The sun is already well up in the sky, the bright light rippling off the water. An angler’s boat chugs quietly across the inlet. It’s still early for the constant drone of summer traffic. A soft breeze gently stirs the air.

I’m visiting an island on Stoney Lake (or is it Stony Lake?), relaxing in the dappled shade of mature white pine, red oak and red maple, tall trees many decades old, quite close together and because of that, with no branches for 20 feet or more - the view is perfectly framed.

The cottage is nestled among outcrops of ancient rock, the great grey and pink forms crowned with moss and splashed with lichens. I examine a small plant community, a foot across, nestled in a slight depression at the base of an oak – Wintergreen Gaultheria procumbens, Canada Mayflower Maianthemum canadense, Lowbush Blueberry Vaccinium augustifolium and tiny seedlings of Eastern Hemlock Tsuga canadensis and Red Maple Acer rubrum.
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Tracks in the Snow - Poems and Essays from Life and the Land by Patrick Lima with illustrations by John Scanlan The Ginger Press (2023) 8.5x11'', unspecified pp, black and white, soft cover, $20 - special $5 discount price here at ROTN!)

A new book from Patrick Lima! You’d have to be a gardener of a certain age to understand the excitement the news conjures up. Lima was one of a wave of writers who surfaced in the late ’80s and ’90s to tell Canadians there’s more to gardening than impatiens and petunias. He and his partner John Scanlan created Larkwhistle, a wonderful garden on the Bruce Peninsula that became a destination, a truly Canadian interpretation of humanity’s love of plants.

This however isn’t about gardening. Rather, it's a collection of poems and essays that have grown from gardening. I’m not a poetry fan. Never mind, delve in. It's a slender volume, but with pages large enough to display Scanlan’s interesting black and white illustrations and also contain even the longer poems on one page.
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When it comes to native plants, I like them all! From the Wild Ginger (Asarum canadense), for which you have to get down on your hands and knees in order to appreciate its lovely three-petalled maroon flower – to the lofty Flat-topped Aster (Doellingeria umbellata) with its clusters of white-petalled flowers set off by yellow centre disks, making for a creamy effect.

But I do have favourites. And I also have reservations.

The number one example of qualified affection comes with the spiderwort. The species I have is Tradescantia ohiensis; like others in the genus, the flower has three petals and opens early in the day, closing by around noon. Ohio Spiderwort is a wonderful deep blue with six bright yellow anthers (those are the pollen-bearing parts of the stamens) and strappy blue-green leaves. When visited by a brightly coloured bee (I believe the Agapostemon virescens is the one in the photo below), the effect is deeply satisfying.
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