Canadian Wild Flowers

Canadian Gardening, eh?

Canadian gardens are in many ways a new idea. Our history is a short one spanning 400 years or so and those who arrived before us certainly did not garden in today’s sense of the word. For those early settlers and the indigenous people already on the land, gardening meant agriculture. It meant survival. Today a Canadian garden is no longer an oxymoron. Canadians have now lived in this beautiful country long enough to have thrown off the cultural ties that bound their gardening style to parts of Europe and instead have integrated these ways into something inherently Canadian.  The indigenous peoples of North America are known for their great medicinal success with the local flora. Lobelia, Gillenia, Sassafras are…

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Catharine Parr Traill – (1802 –1899)

Catharine Parr Traill is important to Canadian history as is her sister Susanna Moodie for authoring a number of books, some which offer the reader a view of early Canadian history. She is not like most women in garden history who tend to be royalty or wealthy with funds at their disposal for grand gardens or greenhouse collections. She is not a plant hunter or a botanist who identifies species and then sends the moverseas to be catalogued and named by men. How then does she fit into a garden history? Catharine is unique and she belongs in garden history because she has seen a world few of us ever will. She immigrated to Canada in 1832 a time when…

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