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Cultivated

Christin Geall is the author of Cultivated: The Elements of Floral Style (Princeton Architectural Pre
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Cultivated is an urban flower farm/design studio in Victoria, Canada, and a literary gardening column by Christin Geall.

27/10/2024

Taught from home today…over zoom…felt I hadn’t done such a thing since the pandemic. Fun (thanks Kitty for asking!). Grooved on the Grevillea. Grateful the garden provided all save a few spray mums. Back at the old library table but tripod and camera gear yet to arrive from the other place... so the old iPhone it is (husband pestering me to update from the 12, likely should though I hate the incessant replacement. Do you like the new camera?) Making do and making. Speaking of…there’s a new substack up today. Link in profile. Happy Sunday!

13/10/2024

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians. I’m on an island in Massachusetts, no city in sight, and you will not believe how hard it was to find a turkey 🦃 other than the wild ones roaming our land. (Which are actually not wild turkeys, but feral blends of wild & domesticated birds, with the toms growing up to 25lbs. Wild turkeys in the state were hunted out/squeezed by habitat loss, last one killed 1851. Then reintroduced, then mixed with escapees…so no one quite knows). I love the turkeys here (they eat ticks). I may be going a little feral myself because I asked around for a ‘wild’ bird in time for Canadian Thanksgiving as we’re in hunting season …but ended up with a frozen subpar bird which I brined and is in the oven. I chose this picture from years ago when I was in Scotland as it features asters which are plentiful here (in wild form) and I’m still learning about them. Grateful and thankful this year. Sending you warm wishes

21/09/2024

Aralia, an east coast native stealing the show today . The stems dusky, the buds a perfect minty green. When I do big public demonstrations like this I often don’t know what the vase or flowers will look like in advance. It’s like a cooking show where you need to whip something up in front of an audience in a short time. A bit nerve wracking, but once I hunt through the buckets and find a beauty to pivot around, things falls into place. Today that was aralia. 🤍after a lobster roll not much could go wrong, right? Well: rain!my outfit, because rain! But needed. Yearning for more urning again tomorrow.
And: Thanks for the dahlias. Don’t know the variety!

20/09/2024

Off to The Garden at Elm Bank. I’m speaking and designing this weekend at The New England Fall Flower Show, just outside Boston. I’ll be doing four presentations. Catch me on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning in the main tent. Book signings to follow.

12/08/2024

Revealed a few things on Gardenista yesterday: hardest gardening lesson I’ve learned, a public garden not to be missed, a design trend that needs to go and more. Link in my bio to read. Enjoy!

22/07/2024

After many years of speaking to garden clubs in the United States, I’m at last a member of one — and what a one it is! The founder of my club in 1924 decreed it be “a constructive civic force and not just an excuse for pink teas and purple feathers.” Said founder, a Mrs. Meikleham, sat on the curb in the early 1920s ‘for much of two days’ with a petition to save elms. Later, during the Depression, when the public learned that the old stone walls up-Island were “being sold and taken away to use for building bridges, Mrs. Meikleham and the Garden Club members bemoaned their removal and worked hard to prevent any further destruction.” When Jaws was filmed on the island, and an Amity sign was propped up, billboards had long been banned thanks to the Garden Club. (A club officer gave the film crew 24 hours.) When Henry Beetle Hough, at the 25th anniversary of the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club spoke he “noted that there were many cartoons spoofing garden club ladies. But he was resolute in acknowledging that this stereotype in no way fit the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club. Mr. Hough fully credited them for their dedication to shaping the Island as it had become, free of large signs, visible dumps, and thoughtless destruction of wild growth and trees.
As the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, I hope you can join me on Wednesday July 24th, at 2pm for a demonstration I’ll be giving at the Carnegie Library in Edgartown.
I’m very grateful to have been so warmly embraced.
PS I will be wearing feathers to the party August 1st 😉(not purple)
Thanks to The Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club for the support and for the reporting.

10/07/2024

Five days from deadline, thick summer heat. Here but not here. Love seeing your stories ☀️

01/07/2024

My girlfriend is visiting from South Africa and asked me this morning, “What’s Canada Day?”. I said something about it being a day to celebrate the country becoming a country adding “I think it came in in the 70s”. (Yikes! Not sure I would pass a citizenship test with that answer). Perhaps, herein lay my confusion: Canada Day was formerly ‘Dominion Day’ marking the occasion of Confederation on July 1, 1867, when the colonies of Canada became a united dominion within the British Empire. In 1982, (about when my memories of fireworks start) Canada shed the last vestiges of legal dependence on the UK parliament. ‘Dominion’ was too colonial, so Canada Day is a re-brand…and an opportunity to celebrate an incredible country. Happy 🇨🇦 Day!

28/06/2024

Had a garden party after internment and lit a fire indoors. Chilly here still. Black currants, raspberries and tayberries happy, apples on the way. Always a surprise how well the garden (well, just parts of it) manage without me. Nice to be home.

05/06/2024

A young man and his tutor sit at a table in a lush English garden. They exchange tense words. They’re being watched from the house. They move under the shade of a maple.
The tutor steps forward to touch a shrub. The student turns, saying, “Liam, no! You can’t touch the buds.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a rhododendron. Have you never been in a garden before?”
The tutor is black, Oxford educated, hired to get the the progeny of a failing white patriarch into university.
“Not everyone has gardens like this,” the tutor says.
The student explains, “It’s poisonous. There are toxins in the sap.”
They light ci******es standing on a little bridge, hidden under boughs.
“It’s basically a weed,” he adds. “Nothing can grow around it. The roots…they strangle everything they touch. It’s quite clever actually.”
He remembers his brother who committed su***de in the adjoining pond. “Felix was obsessed with them. The rhododendron, the rose tree.”
He adds, “It’s Ancient Greek.”
“They are beautiful,” the tutor says.
“That’s not why he was obsessed with them.”
….
A snippet transcribed from the film The Lesson starring .e.grant got me thinking on motif. And: Have we learned our lesson on invasive species? I wondered as I made this in Devon after seeing Rhododendron ponticum everywhere and chatting with about its invasion of her native Ireland. Using the plant at this point in its flowering didn’t risk spreading it, though now I wish I’d worn gloves. I like the second image because the mirror’s reflection surprised me when I was photographing something else in the room (see orangerie post)…the chipped frame, the tarnish evoking the dark history of horticulture, and how we can’t always see the threats ahead. (R. ponticum was sold through the UK nursery trade in the late 18th and early 19th). The scale of its spread staggers: Wales, Ireland, and Scotland can barely stem the purple tide.
PS Toxic honey from rhododendron recently featured in a Death in Venice. I love plant motifs in movies. Send more!

23/04/2024

‘I can’t ever accept this is as good as it gets.
But as I get older, I’m learning, slowly, to accept that this is just a part of who I am. I’m too seduced by ideas. My mind runs too quickly. There’s never enough time or space to do everything that I want to do. A whole lifetime is probably not enough. And while that thought used to scare me, now it comes with a greater sense of pragmatism.
It’s fine never to be totally satisfied. It’s okay to be self-critical. But those voices shouldn’t detract from the enjoyment of now. Things may evolve in the future—plants may come and go, and the cottage may look different—but right now these flowers, these objects, this cottage and its garden are a result of everything that’s made me up until this moment.’
~from ‘s new book Outside In. More in stories 🤍

21/04/2024

Happy Sunday from my Victoria garden

10/04/2024

Champagne sun and two flowers singing spring today—saxifrage and Erythronium.

08/03/2024

On March 8, 1946 feminists in Italy chose the Australian tree mimosa as a symbol of strength, sensibility, and sensitivity for Women's Day. Countless varieties of Acacia are cultivated today with A. dealbata common in the floral trade. (The Golden Wattle, A. pycnantha, is Australia's national flower.) Many are grown for their feathery leaves and branches of brilliant yellow blooms that resemble tiny pom poms. Others for perfume, fuel, resin, dye…⁠
Acacias are tough. As legumes, they fix their own nitrogen or find it with deep roots; this makes them drought tolerant and easy to grow but also invasive, particularly in biodiverse grasslands (carbon sinks) that acacias convert into stubby scrubby flammable forest. Spain and Portugal have banned mimosa and about 23 species are causing problems around the world. All those puffy flowers we love mean oodles of seeds. ⁠
Historically budded branches would be forced into bloom by steaming. Today the industry hot water dips the branches. Sadly, steaming, dipping, and transport has almost obliterated the scent of mimosa. I’ve not yet had the pleasure of sauntering down a tree lined path on the Côte d’Azur, but apparently the scent is a “rich, sweet, warm, green, honey-floral aroma with pronounced powdery and soft cinnamic-balsamic undertones…”. Mimosa produces what the French call ‘cassie’ a valuable ingredient of floral perfumes. Today, much its production has moved to north Africa.⁠
Two species are used: A. decurrens var. dealbata and A. farnesiana. (If the name looks familiar, good eye! Villa Farnese has a famous Italian Renaissance garden. A. farnesiana has been in cultivation for centuries—imported from the Caribbean). ⁠
If you’re harvesting mimosa yourself, recut the branches before plunging them in to warm water. Ideally the water should be acidified, but if that’s not possible, at the very least try to ensure the branches don’t experience a wide range of temperatures. And don’t feel poorly if you only get a few days of freshness from mimosa—the flowers quickly dry indoors.

18/02/2024

If you’re inclined towards visiting Italian gardens this autumn do get in touch with …it will be a grand trip co-hosted with the illustrious . Grateful the gram often delivers a very small and friendly world…a joy to meet Mimi.

13/02/2024

ROSES: I developed this collage to explore the idea of hegemony in floriculture. I started with this quote from Nungari Mwangi’s article “Propertied Proletarians? The Kenyan Cut-Flower Industry”, in which he notes: “Absurdly, Nigeria currently imports Kenyan flowers via a convoluted trade route from Holland or the UK—perpetuating the neocolonial hegemony of Europe as the hub of trade.” ⁠
Economics/globalization, but let's talk about cultural hegemony—because it's more subtle, and refers to the ways in which those in power use media, art, stories, or ideas to legitimize dominance. A floral example might be the use of antique porcelain to reinforce the idea of status.⁠ Given there is an unequal distribution of power and privilege in our globalized world, it is important to recognize where cultural hegemony remains unquestioned.⁠
Consider the floral foam company Oasis sponsoring a designer or floristry school. The practice sounds like a simple marketing strategy, but when the use of those products to create art is judged at an event or on television—well, to borrow from Marshall McLuhan, the media (in material terms) really does become the message.⁠ ⁠
Heavy topic, I know, (and not just because of the hippo...whose habitat has been drained to grow roses for export in Kenya), but the collage was super fun to create...a work in progress. Thanks to .myercough for her ⁠

10/02/2024

Join me in Dallas on February 13th! I’ll be speaking at The Dallas Woman’s Club at 10am and signing books at St. Michael’s in Highland Park 2-3:30pm in the afternoon which has supported charities in Dallas since 1958. Hope to see you there!⁠

03/02/2024

In April of '22 I visited Polly Nicholson (who holds the national collection of Tulipa (historic)—in the UK) and gawped over the beauties lined up for their professional portraits (but was sworn to secrecy at the time!). At last, her book The Tulip Garden: Growing and Collecting Species, Rare and Annual Varieties is out this spring! Sending my hearty congratulations. When you're mid-book as I am, it's incredibly cheering to see people reach their goal. Available for pre-order now from

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Many thanks to The GCA and Woodside-Atherton Garden Club for giving me the opportunity to speak and teach in California earlier this week. Adored Filoli!

Many thanks to The Garden Club of America and the ladies of Woodside-Atherton. Loved my visit to Fioli and Woodside 🌈

In moments of flagging doubt I about the book I’m working on, I read the reviews of Cultivated and feel buoyed. Thank you! Hundreds of people have written notes about what Cultivated has meant to them and I’m so grateful. You likely thought you were writing a review for someone to purchase the book and while that may be true, you’re also keeping a lonely author inspired. People read—ergo—The world is a wonderful place! Press on💕 #authorslife #cultivatedbook #gratefulgram