Pick up spirits with winter garden party
It is early January and the celebrations of the holiday season recently wound down.
However, nights are still long, temperatures cold and the scents and scenes of a great garden season are in our distant past (and future).
Your garden sleeps.
What to do?
We have an idea: create a celebration. A garden party, if you will.
Here we are, about half way to spring thaw and now would be a good time of year to be reminded of what a great gardening-country this is.
Even deep frost has its benefits: fewer bugs and your compost gets a free lift when it comes out of the deep freeze.
What kind of party?
Start with the obvious by calling your gardening friends together for a dinner that features locally produced food. Ask each of them to bring a preserve from their garden. This might be pickles, or “fresh” raspberries or veggies from the freezer.
After a dinner that features local beer and wine, retire to the TV and find some programming on your favourite subject. Netflix recently added “Love Your Garden”, by British horticulturist Alan Titchmarsh (https://www. netflix.com/ca/title/80233104), and PBS’s “In the Garden with Bryce Lane” is available to Canadians online for free (https:// www.pbs.org/show/garden/). Gardeners Niki Jabbour (https:// www.youtube.com/user/nikijabbour/videos) and Joe Lamp’l also have great content available on their YouTube channels which are worth checking out (https:// www.youtube.com/user/joegardenerTV/playlists).
Using the “sleeping garden” theme, invite guests to come dressed in night garb. This is an excuse for Ben to wear his Hudson’s Bay one-piece bear jammies. You would not want Mark in your house wearing what he wears to bed.
Still need a lift?
If you feel you need a lift, give flowers. Start with anyone you might know who is struggling at this time of year, for whatever reason. We often take for granted the wide variety of cut flowers that are available to us. And we always take for granted the inspiration that we provide when we give them unexpectedly.
Spring flowering bulbs are now available at retailers. Look for fresh tulips, daffodils, crocus and of course amaryllis (if you forgot to give the bulb before Christmas). Remind the recipient that all flowering plants last longest when they are placed out of direct sun and flowering bulbs perform best, in the long run, when you place the plant full of foliage in direct sun.
Using the Library.
Looking for inspiration? The library provides more than just great books. Every library now provides access to a wide range of CD’s. They are warm places, generally quiet and have you noticed that the newer ones are very well lit? Not a bad thing during a time of year when the length of day is only about nine hours.
Visit a garden.
We find that the winter is a great time to scroll back through the pictures we have logged in our hand-held device and slowly look over the photos that we took during the past gardening season. We have great shots of visits to local gardens, others that we experienced while travelling abroad and of course we have a few dozen shots from last year’s edition of Canada Blooms (www.canadablooms.com).
And our favourite public gardens, Trebah http://www.trebahgarden.co.uk/, the Lost Gardens of Heligan https://www.heligan. com/, Kew Gardens https://www. kew.org/, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Ontario https://www. rbg.ca/ and the list goes on.
Happy half-way-to-gardening partying! Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and Member of the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourthgeneration urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen. com, @markcullengardening, on Facebook and bi-weekly on Global TV’s National Morning Show.