Posts Tagged ‘Kari McNeill Walker’
A Magical Summer
Personal Photos: We always knew it would be A Magical Summer since the moment our granddaughter Audrey first planted those Scarlet Runners early this spring. It became real one morning when I captured this photo of a fairy standing in the corner of the garden beside an old wicker chair.
Link to Photos for this Post
Part 2: Link to Crackling Fire on Cold Winters Day
Part 3: The Magical Gardens of Adam Szczawinski
Fences and Gardens, Family and Friends
So much was happening this spring and summer it was hard to keep up, but suffice it to say there was a lot of magic. Woven between various trips to destinations inside and outside Canada, as well as visits by family and friends, there was a determination to redo the garden and fences as they were in tough shape after several years of neglect.
Last year Lynn and I worked at cleaning up the decks and redoing the garden furniture, but that only made the crumbling fences and 
overgrown gardens look even more sad and forlorn. Growing up in a family where my mother had the greenest thumb I know, we could no longer avoid thinking how she would feel if she happened by and saw all those steely, prickly weeds making such fun of the few domestic plants that survived the long summers of neglect.
Back in the late 1990’s mom and I had spent two magical summers planting everything we could get our hands on and it was now time to renew the gardening vows that were etched in my genes. In our family one daughter, Kari, and one son, Sean, have been gifted with that particular gene, so the linage will not be lost any time soon. The jobs, however, were not a one week fix.
Photo (Personal Files, c1990s). When mom was here for those two long visits, we spent day son end planting everything we could get our hands on. As neither of us had ever made moss hanging baskets we must have put together fifteen of various shapes and sizes. Many of the McNeill Life Stories, 1941-1965, a historical stories on the blog, came out of our daily conversations.
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