Sunflowers for Ukraine

I’m hoping to make a small difference instead of sitting with knots in my stomach and an ache in my heart. I’ve listed a Sunflowers Print in my shop. It features a painting I did years ago and still love, and one that seems pertinent for the time we are in as the sunflower is Ukraine’s national flower. 

For the entire month of March 2022, I will donate $20US from each US order and $25CDN from each Canadian order of my Sunflowers Print. The donations will go the the Canada-Ukraine Foundation which is providing humanitarian aid to Ukrainians in their country as well as countries where they’ve taken refuge.

The Sunflowers print measures 8 x 6 inches and is on beautiful watercolour paper. I print my art with love and care in my studio.

UPDATE: Thanks to the purchases of my customers, I was able to donate a total of $220US ($275CDN) to the Canada-Ukraine Foundation to help the Ukrainian people. Thank you for your love and support. We did it together. (This special fundraising effort ended on March 31, 2022.)

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Pansies and Violas: Favourite Flowers

Anyone who has followed me for a long time here or elsewhere on social media knows how much I love pansies and violas. They have strong childhood associations for me and remind me particularly of my mom's mother who was named Viola. They are also favourite garden flowers with delicate looks yet a hardy character, perfect for a northern garden. And they are a joy to paint.

This spring I did a painting of some little yellow and white violas that I bought in a little pot to cheer up our kitchen windowsill. I've made my watercolour into prints and cards. You can see the note card in the photo at the top.

Cheering up is the key role I think of these flowers. Whether in the garden, a pot or a vase, their little faces have the ability to lift our spirits. Who doesn't need that, especially right now?

The very first print I created in my studio in 2011, when I launched my online art business, was of a watercolour painting I did of a pot of pansies in my backyard. That happy group of blue pansies was punctuated by pink nemesia, coral diascia and white euphorbia. It's still available in my shop as a print (shown below) and note cards.

This past week, I added an assortment of pansy and viola note cards to my shop. I chose five of my favourite watercolour paintings: Pansy Quartet, Pansies in a Pot, Posy of Pansies and Violas, Violas and Verbena, and Yellow and White Violas. This notecard collection is for all of the pansy and viola lovers out there like me.

When I was a little girl, I would follow my grandmother around as she fed the birds and squirrels in her backyard and tended to the annuals. One of my favourite memories is of her letting me pick pansies from the garden to put in the beautiful silver and glass posy vase she owned. The memory of gathering pansies with her was so special to me that I tracked down an almost identical vase for myself years later from an antique dealer.

If you'd like to see all of my pansy and viola art currently available, click here. There are prints, print sets, note cards, my new note card assortment, and a bookmark. I hope that they give you the same pleasure that they give me.

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Flowers for Change

I've been quiet on my blog. I've been pretty quiet in my life recently too! I'm still staying home as much as possible while we wait out this crazy pandemic! But I haven't been idle. One of the most important things I did recently was to create a painting to support the Black Lives Matters movement. In June, I painted a bouquet with flowers individually chosen for their significance as a tribute to George Floyd and so many others lost to racial intolerance and injustice.

Black tulip - power, strength and supreme elegance

Dill - powerful against evil

Borage - directness, courage and sometimes seen as a remedy for a heavy heart

Black-eyed Susan - justice 

Blue iris - faith and hope

Thyme - courage and strength

Forget-me-not - remembrance

Here's my rough sketch and the early stages of the painting. I used reference photos from my garden for most of the flowers. 

I added a print, note cards and bookmark to my shop in mid-June, all with a fundraising aim. I'm happy to say that as of July 31, 2020, I've raised US$160/CA$222 in total from my "Flowers for Change" print, note card and bookmark sales! Your orders have helped to support the work of: Black Women in Motion, Afrique au Féminin, the Black Health Alliance and, mostly recently, the Black Solidarity Fund. Thank you to everyone who has ordered and, by doing so, supported these important organizations.

The Flowers for Change print, note cards and bookmark continue to be available in my shop. In August, the proceeds from orders of these products will go to the Black Solidarity Fund which unites over 50 Canadian Black community organizations. Donations to this fund are being doubled by P&G Canada up until August 31st! (They will donate $2 for every $1 given up to a million dollars up until the end of August.) So it's definitely not too late to order and help!

 

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During the past few weeks, I've been doing more gardening than painting. I've also been reading and baking. I'm trying to take advantage of the summer days and create a soothing rhythm out of the weirdness we're living. Every time I'm working in the garden, I'm thinking that I really should be painting this flower or that. New paintings are in my head for now but I hope to get up those studio stairs soon! I know it would do me a world of good and I will share whatever I do with you.

I hope that you are safe and well wherever you happen to be at the moment. Thank you for dropping by. It's nice to have guests, even if they are virtual ones!

Happy Holidays! Introducing A New Christmas Card!

Here we are again! It's hard to believe that the holidays are upon us!

This is my newest holiday card. It features a watercolour I did of the Christmas tree farm that we've visited annually for the past several years. It's such a lovely family tradition to go and cut our own tree down. And, of course, I had to include Meeko on the card! I also have a French version of this card. It's also available as an ungreeted note card.



I currently have a lovely sale on. I'm offering 30% off everything in my shop: original watercolour paintings, note cards, holiday cards, prints, books and bookmarks. The discount will be added as soon as you put something in the cart. No coupon is required. The sales ends at midnight EST on December 2, 2019.

It's not the first time that I've featured Meeko on my cards. He's also on this sweet holiday card I did last year.

And here he is again on an everyday note card which I did a few years ago! What can I say? He's a handsome and willing painting subject.

I hope you'll have a peek at my shop while my sale is still on.

And please accept warm greetings from Meeko and me. We wish you lovely holidays surrounded by family and friends.

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Goodbye traditional lawn!

The photo above shows the results of a week of work. Let me explain. Our front lawn was in a terrible state. It was mostly weeds (dandelions and cinquefoil among others), clumps of coarse-stemmed grass and it had many bare patches. We suspected we had a white grub problem. I take a lot of pride in the appearance of my garden and the lawn was an embarrassment. Here's what it looked like. Ugh!

In our household, the flowerbeds and vegetable garden are my responsibility and, with the number of flowerbeds we have, it's a huge one. The lawn and pool have always been my husband's job but his level of duty towards the grass was dwindling. I don't blame him. Perfect lawns are a thing of the past. They don't make sense from an environmental standpoint. We haven't used any pesticides or herbicides in our garden for many years. We would reseed the lawn a bit in the spring, water it regularly, and my husband would mow it every week or two and that was it. He used to put fertilizer on it but hasn't for the past few years. We weren't doing anything special to it and it showed.

I completely removed the lawn at one side of the house nine years ago and replaced it with flower beds and a gravel path. I never regretted it. Elsewhere, the back lawn has evolved on its own to a mix of grass, regular clover, self-sown wild violets and a few other acceptable weeds. Lovely moss has grown on its own in parts and I've added a few patches of creeping thyme. I like the gently disordered way the back lawn looks, quite unlike the mess we had at the front of the house.

Some of the wood violets that have sown themselves in the back lawn. What's not to love?

This spring, we talked about alternatives for the front lawn. My husband suggested rocks. He did. I put a border of river rocks along the two sides of the front lawn a few years ago and I love how they frame the yard. I wasn't ready for rocks everywhere though! When I was awake in the middle of the night, I thought of making the lawn into one huge flowerbed with a pathway cutting through it. And then I remembered how I have trouble keeping up with all of the flowerbeds I have already. That didn't seem like the best approach. I researched lawn alternatives and found some articles about micro clover (Trifolium repens pipolina). It's a tiny version of clover that was developed in France. It has smaller leaves and is shorter than Dutch white clover. It requires less water and mowing than grass and is not of interest to white grubs. It doesn't need to be fertilized. It forms a soft, green carpet and responds well to being walked on. The more I read, the more convinced I became that this was what we needed to try.

Before we started our work

We initially discussed hiring a landscaper to remove the existing lawn. Then last Saturday, I foolishly suggested, "Why don't we try it ourselves?" So we did.

I used a lawn edger to slice thin strips and then used my trusty Japanese gardening knife* (my favourite garden tool) to cut them into small pieces, knock the dirt off and dig out any deep roots.

Remember my suspicion about white grubs? Oh, we had them. I lost count of the grubs we encountered as we sliced and removed the lawn. I said 'Yuck' pretty much every time I found one. And there were hundreds! We also ran into the occasional parent, the June beetle. There were also a lot of earthworms. I love worms so we carefully extracted them from the clumps and made sure they went back to the earth.

Under the lawn: the good (earthworms), the bad (June beetle) and the ugly (white grub).

We opted for a labour-intensive manual process to get rid of the lawn. It allowed us to remove as many roots as possible of the grasses and weeds that were there as well as removing the white grubs. The lawn is about 500 square feet. We were kind of crazy to do it manually although it did ensure that we did a thorough job.

It took us several days, working two to four hours at a time. I did the shifts alone in the middle of the week and then we worked together on the weekend. If you ever want to meet and greet neighbours, sit in the middle of your yard removing the lawn. You become a magnet. Everyone was curious about what we were doing. We chatted with old and new neighbours as well as strangers. I got the 'thumbs up' from people passing in cars and got called "patient" by more than one passerby.

We removed the grass piece by piece and tapped the dirt off it, dug any deep roots out, removed every white grub and June beetle we found, rough-raked the earth to get whatever bits of plants or roots remained, fine-raked it to even it out, flattened it (we used a scrap piece of plywood rather than rent a lawn roller), and then spread a thin layer of soil on top.

Progress: After the lawn was removed, after raking and flattening, and after a thin layer of top soil was added.

I also took the opportunity to enlarge my flowerbeds a little bit (I couldn't resist), to give me a bit more room for annuals at the front of the beds. I used an old garden hose and yellow stakes to mark out the revised perimeter of the lawn and flowerbeds.

The new reduced perimeter of the lawn marked with an old garden hose and yellow stakes. Meeko distractedly supervised the whole project.

Then I seeded the lawn portion by hand. I mixed the seed with compost and scattered it as widely and evenly as I could.

This was the state of my hands after distributing the compost and seed mix. I always start by wearing gardening gloves and then ditch them at some point. 

After a week of intense labour, we are exhausted but we are also very excited. We can't stop looking out the front window at the neatly seeded earth. There's rain in the forecast which will help us as the seed needs to be watered frequently while it is getting established. I can't wait to see what the lawn looks like. And we know that the neighbours are curious too! I'll update my post with 'after' photos. Keep your fingers crossed that our micro clover experiment will be a success!

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These were the articles that I found most interesting and helpful when doing my research:

English: https://laidbackgardener.blog/2016/05/11/micro-clover-a-new-groundcover-to-discover/
Version française: https://jardinierparesseux.com/2016/05/11/le-micro-trefle/

https://vancouversun.com/homes/gardening/brian-minter-make-your-lawn-more-eco-friendly-with-micro-clover

Sources:

Micro clover (Trifolium repens pipolina): I purchased our micro-clover seed online here.

*Japanese gardening knife: I bought mine years ago from Lee Valley. They have a different version available now.

☘️ ☘️ ☘️ AUTUMN 2019 UPDATE! ☘️ ☘️ ☘️

We adore our micro-clover lawn! No regrets! It grew beautifully during a very hot summer. We ended up mowing it about every three weeks. So many neighbours and passers-by complimented us on its appearance and a few said they were inspired by us to think about planting it too. It's the most beautiful green! Some white clover mixed in with the 'Pipolina' micro-clover naturally and it looked just fine. When it was just starting to grow, there were some weeds growing with it (left in the earth despite our best efforts to clean everything up) but, as the clover became thicker and more lush, the weeds were forced out. We didn't see any signs of white grubs throughout the summer which were a big problem for us in the past. We're currently approaching winter here so it's dormant now and covered with a blanket of snow. I'm looking forward to seeing it back in the spring!  ~ Kathleen 💚

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Beautiful Garlic

I've been growing garlic in my garden for about three years. This year was a particularly lovely harvest.

Years ago, when I started my little backyard vegetable garden, it never occurred to me that I could grow my own garlic. And then, a few years ago, I tried. As with many garden endeavours, experience teaches lessons. When I first planted garlic cloves, I didn't know that you harvested the garlic bulbs in late summer. I watched their stalks and leaves die and thought: "Well, that didn't work!" The next spring I was telling my best friend how I hadn't had success with garlic and she said that I was supposed to harvest the garlic bulbs in late summer just as the leaves started to wilt. I got off the phone with her and went out to my garden. In the raised bed where I'd planted the garlic the previous summer, there were tiny green shoots. The garlic was still there and it was alive! Had it listened to our phone conversation? I let it grow that whole second season and then harvested it in August.

Since then, I've followed my friend's advice and have planted my cloves in the fall and harvested the bulbs in late August or early September. I cut the curly garlic scapes in the early summer and make a wonderful pesto recipe I found online a few years ago. Then I wait for the leaves to partially wilt a few weeks later and dig up the bulbs. We love to cook with garlic in our household so it's a real treat to have our very own.

This year, I grew Marbled Purple Stripe garlic and it is beautiful! So beautiful that it inspired a new painting! I can report that garlic bulbs are very cooperative models. They sit very patiently and don't wilt and wither like so many of my other painting subjects. They give you the time you need to admire and paint them.

Here's a photo of my painting in progress.

And here's the finished painting.

Within minutes of posting a photo of the finished painting on Instagram last week, I received an email from a friend who has been purchasing my art for years. She had a touching request. She wanted to buy a few prints of the garlic painting for a family she knows. Garlic has a very special meaning for them. Their father, who passed away recently, used to tell his sons that a garlic bulb is like a family: while the cloves exist as individuals, they are grown together and belong to the whole. Isn't that lovely? I will always think of that now.

I'm happy to let you know that my garlic painting is available as both a print and note cards in my shop. Here's what they look like.

When I chose to paint the garlic, I was mostly thinking of how pretty it was. I thought that the painting might interest someone who loved cooking, gardening or eating! It didn't occur to me that garlic would be of symbolic value to someone. People frequently tell me of the special associations, often from childhood, that flowers hold for them. Now I know that exists for garlic too. 💕

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* 🌱 Gardener's note: I purchased my garlic bulbs by mail from Veseys Seeds in PEI.

* 🍲 Cook's note:  I mentioned a great garlic scape pesto recipe. Garlic scapes have a pungent flavour. I like to freeze this pesto flat in ziplock bags. Then I break off a chunk when I'm cooking a soup, sauce or stew during the winter. I also like to defrost a bit and spread it on pizza crust before adding the other toppings. Delicious!

“There are five elements: earth, air, fire, water and garlic.” 
Louis Diat - chef and culinary writer (1885-1958)

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Ice Paradise

Yesterday we had twenty-four hours of I guess what you'd call a winter mix. We had freezing rain overnight, followed by some regular rain, thunder, lightning and then a bit of snow. It was quite something! Because of the dangerous icy conditions, many schools were closed in the region including Chloé's college. The power flickered many times throughout the day yesterday but we didn't lose it. Others were not so lucky. But there was a silver lining to all of that weird weather. Today, we woke up to sunshine and a sparkly wonderland.

This morning I ventured outside in my boots with cleats on to take these photos in the backyard. I hope the photos give a sense of how very beautiful it was. It was as if every single branch, leaf and berry was clothed in diamonds. Look how gorgeous the clematis vine seed heads look encased in ice!

The photo below shows you how very, very sparkly it was! It looks like the garden is covered in fairy lights but it's the sunlight reflected in the ice on all the branches. Magical!

This is one of my Palibin lilac bushes. The ice on these branches looks like a bird in flight!

Meeko was able to walk on top of the ice surface. While it was slippery, he got adept pretty quickly at walking (sliding) around. He had a lot of fun exploring all corners of the yard. He's been limited lately because of how deep the snow was in places but with a covering of ice, he was able to go everywhere! My movements were a little less elegant. Because I weigh more than thirty-five pounds (!), I broke the ice and sunk in at every step!

With all of the sunshine, the ice is melting. Look at all of the ice that has fallen off of the branches of our chokecherry tree!

It's easy to get a little discouraged by winter weather in late January but today's icy spectacle showed that, while conditions can be sometimes be harsh, there is beauty to be found even in one's own backyard.

Garden Visitors

My garden is always full of surprises from year to year. Sometimes it's a plant that thrives particularly well. Other times it's the disappointment of a plant that fails. And occasionally it's a magical occurrence like the visits by dozens and dozens of painted lady butterflies the past several weeks.

We had an unusually mild September and early October in the Montreal region. Apparently those warm temperatures enticed painted lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui) on their migratory path to descend and stay a while. It was written about in a local newspaper.

When I would go out the back door into the garden, there would momentarily be a small cloud of butterflies in the air as they left the flowers they were on and then went to others. I wish I had been able to capture an image of their numbers!

I first noticed them on my sedum spectabile plants.

Then I found them on my echinacea.

They really liked my zinnias.

They really, REALLY liked my zinnias! If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen my video of a very happy painted lady butterfly flitting about on my zinnias.

And what do you do when blessed by such beautiful garden visitors? Why you paint one of course!

I found one on the ground (poor thing) and was able to bring it into my studio to use as my model.
Here is my watercolor painting in its early stages and, underneath, in its final form.

When you look at a painted lady butterfly, the markings look kind of random and splotchy. It was only through close observation that I realized how intricate some of the markings were. In my painting, I tried to honour the details while still keeping a painterly feeling.

I love how it turned out and now have both prints and note cards available in my shop. I really hope you like them!

If you haven't visited my shop in a while, I hope you will have a peek. I've been busy adding new prints and cards. 🦋

Mad for Magnolias

Many years ago, I worked in a corporate communications job during the day and painted in the evenings. I was living in an apartment in midtown Toronto and having a garden of my own was only a dream. Each spring, I would take an alternate route home from work for about a week or two. It was a winding road through a beautiful residential neighbourhood. Around a curve and at the top of a hill was the reason for my detour--a gorgeous magnolia tree in bloom. 

Years later, I finally have my own magnolia tree in my very own garden. It's a pink star magnolia called Magnolia stellata 'Rosea'. I planted it about ten years ago. It's very slow growing and has taken a long time to get established. It's still quite small, about my height, but the blooms are now plentiful and spectacular.

 Last week I decided that I needed to paint one of its flowers! I took a few photos of the blossom I was going to paint to be sure I had references as I knew it wouldn't last long.

Here's my painting on the second day when I was still building my washes. I paint slowly! The bloom I picked wilted after about 24 hours which is when I dissected it to have a closer look at the colour and markings on the petals.

I love holding garden specimens as I paint them. It allows me to observe their details closely. For example, I had never noticed the little speckles on the magnolia tree's bark until I was doing this painting. It took me three painting sessions over the same number of days to complete the painting. Below is the finished original watercolour painting!

After I completed my painting, I knew I had to create a print pretty quickly if I wanted to photograph it with actual magnolia flowers as the blooming period lasts for such a short time. Each morning when Meeko ran to the back door to do his morning check for squirrels, I would make sure the magnolia hadn't lost its blossoms. To each his own priorities! I am happy to say that I completed my print in time! Here are some photos of my star magnolia print which is now available in my art shop. It's printed on gorgeous paper that reproduces the delicate details of the image beautifully.

Here is my print in front of the magnolia tree that inspired it! You can have a look at more images of it here. Now I wonder what flower I should paint next?

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