Hallson Gardens

Not our garden this year (yet). I think it was 2 winters ago....

Here's my effort -

George, While I'm sure you'll miss your present garden - and so will we all - the great thing about Japanese style gardening is that very satisfying ones can be made in the smallest of spaces. I know that your next one will also be a work of art. I look forward to seeing it. All the best, Herb

O.K., here's trying. If anybody would like more explanation, please say so. First thing to remember is that a limit on "size" measured in kilobytes is not a limit on the size - in the sense of the dimensions - of the picture. It's a limit on the size of the file that holds the picture. Consequently,...

Tigger - Thanks - that's a very interesting suggestion. We have a book called Trees and Shrubs for Pacific Northwest Gardens , and it lists four varieties of Stewartia as being probably suitable & a picture we found in another book of Stewartia ovata . Furthermore is says that propagation is usually...

Viktoria - Thanks for the suggestion. We have two Viburnums - one's a bodnantense and the other's some other sort. I just checked both, and they both have have opposite leaves. So it seems that the seedling must be something else.

Herb

We found this growing in our garden several months ago (in Victoria, B.C.) & put it in a pot because we liked the leaves. We've wondered whether it grew from a nut that a squirrel had buried, but it doesn't look like either a Hazel nut or a Walnut. Now we're getting more and more curious about it. D...

Thanks, Spider - I think you must be right. I Googled an image search for 'immature grasshopper' and found some that look very much like the one in my picture. I think I was mistaken to say it didn't have big back legs - now that I look more closely at my picture of it, I think it does have big back...

When I first saw it on the ground (in our garden in Victoria, British Columbia) I thought it was some sort of Grasshopper, but when disturbed it just flew away. To my surprise, it's wings looked rather like the shape of wings that a Butterfly or a Moth might have - with a distinct pattern to them th...

I'm new to gardening in containers, but have begun by (mostly) having plants in ordinary plastic plant pots sitting inside glazed pots. One thing I've learned is that in very hot, dry weather, even plants that could normally be left unwatered need to be watered generously and often! http://www.pbase...

George -

Priceless! What would we do without you and Sam?

Bert

Just to give a better idea maybe of the actual change from Tori gate to roofed gate, here's an attempt to show what it looked like when the tori gate was there and what the effect was after sawing the top off the tori and substituting the roof.

http://www.pbase.com/image/115508768

Sam -

Maybe I reached the right result via the wrong reasoning. Still, when I try imagining my garden as a "shrine", I can't help feeing that it takes the idea of "shrine" a bit far. I guess it's a matter of personal taste, eh?

Herb

Brian - I built a tori gate about 12 years ago a year or (and was very proud of it) until a year or two later I read somewhere that a tori gate usually indicates the presence nearby of a Shinto Temple so that in a private garden some Japanese would feel it was a bit out of place. So I cut the top of...

We live in Victoria, B.C., and have just noticed these strange-looking growths on some leaves and round a flower bud at the end of a branch on our Pink Simplicity Rose. They look, in a way, like very tiny witches' brooms. Are they caused by some insect parasite, or what? Should we cut the branch off...

Pictures really are, very often, worth a thousand words so here's another one. This isn't a woodblock, but a photograph. I don't know who took it, and I hope that the photographer won't take me to task for infringing his copyright, but what attracts me to it is that there isn't a single Japanese art...

I've just come across a couple of Japanese woodblock pictures that people may find useful as examples of Japanese garden layouts, so I've added them my album at PBase -

http://www.pbase.com/mtu_fulani/image/114396030

http://www.pbase.com/mtu_fulani/image/114396091

Our Hummingbirds are so tiny that their nests are no bigger than an egg cup - and so well camouflaged that they're nearly invisible. Here's a picture of one in one of our apple trees - magnified very considerably -

http://www.pbase.com/mtu_fulani/image/1 ... 8/original

Pandora - I went to the forum you suggested. One poster says that it's an earth rock & that it had other, less durable rock material embedded in it, & that the less durable material has eroded away & this resulted in the hollows & indentations. Another poster's opinion is that it's a meteorite, and ...

Eastwood - Congratulations! One of the most fascinating features - apart from being able to a line round just a part of a picture and then modify just that part - is the 'layers' function. I had nobody to show me how layers worked & it was a few years before I figured it out - and then realize how e...