Beautiful gardens: Willy Klassen, Portage La Prairie, Manitoba

from Canada's Local Gardener Volume 1 Issue 2

Beautiful Gardens: April and Dery, Edmonton

story by dorothy dobbie, photos by dorothy dobbie and shauna dobbie

Under the shade of a very old silver maple tree and behind a traditional two-storey Portage la Prairie home lies the hidden garden of Willy Klassen. Originally from Charleswood, Willy moved to Portage to work for Simplot where he helps make french fries for McDonald’s.

From the street, the view is of a shady corner hugging a boardwalk behind a hedge. An Adirondack chair overlooks a garden filled with hostas and shade-happy daylilies, the scene decorated with carefully chosen rock under the canopy of another mature tree. There are various rustic artifacts begging for a closer look.

Nice, you think, admiring the effort

Looking through a tangle of flax and daisies.

The shady front yard.

Every part of the garden offers a different view.

The garden shed at the end of a manicured lawn.

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One corner of the garden.

Purple bellflower and fattening-up sedum.

The brilliant red keys of Tatarian maple.

A spot to sit at the front and admire the bird of paradise

and preparing for more of the same in the backyard, so you are not ready for what is suddenly revealed: a complete garden world with decks and boardwalks leading the eye from destination to destination. It’s intriguing and exciting. The layout begs for exploration: what’s behind that big blue spruce? Oh, there’s a pond! And a dry stream bed… and behind that, there’s an interesting garden shed.

Willy, tall and tan with a wealth of long blonde hair, is the garden’s creator. He has an eye for meticulous detail that belies the apparent random placing of objects and plants. Closer examination of the tidy beds and trimmed lawns points to a gardener who is very much in control of this environment. This is Willy’s world, created by him according to a plan held fully realized in his artistic inner eye.

The farmyard antiques and artifacts, and there are many of them, have been chosen deliberately. He is such a good customer of Junk for Joy, a local antiques dealer, that the owner looks for things especially for him. A weathered birdhouse atop an old post speaks of love and it is clear that the bird occupants agreed; the remnants of their home can be seen on the bird doorstep. Willy focusses his bird dwellings on attracting the busy little wrens that he admires so much. This year, he had two families, which pleased him greatly.

Willy loves wood, fallen logs that have begun their return to earth, and beautifully laid planks that form the walkways throughout the garden. In the springtime, he heads out to

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plant.Young trees grow among the rocks.

Someone gave up their travels at these signs.

Weathered logs and wood are scavenged from the Portage Diversion.

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A handful of perennial bachelor buttons.

Lilies bloom in bright colours.

A clump of lilies ready to bloom.

Some pale-yellow snapdragons around the corner from a blue spruce.

the Portage Diversion to find likely specimen wood, weathered and waterlogged to just the right stage of decay and transformation. His dad was a house builder, he says, so wood was part of his culture. Willy loves to build things, too: the boardwalks attest to that.

“Do you know the show, Decked Out?” he asks wistfully. “I wish I could be him.” The show is on HGTV and is hosted by Paul Lafrance, a contractor who owns Cutting Edge Construction and Design in Pickering, Ontario.

Dad was also a vegetable gardener and Willy learned to love gardening early in life.

It is not quite summer, but the plants he has chosen live side by side in harmony. Warm yellows, cheery oranges, set off by cooling mauve flowers that pop out here and there. White daisies with sunny centres show well against Lysimachia punctata, the one called ‘Alexander’, with its showy green and white variegated leaves. The violet spikes of Veronica spicata cluster around a patch of big shiny-leafed bergenia, their cool hues picked up by blue perennial bachelor buttons and the occasional flowers of tradescantia. Lovely lemony rudbeckia is just opening her petals.

Willy loves trees and young ones are dotted throughout the garden: small beauties such as Tatarian maple and mountain ash. In one secluded corner, a sour cherry is weighed down with fruit. Chubby blue spruce stands out among the greenery. He prizes an Ohio buckeye. Dwarf cedar decorates weathered stone in a dry gulch.

Around the garden, Willy has spotted surprise viewpoints that he devised in his inner view finder and he likes to take you to each particular angle to enjoy the scene. It is amazing how well-developed these views are in a six-year old garden. That’s not all he does. He has been gaining a reputation as a garden designer and has been working with a friend, Kim Emberley, for the past couple of years, constructing her landscape. It is a big job that apparently includes boulders and big logs—and a boardwalk!

He’s thankful for his wife Nicole: “The brains around here,” he says.

Why does he do this? The answer is quite simple. “I like to come home after a hard day’s work, sit back with a drink and dream about what to do next,” he says.

Every gardener will understand. i

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Some specimens in Willy’s world

Phlox.

Daisies.

Ligularia dentata.

Veronica.