Beautiful Gardens: Victoria Beatti, Calgary

A garden with a view.

Victoria Beattie.

Story by Dorothy Dobbie, photos by Dorothy Dobbie and Shauna Dobbie

Hiding up there lies a garden in the sky.

Victoria Beattie is one of those women who reach for the sky, no matter what their occupation. Maybe that’s why she has developed a little beauty of a garden near the top of one of Calgary’s downtown high-rise condo complexes . . . and why she is able to do it so effectively. It may also be the reason she has been so successful in her business. This petite woman owns an industrial construction company.

Square in shape and facing southwest, her courtyard garden has three protective walls instead of the usual one of most terrace gardens. This should help with the wind but at five o’clock every afternoon, a little whirlwind is generated as the heat of the pavement rises to meet the colder upper air and causes a mini maelstrom. “It’s all over in an hour and a half,” Victoria laughs, “but from 5:00 to 6:30, the wind is so strong, it can pick up a table umbrella and turn it into a weapon of destruction.” By dinner time at seven o’clock, it’s all over. The wind is gone and it becomes very quiet.

This is just one of the fascinating things about gardening in the Calgary sky. “I used to live in Edmonton,” Victoria explains, “and it is a completely different zone.” She has had to learn to live with sudden snowstorms followed by sudden thaws, or spring temperatures diving

Multi-tiered planters for purple petunias and calibrachoa.

Bicoloured verbena.

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A bird feeder full of seeds.

Room for bird visitors.

to -30 degrees Celsius and killing all the nascent buds on her beautiful Japanese lilac as happened this spring.

Facing south-east, the garden gets the morning sun all the way until two in the afternoon, a perfect exposure. As the day heats up, the sun disappears around the corner leaving the patio perfect for evening enjoyment. And there is a lot to enjoy. And every year it is brand new—literally!

Every October, Victoria lines up all her perennials, the hosta, the astilbe, the Lady’s mantles and perennial bachelor buttons . . . whatever caught her fancy last May. She gets out a five-gallon pail of water, pulls up the perennials and then carefully rinses the soil from their roots. She lays the plants flat, bare root, in her “perennials suitcase” ready for an immediate flight to Vancouver, where she takes them to her daughter’s acreage and plants them. “They are all very healthy and happy at the end of this ride,” notes Victoria, who bids them an unregretful good bye, her mind already on the newcomers that she will have assembled by her favourite greenhouses next May.

But the trees stay. She keeps them happy and under control. They are pruned to size; especially the pretty dogwoods that do so well up here and whose seven-foot, red stems please her eye all winter. “They look so pretty with the snow on them,” she says.

She is not the only one who loves the trees in the garden. This past summer, she had two nests full of baby birds which she got to watch as they fledged and learned to fly. Sadly, a magpie got one of them.

That five-gallon bucket of rinsing water is returned to the trees, full of the undigested but collected nutrients around the perennials’ roots. Then the trees get some loving care once it’s time for freeze-up. Victoria wraps them tenderly in packing blankets, made snug with bungie rope.

This past season, Victoria added to her weeping caragana collection so now she has three to supplement the dogwoods, the two six-foot trembling aspens and the three Norwegian spruce.

She even had a ‘Blue Moon’ wisteria that rewarded her stingily with two blossoms over its sojourn in the garden.

But this year, they have all been

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Pots of grasses and evergreens along the railing.

Hostas in different colours provide a backdrop for other plants in this high-level wonderland.

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'Night Sky' petunias shine brightly.

Another mass of plants. Do you see the strawberries at the bottom?

banished, at least temporarily, to a new home as the “house” is being renovated, and that includes the balcony.

Next year’s garden will be a thing of even greater splendour based on Victoria’s experience after three years of building this world of wonder. She now knows what grows best. “The herbs were unbelievable this year,” she says. “It was so hot.” You name it in the kitchen spice closet and it seems Victoria has it: chives, basil, thyme, parsley, and oregano . . . no need to worry about mint taking over this garden.

How does this all happen without flooding the folks below? Victoria has an irrigation system hooked up so that he plants all get a nourishing drink for 10 minutes every night. Plus, when it gets hot and dry, she has one of those wonderful shrinking hoses that she can use to spritz her hostas and other big-leafed plants. There is no need for drainage this way and the plants are very vigorous, getting just the right amount of

Young evergreen potted up by the window.

water every day. You should see her fat and satisfied tomatoes.

Nor is anything wasted; she empathises with the heavy lifting her husband, a “very sweet man”, had to do to fill all those containers in the beginning. The pots are filled with equal parts of topsoil and composted manure. Cow’s manure is best, she says. She uses the soil from her denuded perennials to form the basis of her next year’s potting mixes for the new plants that arrive on that glorious weekend in May when she indulges in an orgy of planning and planting.

When winter comes, it is not over. The patio opens off her bedroom. The trees are out there, the scarlet dogwood limbs shining red against the brick and the snow. She keeps the birds fed and happy with the luxury of a heated birdbath. This provides her with a morning pageant that gladdens the spirit.

“It’s quite enchanting to lie in bed and watch them through the patio doors,” she says. C

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A view of some skyscrapers just beyond this table for two.A herb garden and tomatoes.

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