Gardening

Common lilacs make great water-saving flowers for your garden

5 Water-Saving Flowers

With summer’s intense heat and family vacation season on the way, chances are your garden is going to be neglected at one point or another. As a result, more gardeners are choosing to xeriscape, which means planting a water-efficient garden. It requires a little homework to select plants that are […]

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Comfort Food

Two summers ago, I was on a mission of sorts. I was learning how to authentically cook vegetables I had never heard of from around the world. But instead of travelling to East Asia for gai lan or the Caribbean for callaloo, I neighbourhood-hopped around Toronto to Chinatown and Little […]

Rambunctious Garden book review A\J AlternativesJournal.ca

Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World

What should conservation look like in the Anthropocene age? Under the premise that humans have transformed nearly the whole planet in some way, shape or form, Emma Marris challenges readers to reconsider their definitions of conservation, and proposes a paradigm shift in how humans define, perceive and understand nature to […]

Guerilla Gardening A Manualfesto book review A\J AlternativesJournal.ca

Guerilla Gardening: A Manualfesto + Interwoven Wild: A Ecologist Loose in the Garden

Of all the possible definitions of a garden, I like Don Gayton’s best: “A garden is a gift, a celebration and a revelation.” Gayton’s idea applies equally well to his own efforts, as an ecologist landscaping his suburban yard, as to the more political and activist agenda of guerrilla gardener […]