Some gardeners will fight moss off their lawn and patios until their last breath; others will simply embrace it for sheer laziness or, I prefer to think, tasteful refinement. Slowly but surely, moss the enemy is creeping up on the better grounds of our appreciation.

Moss are archaic, non-vascular plants, put away in their own division called Bryophyta. There are about 12 000 species of them on the planet. As a lawn substitute in the shade, moss does marvels, consuming a fraction of the water, allowing some foot traffic, requiring no moving and leaving deer blah. In the woodland garden, they complement ferns and other delicate treasures, setting them off (if it doesn’t swamp them over) nicely all year round.

Moss nurseries are elusive; I remember working at Quaker Hill Native Plant Garden, trying to localize some, to no avail. When moss was needed, one was left hanging- yet with a few basic steps one doesn’t need to ‘hang’ too long before results are seen. Things have changed since then, it seems like. Moss Acres, located in NE Pennsylvania, will ship boxfuls of four types of moss anywhere in Canada and the United-States. It is the nursery that supplied the moss required for the courtyard of the New York Times Building, work of  Renzo Piano and fellow Vancouverite Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.

And speaking of New York, let’s the aforementioned newspaper have the last word, as a warning against a rare affliction I would happily call bryophytomania: “T.J. Turgeon is an executive at a private bank in Manhattan for wealthy people (…). He began growing moss four years ago (and soon) he was filling trash bags with the stuff. I’m having an absolute blast with it, Mr. Turgeon said. I’m great at a dinner party because I can talk about moss and no one’s ever heard it before. People think I’m out of my mind. Wherever I go, I take moss.” Moss at your own risk!

As stated online, his firm looks “for a deeper perception of the landscape by refining human sensibilities for the qualities of nature and its invisible dimensions.”

The lecture is free and open to the public. See you there!

With the usual Helleborus X hybridus first in row, hellebores have always been the object of many a breeding program. To this day, the most cherished plants are propagated with the seeds harvested after careful controlled pollination. Recent tissue culture advances, though, seems to ease this process. This might explain in part the masquerade of new introductions that the last few years have been the theater of. Of these, the results of the German breeding program of Joseph Heuger, dubbed the Hellebore Gold Collection, or HGC, are a must. For their vigor, dark, healthy foliage and floral showmanship, they have taken the market by storm and I, as a landscape designer, am delighted.

Lyle Courtice, owner of HarkAway Botanicals, most likely the best, micro speciality grower in the Greater Vancouver, was raving about one of them today, called ‘HGC Snow Frills’. “This is the one and only one I really want to grow: no black spot no rot, loads of double flowers, vigorous: one can’t ask for more”. Lush and perky ‘Snow Frills’ indeed is. It has multiple rows of the whitest white sepals facing up: this exhibitionist quality is remarkable in Winter-blooming hellebores and should always be sought after. Who wants to kneel down in this not-quite-ready-jell-O-like lawn to get a peek at flowers, however pretty they are?

It is, however, no literary critic that I am here introducing. I rather simply want to share another side of Mapplethorpe’s acclaimed photography, eons from the then shocking, homoerotic (say sadomasochistic if you prefer) work he’s mostly famous for. His portraits of flowers are simply beautiful, a remarkable achievement of sobriety, purity and elegance. One may hence extrapolate that the genius of some artists, however far they swing at times on either side of decency and beauty, resides in their ability to achieve an overall equilibrium in their body of work.

The HTBG is “a garden in a valley on the ocean”, squeezed in tight between slopes where visitors are, indeed, drawn downward over intimate, meandering paths, to the sound of breaking waves and to the lure of brighter, sparkling light. If this garden fails at cataloguing anything fully, even remotely, it can’t be beat for its genius loci and ambiance.

Of all things Canadian that have had a worldwide influence, I must now add academic Marshall McLuhan. Unknown to me until a recent late night dinner party, McLuhan coined the expression, among others, “the global village” upon foreseeing the shift from print culture to an electronic interdependence, no less than 50 years ago. That is, 30 years before the Internet was invented. And if one thing has shaped the last couple of decades, it is neither flying cars nor vining petunias, but the electronic medias.

In his 1962 book “The Gutenberg Galaxy”: A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a scalable kind.” Blame Canada, blame Canada…

Then a recent posting on the blog of the American Society of Landscape Architect, announcing the opening of an exhibition of Burle Marx’s paintings and drawings, brought his art to my attention again. I have always held Burle Marx’s landscape drawings as art per say, so graphic and inspired and unique they are. A true Renaissance Man with lyrical-modernist convictions, Burle Marx “… painted every day in the morning and in the afternoon he did his gardens.” I can think of very few people who have had such a strong, lasting influence on my stylistic preferences. Rooster Gallery, New York: “In the end, one might question wether it is the architectural grammar that is present on Burle Marx’s paintings or the pictorial language that is present in his landscape projects.”