The Yorkton and District Horticultural Society will be holding their annual general meeting tonight, Wednesday, November 28, at St. Gerard's Parish Complex in Yorkton. This is a members only meeting, and will include a delicious supper, our meeting, a silent auction, and a presentation on Mexico by our intrepid gardener Ed Sek. It will be a great evening; members, we hope to see you there!
More snow! The garden blanket is thick and soft, so our plants should be safely asleep by now, waiting for spring. In less than a month, we will have the shortest day of the year, and then we can console ourselves that spring is getting closer!
But for now, get out your glamorous, wide-brimmed straw hat and your movie-star sunglasses, and let's travel together to another stop from our recent holiday, Monte Carlo, Monaco. Monte Carlo is a very compact city in a very tiny space: all of Monaco is only 1.95 square kilometres! The city has no space to expand outwards, so it goes up! There are many tall buildings perched on its steep landscape, and it seems that to go anywhere, one must climb uphill. The affluent city boasts the Grand Prix, beautiful shops, luxurious yachts, and glamorous cars. While waiting to cross the street, we saw Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Alfa Romeos, Bentleys, Jaguars, and Monte Carlo's version of a "zip around town" car, Mercedes Benz.
But another claim to fame is the temperate climate that is just perfect for so many interesting plants. On our way up to see the Grimaldi palace, let's stroll by Le Jardin Exotique, the Exotic Garden of Monaco. It is hard to believe that in this small space, there are over 1000 varieties of plants! The garden opened in 1933, and is home to a great variety of succulents: plants that are able to retain moisture in their leaves, and many cacti. Because of the ideal weather, some of these plants have grown to amazing proportions. As we walked along, I thought to myself that many of the plants looked like illustrations in Dr. Seuss books! There were grand, sweeping leaves of succulents that looked as if they could scoop us up at any moment! There was so much to see: flamboyant bougainvillea, dracaenas the size of trees, palms ranging in size from low-growing to towering above the other trees; giant prickly cactus; jade trees that had the elegant shape of bonsai, but were like small trees; very unusual, gnarled looking cacti that grew in slender, upright columns; and a beautiful flowering shrub with white or purple flowers that resembled the flower clusters on a hoya plant.
There seems to be a very conscious effort to make any little patch of public space pretty to look at, and medians and boulevards are either planted up, or have lush planters to decorate them. Once again, I thought of our spaces back home: our generous back yards, the wide prairie sky, and realized that many of the Monegasques (natives of Monaco) could not even imagine the luxury of the space that we have around us! An interesting little factoid: we were told that the average base price to buy a condo or apartment in Monaco is at least $20,000 Euros per square metre. That would be the minimum. I looked at the luxurious high-rises that hugged the cliffs around the harbor, and I couldn't even imagine what they must cost! And for all that money, they don't even have a small portion of the outdoor space we enjoy.
