Output Stream of Consciousness

As far as Calgary garden centers go, I really like this quirky, small garden center out in Bowness.

It's shocking how much the employees like plants. No, love plants. I swear they'd take them all home if they could. They can identify most plants at ten paces, it seems. For all their lack of room, they make up for it by bringing in interesting plants.

When we were there, we found some Checkered Fritillary (I have seed from an exotic seed catalog, which I hadn't planted because they take so long to germinate... up to 12 months), Puschkinia (or "striped squill") with blue stripes down every petal, miniature curry plants that smell strongly of curry, and some very nice-looking potted roses that actually had smell to them (we've been inundated with some extremely nice-looking but practically smell-less roses in town), and some giant cyclamens with interesting patterns on them.

This isn't even the season to go to garden centers yet - as we found on our journey yesterday, we're a week or two too early. Calgary stays frosty until pretty late in the season :)

I remember being insanely jealous of some peoples' purchases at Edward's last year. Someone managed to snag a grown Evans cherry, although I did manage to grab a prairie-hardy grape vine and a Hippophae rhamnoides aka common sea buckthorn, which I'd been looking for for ages - the fruits on the female plant taste like small sour apricots.

They are moving shop after this growing season - apparently to a larger location (next to their greenhouses, if I remember correctly). The neighbourhood will miss them - you can see wonderful gardens radiating out in all directions from the store :)

I'll be looking for them in their new location :)