Beautiful Gardens: Maggie and Julian Sale, Guelph, Ontario

A wide view of the front yard, with the old crab apple in the middle of it all, like an old man who knows this garden.

Beautiful

Gardens

Maggie and Julian sale

G uelph, ontar io

stor y and photos by shauna dobbie

Most garden stories could start out: “The garden was a blank slate when the couple moved in twenty years ago.” This isn’t one of those stories. When Maggie and Julian Sale bought their house in Guelph 10 years ago, the seller asked: “Do you like to garden?”

Maggie said she’d like to do more of it. More is what she got with this beautiful property. She’d done some gardening in the past. At the house in Toronto, where they raised their three kids, she maintained the garden. They lived in Montreal for a period, where she kept a rose garden looking good. In their last house, a townhouse they bought in Toronto, she developed a garden for the first time on the postage stamp lot. ‘Coming here to this bigger garden—and having an interest

A narrow walkway to the front yard. A combination of hostas and ferns. The spotted plant is pulmonaria.

A pretty planter next to the arbour. A birdbath among the hostas.

An engaging scene with twisting driftwood, a little hedgehog and big red poppy flower stake.

in gardening but never having the time or opportunity to do a lot— changed when we came here, which has been nice.”

The gardens were already laid out and hardscaped, so she had a good base to work from. Over the years, they’ve moved and changed some plants and taken out and added some trees. A huge locust tree in the back was felled by a storm, giving Maggie a sunny spot in one corner. The gorgeous old crab apple in the front is coming to the end of its life too, which will be difficult for all the shade plants. There is some kind of fungal disease in the soil and some years the tree doesn’t bloom. Maggie has decided not to worry about it until she has to.

Both Maggie and Julian are keen photographers, and Maggie says photography has informed her sense of gardening. “I’ve enjoyed developing the garden with my background of texture, form, composition, how to arrange plants; all that sort of has a photography feeling to it, I think, it helps me to get the garden the way it is.” The way she composes a bed with hostas, ferns, pulmonaria and other leafy plants speaks to her expertise. When one of the plants is in bloom, the focus is on the colour, but for the rest of the season, texture takes centre stage.

The front yard is overseen by the old crab apple tree. There is no lawn in front; instead there are arrays of

Metal stork sniffing the peony foliage.

f lowers and plants from the curb to the house. Low-growing wooly thyme fronts gayfeather and tradescantia and a wide swath of echinacea. Further back, toward the house, Maggie grows miscanthus with a steady hand so that it doesn’t escape its bounds. On the other side of the driveway there is an arbour that leads you to a path between an ivy-covered wall and an ivy-covered fence.

At the end of this pathway is the back yard, a park-like setting of wide f lower borders surrounded by trees. Hostas are varied and plentiful here, and Maggie combines them with ferns, sedums, geraniums, bleeding hearts, sweet woodbine and more to a deeply textured effect. Offsetting it all is a generous planting of hakonechloa grass, lighting up the garden with yellow. Maggie also has a few pots of annuals around for colour. “I don’t plant annuals in the garden much,” she says. “There’s not much room. I like the splashes of colour around the garden when some of the perennials are over.”

She loves late May to early June because that’s when everything is blooming. “It looks fresh still,” she says. But our visit in August showed a garden peaceful in its maturity and thriving. i

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Ar t in the garden

Spotted throughout Maggie and Julian’s garden are a handful of works of art. The earliest came from their cottage in England; it’s the face of a woman carved from stone by a Shona artisan in Zimbabwe.

Maggie and Julian were disheartened to find that a guest at the cottage had scratched her face; they brought the sculpture back to Canada, hoping to find someone to fix it. That’s how they found ZimArt in Peterborough, which happens to specialize in sculpture of Shona and other artisans in Zimbabwe. They got the face fixed and purchased another piece besides, a swirly sort of work.

They also have a wind-activated piece that had belonged to friends they know who moved into a condo. And there is a trellis-like piece near the back door, created by their son. These and other pieces complete their garden.