorrow promises to be a slightly drier day. There are gardens to explore and plants to identify.

It?s not like we didn?t go to gardens almost every day, we did. And I will remember them when I look at my pictures and read my notes. But I?m recalling the yet another superlative experience on our Tuscan Tour.

Last winter I met Susan McKenna Grant at a dinner and book launch at Grano, resto of fame in Toronto. I fell in love with her life, her book (a great read: Piano, Piano, Pieno) a cookbook-memoir of her life in Tuscany. Once again I suggested to Linda Thorne that it would be a memorable visit.

Well it was beyond memorable. It was another of the transcendent moments we had on this tour. Again we wound our way through the Tuscan hills on our way from Radda in Chianti to Lucca where we were to stay for the last part of our trip.

Susan is a Canadian who found a crumbling farm and decided to throw all her money at it and return this amazing landscape to the self sufficient farm it had been more than a hundred years ago. What an adventure.

We crawled through the usual terrifying back roads (I always seem to sit on the side overhanging the edge) until we can to what appeared to be a sparkling gorgeous villa surrounded by colour: The home of Susan McKenna Grant and her film maker husband. Another warm Tuscan greeting and we were ushered into their living room. Of course we were gob smacked: a big fire in the fireplace (it was a bit chilly) and the dining room set out with coffee and cookies (oy were they good). Susan and two of her agronomists explained how and what they were doing with the land. Neither men spoke any English and Susan was our interpreter.

What they are doing is making the land fertile again, restoring forests, cleaning out shrub and constantly experimenting with what will grow in this climate (from olives, to grains, to heirloom fruit, new vineyards, bees and a chestnut forest. For the past hundred years this area has had so many monocrops that whatever disease hits, kills. They are going for biodiversity in every sense of the word.

We set out on a tour of the property. Oh boy it was fun. We learned more about their plants, picked and smelled and touched and had things explained. The enthusiasm of these guys was completely infectious. The gardens and orchards were stunning.

And then there were the animals. A lot of strange look duck things but the most adorable were three weird looking little pigs called Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. The fourth was going to be our lunch. Gulp.

Eventually with rain threatening and after a bracing walk, we got back to the villa. We strode into the dining room-kitchen and a whole different world. The kitchen is a professional chef?s kitchen with students who come from all over Canada to apprentice with Susan.

We had a demonstration in the making on one of the dishes we were going to eat. I want a kitchen like this: huge, gorgeous filled with handsome young people bustling about. Then into the dining room: another visual treat.

All the tables were laden with silverware and gift bags and we grabbed a bench. I sat near Harold and Howard and Susan and across from us was Giuliano (Marco sat at the other table being just as charming). I have to explain Guiliano: he was the forestry expert. A man who is so gorgeous all of the women were beyond drooling. Michaelangelo could have sculpted him. Anyway we all spoke Italian or English or it didn?t matter because we started with a Prosecco con profumo di more (the late their wild berry profume).

Then followed a series of wine and food that went on for almost three hours. We had their farm raised cinta salumi and Tuscan crostini; Farro risotto (which we watched being made and heard about the history of this amazing grain); then a mixed grill the likes of which I?ve never seen before along with freshly picked asparagus and roasted potatoes. Some pig that. I take back any anti-pig sentiment I?ve ever had in my life. Susan?s pigs are divine.

Cheese and honey (various pecorinos, various honeys); then panna cotta then biscotti. It was an extremely silent bus full of people heading to Lucca that day. We loved Susan and her farm all the gorgeous plants she has around it as well as her glorious food, but mostly we loved the idea of the audacity of a dame from Toronto doing this. She is a true heroine and what a great life. See if you can find her book and you?ll see what I mean.

We headed for Lucca is god awful traffic but I don?t think any of us noticed or cared. Another magnificent Tuscan experience. Lucca of course is a whole other adventure.

Marjorie and Linda Thorne?caught by Howard Geddes