They come and they go. 

The heart soars when they arrive, orange beauties floating into the garden. What was just another day has turned magical. It really is spring. We share the news.

There’s a pang of regret when they depart. Also a flash of hope, as a Monarch butterfly soars southwards into the sky. A tiny determined insect’s 4,600-kilometre migration unites the continent. We have yet to decode the mystery of how it knows where to go and how to get there. It’s fitting that there are feasts when it arrives in Mexico.

But our feckless ways have made the Monarch’s seasonal journeys so perilous, its sojourns in our northern breeding grounds so challenging, and its long rest in the southern wintering grounds so unpredictable.

So it’s about time we stepped up.
Read more

There’s a patch of gravel in heaven, and Keith Squires has arrived to make it bloom. The owner of the Country Squires Garden in Campbellville, a fourth-generation nurseryman who was in the business for 74 years, passed away on Thursday. He was 94.

I have such vivid memories of Keith Squires – his delight in the minute speck of green that signalled succcessful germination, his indignation when I had the temerity to drive over his watering hose, the ‘jingling’ of his empty pockets as he joked about the wealthy ‘greenhouse men,’ the hearty welcome for the swallows that returned to his barn to nest every year, his pleasure in a bunch of cuttings collected on a warm end-of-summer day….

Plants seemed to come to life in conversation with him. They have personality, preferences and aversions. We need to pay attention, they need to be understood. He loved them all. He was as excited about the Tree Peonies he’d just had shipped from Holland – developed, he reckoned, by some highly skilled plant specialist in China - as he was about the Viper’s Bugloss he’d grown from seed collected from a common European weed that's found along roadsides here, with a lovely blue flower, a “true blue,” he called it.
Read more

Well, the time is now. Not even the best experience lasts forever and so it is that I have decided to call an end to my role as a merchant of native plants. I’ll be closing for good at the end of October.

Return of the Native is for sale or available to be taken over by a suitable person or organization – the plants and their paraphanalia like pots, lights, flats, signage, as well as the name and the website, which along with word of mouth has been the source of my clientèle.

And my clientèle has been wonderful!

If you have made the effort to find me and trekked all the way to Elmvale, you’re already a kindred spirit, already converted to the cause of making the world a better place for living things. I’ve had so many good conversations, met such interesting people, and made firm friends along the way – all in the driveway of my home which from spring to fall has been crammed with pots of plants.
Read more