Vita, Virginia and Sissinghurst

What a week. I want to thank Pol for pointing out that I’d forgotten the word gardens in my last blog. Pol is faithful but I don’t know where her comments are because I’ve spent so much time removing spam I might have removed her valid comment in a fit of pique along with all the porno.An overloaded week. To tool around the city after our first snow fall and long before all the trees have shed their leaves is to view one of those natural miracles: ? Japanese maples still in crimson glory now covered in a gossamer sheen of snow. Everything left in containers is black and we know that winter is here.Friends in Ottawa report that they got a huge dump of snow. ?Snow, of course, is something all gardeners long for from December on. Snow is the best insulator there is. ?A nice deep consistent ?blanket of snow will protect plants and keep the soil at a consistent temperature and keep plants from heaving out of the ground with freeze-thaw cycles. ?But these days snow disappears too easily and in bare spots you’ve got to mulch. ?I’m hoping to go on a leaf run this week which is the last week people will be putting out bags.?The city didn’t take into account that there are a lot of trees with leaves because of our warm autumn. If they want all the leaves, give us another week please.Weird week too. I went to a presentation called VITA, VIRGINIA AND SISSINGHURST. It was one of those razzle dazzle evenings: a very gung ho audience at first; huge screens, really good photography. ?That was the good part but it was a thudding presentation, not very well written and never seemed to make up its mind what it was about. Is this a social history? Is it a deconstruction of the garden? Not either. ?And it was long. Torontonians were trampling over each other to get out of the hall as the ladies were presented with bouquets of flowers. ?There are two more in the series but they won’t tempt me, not for $35 a pop, they won’t. ?I could have sat through hours of information on how Nicholson and Sackville-West organized, planned, and planted the garden. What was strange was a fictionalized wheel through the garden on Vita’s last night. ?The garden would have been very different when she died from what it is now. ?So this little conceit was off-putting, though the images themselves were wonderful. ?A really unsatisfying evening though it was fun, as usual, to be in an audience of keen gardeners. They are really a great audience. ?You are never lonely when there are gardeners around.????