How did Jenny Butchart turn an ugly, disused limestone quarry into the world’s most famous private garden? Over 100 years later Butchart Gardens still attracts almost a million visitors from around the globe, to enjoy a world created by an unrivalled green-thumb visionary.The stuff of legend is what makes a good story, and the stuff grows here as quickly as a well-tended flower bed. Legends cannot be proved or disproved, merely recounted and enjoyed. Mystery and sp...

Words of Love. Love can be a fleeting moment of deepest joy, or the journey of a lifetime. Here's a collection of love poems from all stages of the journey, some illustrated by the author's photography and artwork. The pieces range from finding and nurturing love, creating romance, through riding out the storms of a relationship, to acceptance of the relationship as being beyond control. Love hurts and heals, makes you laugh, makes you cry, might kill you, ...

Take three women and listen to the stories they tell here for the first time. Hear how unremarkable lives can become quite remarkable when they strip away the hair, the clothes, the makeup, the smile and reveal themselves for who they really are. Mixing their laughter with tears, each one struggles, each one wrestles with the past and fears the future. But which one of them has true hope?Linda has been trapped for twenty years in a dangerous, abusive marriage. Why has she stayed so...

All is Bright - The Funniest British Christmas Stories!Derek Bradley’s just like any other daft young lad growing up in the 1960s - unique. Through his brutally honest eyes and ears we recall what it's like to celebrate Christmas past in a small Yorkshire village.The advent calendar in the Bradley household is full of adventures - Derek's first crack at carol singing ends with his first kiss. Dad's lost wage packet means a lean festive season, until a tiny ...

Late one mid-December afternoon in 1950, an elderly woman looked out of the window of her home in Victoria, and softly whispered to her nurse: "I've never seen a more beautiful sunset."… a moment later, she died.The woman was Jennie Butchart, and during her eighty-two years on this earth she helped make a small corner of it so beautiful that almost a million people a year travel to see it. Taking over her husband's disused limestone quarry, she oversaw the design and development of...

Personals. It's the hardest thing you will ever have to write: a description of yourself that will sell your heart and soul, (and often, more importantly, your body) to the perfect partner.Personals follows the heartbreaking, heartwarming stories of seven people in search of friendship, affection, acceptance, and usually... sex.Sometimes, desperate to close that "sale" of our most precious commodity, we stoop to lying, cheating, and adopting the imaginary p...

The moment you have a child your world changes. What a gift!The pure joy of welcoming a new life into yours puts everything else in perspective. Parents struggle with infant feeding, teething, toilet training, first falls and injuries, the stress of school, bullying, and a myriad trials and disappointments we must witness, share, and cope with. Energy ebbs and flows.Teenage years are fraught with the agonies of puberty and peer pressure. We watch from the sidelines as our k...

An Amazing Journey! From Halifax to Victoria, clear across Canada, Dave Preston rode the rails, exploring what was once the most popular mode of transport in the country. Days and nights spent rollicking across the amazing and diverse geography of Canada were punctuated by stays at some of the country's oldest and most prestigious hotels; those built by the railway companies to entice the most affluent of travellers.From the Author: There are many ...

The classic Godot is revisited by two luckless pilgrims camped out in the disappearing wilderness. Equal shots of humour and pathos fuel this look at rampant consumerism and a society that threatens to bulldoze everything into the ocean, for the price of creature comforts. "At last, someone makes sense of Waiting for Godot!"- Times-Colonist review. With blind optimism, and stubborn ignorance, Gough and Dee wait by a tree for godonlyknows who to come ...

The year-end is a time to celebrate! It's a time to relax the reins of restraint and enjoy the fruits of our labour with good old-fashioned food and drink. A 21st century Christmas often makes us all so busy we don't think we have time to make our own festive treats, meals and drink… so we end up buying them from who knows where.If I can give you anything at Christmas, I'd like it to be the idea that Yorkshire's food and drink is special, and worthy of our effort. It used to be lik...

There are many ways to get from A to B -- or from one the east coast of Canada to the west. I've flown this expanse, driven most of it, ridden a motorcycle across much of it, and hiked for days along its lakesides and riverbanks. But it wasn't until I rode a train for 4,414 miles across every Canadian province that still has a track that I truly appreciated this country's size and diversity.Our nation's love of rail travel has been a torrid and well-documented affair, spanning more ...

Being in love can be the best of times, and the worst of times. I've tried here, to capture in words, some of both, but mostly the good times. This has been quite a departure for me as a writer, not that I've been a stranger to love, but because to date my work has covered almost everything but love poetry.And love has been written about so many times by so many people that I can't help feeling that it's all been said before. Perhaps it has; I just wanted to say it again.Th...