Happy Canada Day! We are so blessed to live in this beautiful country; take a moment today for a prayer of thanksgiving that we can call Canada home.
The Yorkton and District Horticultural Society is now taking the summer off because this is when we all work in our gardens! We usually would get together in August at our Annual Fruit, Flower and Vegetable Show, but this has been cancelled for 2020. Still, we are trying to stay in touch with you all by getting together right here each week, and also on our website, www.yorktonhort.ca Visit us and be part of something new! Keep reading!
Do you have an unusual plant? Take a photo and submit it to our website for our new feature “Mystery Plants”. Be sure to include the name of the plant, if known, and tell us a little about it. We’ll post the photo and ask viewers to guess what it is. Then after a couple weeks, we’ll reveal the name. Or, if you have a plant and don’t know what it is, maybe someone can identify it. We’ll all learn together! Please send in photos to yorktonhort@yahoo.com
Gardeners are a hardy lot, indomitable and looking forward, no matter what! The Canada Blooms Festival in Toronto is a showcase of garden ideas and design, and while it was cancelled for this year, many completed show gardens were done, judged, and can be viewed online at https://canadablooms.com Log on and enjoy seeing some amazing gardens, as well as breathtaking floral design.
And if you visit www.canada.ca, you will find an abundance of ideas to celebrate Canada Day, including making a small time capsule; this idea captivated me, thinking it would be fun for us gardeners, if we made a list of what we planted in this very unusual and historic year, put the list in a waterproof container, and buried it in some quiet corner of our gardens!
Thinking about flowers and Canada, I wanted to review the provincial and territorial flowers of our beautiful country. Do you remember them all? Let’s make a cup of tea, and go over them together before we head back outside to our gardens.
Okay, here we go. Let’s start on the West coast. British Columbia: Pacific Dogwood, chosen as the provincial flower in 1956. Alberta: prickly wild rose, chosen in 1930. Saskatchewan: the Western red lily, chosen in 1941. Manitoba: the prairie crocus, chosen in 1906. Ontario: the white trillium, chosen in 1937. Quebec: the Harlequin blue flag (iris) chosen in 1999. New Brunswick: the marsh blue violet, chosen in 1936. Newfoundland and Labrador: the pitcher plant, chosen in 1954. Prince Edward Island: the pink lady slipper, chosen in 1965. Nova Scotia: the trailing arbutus, chosen in 1901. Northwest Territories: mountain avens, chosen in 1957.
Nunavut: purple saxifrage, chosen in 2000. And the Yukon: fireweed, chosen in 1957.
Each plant a unique part of Canada’s horticultural landscape.
Luckily for us, our gardens don’t know anything about COVID-19. They’re out there, doing their thing, and happy to have our company whenever we visit. When the news becomes too heavy, what better task for body and soul than to connect with nature.
Breathing in the fresh air, bending and stretching to weed or water our gardens or containers, making an effort to take note of the new glories that our gardens offer to us each day either by sight or fragrance, this is truly healing, uplifting and exhilarating!
We thank our friends at Yorkton This Week for all their wonderful work. Let’s pray for health for all, a gentle rain, a careful return to “normal”, and today, a prayer of thankfulness for our beautiful Canada. God keep our land, safe and healthy. Happy Canada Day!
