Beautiful Gardens: Phyllis Snow and Krystle Snow, Winnipeg.

The bed at the entrance to the front yard.

A vibrant mix of colours and textures.

Aphrodite in the front garden.

Phyllis Snow and Krystle Snow are a mother

and her grown daughter. They live together in the same house, a big old heritage house on Cunnington Avenue in Winnipeg, along with Jack, Krystle’s father, and Lennard Taylor, her husband. The four bought the house together four years ago when Phyllis and Jack moved to Winnipeg from Brandon. It all sounds like it could be claustrophobic, but Phyllis and Krystle are close and their husbands good natured, so it works.

Phyllis is a plantsman by birth, though it took some time for this feature to develop. Her mother owned a greenhouse in Ochre River, Manitoba, and gave Phyllis and her five siblings chores in it. Phyllis didn’t care for the work growing up, but now that her daughter has made it a hobby, she’s come to love it too. She can be found for six or eight hours a day in the yard in the summer, when she’s not at her job as a nurse at Headingley

Correctional Centre. (She retired before she and Jack left Brandon, but some people just can’t stay retired.)

Krystle is an actress, mostly doing stunts for films, and a server at Earl’s, along with various other jobs. She manages to carve out a good deal of time for gardening too.

They’ve been to Victoria and visited Butchart Gardens, an old quarry made over into 55 acres of garden, several times. “That was our biggest inspiration when we moved into this house and finally had a big yard and all this beautiful soil,” Krystle says. “Then someone was walking by our house one day and pointing out how much they like walking by and said, ‘it’s like Butchart Gardens’!” Krystle and Phyllis were tickled.

This garden gets a lot of love. It is watered almost exclusively with rainwater, except in very dry years. The ladies have a kind of a system, with a wagon and water-

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A couple of ladies watch the impatiens grow and spread.

Closeup on parts of the planting at the

ing cans. They fill up the cans with water at the rain barrel, then go about the garden, sprinkling the pots and plants. “It’s not work when you love it,” Phyllis says. “It’s so much easier if there’s two of you doing something.”

The two start many of their plants from seed. They dream of having a greenhouse, but for now, the plants get started in a living room upstairs in their home. They have grow lights and seed about 75 tomato plants as well as peppers and other annuals in late winter. They also start gladiolus and dahlia bulbs. They use these plants and more from the nursery to fill the yard with colour.

Mask of a jolly man.

A beautiful mix of pink petunias and lavender scaveola.

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front entrance.

Although their home is urban, they get lots of visitors from nature. In fact, Phyllis saw deer the other day. She loves seeing them and welcomes the animals, though they don’t always agree with her on what makes for good eating. Last spring, Phyllis and Krystle tried to grow hollyhocks to attract hummingbirds, but the hares ate the hollyhocks. “We try to give them alternate food sources, so they don’t love our garden so much. But I think, they were here first and they can’t help it if the houses have been built,” Phyllis says. They’ll try hollyhocks again this spring and maybe sprinkle some grated Irish Spring soap around them to ward off bunnies.

Monkshood.

Sweet alyssum, impatients and dianthus mix it up.

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Peonies lazing about.

A spray of mock orange.A pink zonal geranium rises above the scattered petals of a mock orange.

Spring is the favourite time of year for both. “Every day you get up in the morning and go outside to see if a new flower is out or to see how your garden is spreading,” Krystle says. They keep very busy, planting then weeding and pulling elm seedlings out of the grass. “We live in Elm Park, so every tree is an elm,” she admits, noting that they use a shop vac on the garden to get the seeds as soon as they fall. (See sidebar.)

“In mid August, when everything is good and there’s no more weeds to pull, it’s a little bit like, ‘what do we do now?’” Krystle says. She and Phyllis thrive on their labours. But not to worry; in late summer they’ll get a call from a friend at one of the nurseries on St. Mary’s Road to tell them everything is on sale. “We try not to think about what our budget is in the summer!” Phyllis says.

At harvest time, they make salsa, pickles, tomato sauce and applesauce. These go into the pantry to feed the family’s souls through the winter. When they moved in, Krystle and Lennard were going to build a kitchen upstairs for themselves, but now the two women cook together and the family eat together. It is an idyllic way to live. i

Shop vac in the garden?

Absolutely!

A shop vac is perfect for sucking up all those bits and pieces from the lawn, including tree seeds and petals. If you’re from Manitoba, maybe you already knew this.

On the Manitoba Gardeners Facebook group, this is a well-known fact. On the rest of the Internet? Not so much. So, for the rest of Canada, here’s the secret.

A shop vac isn’t particular and it will suck up anything that isn’t firmly set in your lawn and garden, but a bit of dirt in the vac’s container won’t hurt it. As for any small critters that get sucked away with the dead plant matter… well, you make your choices. On one hand, a few spiders might die for your pursuit of a perfect lawn. On the other hand, they may survive the sucking and go on to live somewhere else.

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Baskets of colour

Baskets of annuals spread colour everywhere in the garden. mix in some tropicals like the palm fronds for an exotic look.

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