Canada 150 special

Eremurus Romance: four-foot (1.25-m)-tall hybrid with pale salmon-pink flowers that fade to a rich cream colour.

Reach for the top with foxtail lilies

Stephen Westcott-Gratton

Tall perennials are beautiful and useful for dramatic accents, focal points and floral screens. Several species of foxtail lilies produce flowering spikes.

My Canada 150 summer reading list

Stephen Westcott-Gratton

Canadian classics: Manitoba's Frederick Philip Grove, British Columbia's Martin Allerdale Grainger, Ontario's Anna Brownell Jameson, Nova Scotia's Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Bunchberry (Cornus canadeinis) prefered by 80'% in online poll.

Bunchberries make national headlines

Stephen Westcott-Gratton

You may not recognize the name, but you may have seen bunchberries hiking through a Canadian forest in late spring (small, upward-facing white flowers).

Baptisia-'Twilite' bears dusty purple flowers with yellow keels (bases) paired with purple leaves of corkscrew hazel. (Photos by Stephen Westcott-Gratton)

Baptisias: Favourite almost-native perennials

Stephen Westcott-Gratton

In 1990, blue false indigo (Baptisia australis) was considered a rare plant, but by 2010 the Perennial Plant Association named it Perennial of the Year.

Campfire roses bearclusters of flowers with 20 petals that open yellow and develop pink edges that gradually spread and turn rose-red before they drop. (Photos by Stephen Westcott-Gratton)

Three tricoloured plants for Canada’s 150th party

Stephen Westcott-Gratton

Flowering plants that simultaneously bear blooms of three different colours – tricoloured plants – Campfire rose, ‘Genpei’ Japanese spirea, Carnaval weigela

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