Allan Gardens Conservatory

April 14, 2013November 11, 2014Leave a comment

This endless Winter is starting to feel like a cruel joke to most of us, and Alex and I (and Lindsay) spent Saturday afternoon faking Spring the only way we know how – Allan Gardens Conservatory. Wandering around coveting all the succulents, and being surrounded by green did a lot to improve our moods.

Lindsay and I spent most of the weekend together, baking snickerdoodles, cooking quinoa dishes, going to really intense Pilates classes, browsing the Junction Flea and hiking with our dogs. By Sunday evening it was hard for me to feel anything but perfectly content with the weekend.

Now it’s back to the old day job. Last week’s listings will be up late tonight. Sorry for all the tardiness.

Hope everyone had equally cheerful weekends !

Family Visits

April 1, 2013Leave a comment

Happy Easter everyone! I’m just winding down from a four day weekend with my parents and Sister, who all came to visit me in Toronto. As always, it was wonderful to see them, and have sleepovers with Allie, eat ridiculous amounts of delicious food, and walk the dogs around Toronto. I’m sad to see them leave, but at least I know it’s Spring now (sort of) so I can look forward to more regular visits back and forth between Toronto and Montreal (the highway between the two is miserable to drive in Winter).

I hope you all had lovely Easter weekends with your friends and family, too!

Posted by Meaghan

Ellis Wiley

March 4, 2013March 4, 2013Leave a comment

I stumbled across the above Ellis Wiley photo when I was reading this post about cycling in 1970’s Toronto on The Torontoist blog (I can’t wait for it to be warmer out, so I can start riding my bike around again!). A quick google search later, I was browsing a whole library of his photos on the Toronto History Flickr page. Despite how much I miss Montreal, I’ve grown to love this city – and Wiley’s photos somehow make me love it even more.

All sources say he was a Toronto born accountant, who took up photography as a hobby and wound up taking some great photos of some of this city’s most iconic buildings as they were being constructed. He used Kodachrome and Ektachrome film, the latter of which has a tendency to fade quickly. Luckily, the Toronto City Archives scanned and digitized his collection, so that I could make a silly little blogpost about him today!

Posted by Meaghan

Blooming Leopold

December 12, 2012November 11, 20148 Comments

We were lucky enough to be asked by Lauren – the beautiful little mastermind behind Blooming Leopold – to put together a guest post about our favourite Toronto based holiday traditions recently. Lauren is a long-time favourite blogger of ours here at Larkspur, and is also someone I very quickly established a personal friendship with over an iced coffee date a few Summers back when I was travelling through the US. If you haven’t already (which I’m sure you have) check out her Etsy shop, where she sells a mix of perfectly picked vintage and amazing one of a kind hand made designs. And, if you’d like to see more pictures and read a little bit about Alex and I’s favourite Toronto spots, you can click here to see the guest post!

Posted by Meaghan

The Scadding Cabin

December 3, 2012November 11, 20144 Comments

Last Saturday, Alex and I went for a walk, determined to take some blog photos despite the cold. We walked over to The Scadding Cabin which is just down by Lake Ontario, at the bottom of our street, and the light was so perfect, we decided it would be fun to take film photos instead of digital ones. Neither of us know a thing about photography, so we just kind of let the scenery and the sunset do all the work, and we are pretty happy with how they turned out…. It made us both want to learn a thing or two about film cameras, though, so that we can take even nicer ones in the future. These are our favorites from the roll of film we finished.

The Scadding Cabin, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have a very exciting, or scandalous history (except, maybe for the fact that John Scadding was killed by a falling tree), but it is the oldest building in Toronto!

The cabin was build in 1794, by John Scadding, who managed Colonel John Graves Simcoe’s estate back in England. John Scadding followed his employer to Canada in 1792 and built himself a tiny little one bedroom log cabin which burnt down, so he built himself another one, which is this one here. The cabin was moved from the east bank of the Don River, where it was originally built, to the Exhibition grounds, by the York Pioneers and Historical Society as a historical exhibit for the first Industrial Exhibition.

Apparently they open the cabin up for visits every year at the Canadian National Exhibition, which Alex and I actually went to this Summer, but we must have been too distracted by tilt-a-whirls and broken down fun houses to notice. Maybe next year we’ll take a peek inside.