A Garden Timestamp
[ Canadian Late Summer Edition ]
Late summer in Niagara-on-the-Lake arrives hot, humid, and full of beautiful drama. The kind of weather where your hair gives up completely, but the gardens? They are thriving. My parents’ backyard was overflowing—Annabelle hydrangeas puffed up like clouds, echinacea buzzing with bees, pink phlox candy-coloured against the green, and Japanese anemones swaying gently. We came back to Canada for a family wedding and cut straight from the garden to make a bridal bouquet that became intensely rooted in time and place.
The town itself feels like it’s on permanent vacation. Niagara-on-the-Lake is famous as a retiree’s paradise, and it shows: quiet streets, porches with rocking chairs, a pace of life that makes you realise maybe we are all walking too fast.
We wandered over to the Pillar and Post, a local vintage hotel with gardens so vibrant they felt like something out of an Impressionist painting. The green bridge crossing the little pond pulled me back to Monet’s Giverny. Maybe it was the heat, maybe just the magic of late summer, but for a moment it felt like we’d stepped into another country altogether.
At the Niagara Botanical Gardens, I found myself surrounded in colour. Towering pink and white lotus flowers stood tall in the ponds, monarch butterflies swooped around us (probably escapees from the conservatory), and bright yellow dahlias that looked Photoshopped. Hibiscus blooms the size of dinner plates, Annabelle hydrangeas piled high like summer snowbanks—it was such a feast for the eyes, in the best way.
We spent a quiet morning at the Neo-b Lavender Farm, picking our own flowers for the first time—cosmos, zinnias, scabiosa, sunflowers, and bunny tails. We even managed to find and cut a six headed white cosmo! No way could you find that at your local flower market. Strangely enough, for all my years with flowers, I’d never cut my own before. Fruit-picking, yes (our summer guide has a great recommendation outside of London), but never flowers. It was a reminder of how removed we can be from the growing side of things. We left with buckets of flowers, choosing our stems, then heading home to arrange our freshly cut bouquets together. A simple, seasonal joy.
A few months earlier, I was strolling through these same places in the dead of winter. Same streets, same gardens—completely different. The hydrangeas were dried and papery, the alliums reduced to their skeletons, bare dramatic branches peeking under heaps of snow. What had been overflowing and humid was now stark and sculptural. A reminder that gardens don’t disappear; they simply enter another chapter.
That’s what stuck with me most: gardens as timekeepers. They tell you exactly where you are in the season, where you are in the world, and sometimes in life too. For me, late summer in Niagara-on-the-Lake was all about color, humidity, and a complete deep, relaxing “sigh”—and a little moment on a green bridge that made me feel like I’d time-traveled to France. For the time being, you can find me chasing the next garden, the next season, the next timestamp.