The Blogger's Garden

The valley is situated against a back-drop of tall cliffs and is landscaped with traditional lush Japanese gardens and koi ponds. Inside the Byodo-In Temple is a nine-foot Lotus Buddha. Outside is a three-ton, brass Peace Bell.

My fascination with this type of garden started when I came across the first Japanese Garden I ever saw. My father works in a language school and one of his colleagues is a Japanese professor.

For those of you who remember the older versions of Victory Garden you will remember how many of their segments were filmed on the grounds of Callaway Gardens. It has been fun seeing the locale, but also seeing the ethic that created such a large preserve and dedication to creating greeen space.

The next thing I did was take mental notes while walking around my neighborhood. You can find a lot of backyard landscape ideas when you take a nice, brisk walk. It may take some time to consider their layouts in relation to your own. I even started asking my neighbors questions about their projects. My neighbors loved sharing their backyard landscaping ideas with me.

This first day of travelling we made it to Cowra. I wanted to check out the Japanese gardens here as Ive heard about them and never seen them. We knew there was a National Park in the area and so spoke to the information people that pointed out the places to camp in the area.

When I first saw a bonsai tree, I thought it was governed by some sort of mysterious alchemy. I imagined old Chinese masters performing their art allowing no one know how they do what they do. It was not!

There are quite a few challenges for the [dog owner] that wants a landscape that is perfect for the pet but pleasing to humans too. Dogs tend to wear paths, especially along fence lines because they are territorial. They are known for lying down in your favorite flower bed and smashing all the plants. They often like to dig down to the cool soil, and their urine can create burn spots in grass.

Something a little more serious this morning….In more than 24 states across the country, bees are disappearing at an alarming rate. According to Ann Johansson of the New York Times and other journalists across the country, this is not only threatening the livelihood of beekeepers, but is also a threat to many of our important crops, such as the almond industry in CA. Not to mention our entire food supply!

Well, it has been a bumper weekend. Saturday morning saw us up with the blackbirds and off to the garden centre with Grandma, then a spring fair to hunt for books, Wildwood (more on that soon), then to see our friend David in an excellent production of Kiss Me Kate. Yesterday, pao had a horrible tummy ache when he woke up so we skipped church until that passed but then went on a bumper shopping trip for lots of garden things - we bought masses of plants and some bird feeders then spent quite a bit of time planting and afixing in the afternoon.

We did a take off of the homeshow water features in Calgary. We added copper sheeting on the sides, and put the waterfall on an angle rather than verticle. We wanted to cut out the Hard Rock logo and place it in the middle, but ran out of time.