Beautiful Gardens: Kim and Jim Sinclair, Winnipeg

Story and photos by Shauna Dobbie

The front of the house.

Overview of the vegetable garden with the cottage shed in the background.

Kim and Jim Sinclair.

Hidden away on a curious little side spur of a partly industrial road in the Transcona area of Winnipeg is a 90-year-old house surrounded by a garden brimming with petunias and character under the stewardship of Kim Sinclair. You’d want to stay awhile and explore, absorbing the homey, comfortable feeling of existing in a well-loved place, and no doubt you’d be welcome.

Kim and her husband Jim bought the house when they were young. Jim didn’t want it; he isn’t a handyman and saw only a world that needed fixing. Kim wasn’t a gardener then, but she loved the place from the start, with its tree-filled acre of a yard. It had been owned by a couple of generations of one family, and the care that family had taken showed. There were boards where there had been a vegetable garden, and the overgrown remains of a flower garden in the front.

In fact, Kim didn’t start gardening for a couple of years, until a neighbour came by with a wagonload of bearded iris and told her she should. Well, she did.

Since she got bitten by the gardening bug, she spends all her time at home outside from spring through fall, making changes every year. She adds things, and occasionally has to have a tree removed. Kim was off for four months last spring and summer owing to COVID-19; she’s a dental receptionist and hasn’t been shut down since. Her husband, who works for the federal government, was off for five months. During their time at home, they added privacy walls in spots where the trees didn’t block their neighbours’ sightlines into their yard. This spring, they’ll finally add a big deck off the side of the house.

When it comes to gardening, Kim doesn’t like to bother with seed starting; she buys all her annuals and vegetables as plugs from the nursery. She loves old-fashioned annuals, like snapdragons, marigolds and petunias. For perennials, she is fond of peonies, yarrow, veronica and the like. Most years she haunts garden centres in the spring, picking up a few of what she likes in one place and a few in another. Last year

Tomatoes between the head and foot of a bed.

An old, old elm spreads its arms over the house and yard.

Tomatoes between the head and foot of a bed.

didn’t afford that luxury. In Manitoba, the garden centres were declared an essential service, but you had to go through a store in a prescribed order, picking up what was left when you went by it; there was no going back to get something before heading to the cash register.

She is an ornamental gardener first and foremost. Although she keeps a vegetable garden, it’s for the look of it. It goes with her cement cow and her tin chickens. The only things that actually get eaten are the tomatoes, by Jim, and the lettuce, by visiting rabbits. And it’s lovely.

Her sense of humour comes through. A couple of garden beds are in actual beds: one with a headboard and footboard and another with the springs of a bedstead separating rows of onions. The pathways around the vegetable garden are topped with straw to keep things in order. She was warned about mice taking up residence in the straw, but she doesn’t mind; they’ve got to live somewhere, after all, and this garden is a good distance from the house.

Calibrachoa hide their pot.

A quick DIY sculpture of terra cotta pots strung on a spike with lobelia ready to spill down from them.

A mass of gaura.

Kim loves old-fashioned annuals like snapdragons.

Deep blue is the colour here, in the reflecting globe and the blue cardinal flower, punctuated by yellow and orange.

Astrantia.

Fill-blown peonies.

Nepata.

Yellow daylilies and red dianthus.

A beautiful planting of goutweed in the perennial bed.

She plants lettuce to feed the bunnies through the summer and provides peanuts for the squirrels, who she knows eat the birdseed. She’s seen deer in the garden on occasion too; they come over from a nearby golf course. She figures “they were here before me”, and she doesn’t get fussed about it.

There’s a cheery yellow garden shed backing these gardens, looking like a little cottage. In front of the shed she’s got a border mostly filled with goutweed, also known as bishop’s weed. Now, I’ve battled this stuff in my own garden and come to consider it a kind of cuss word, but I’d never seen it planted like this before. A great healthy swath of it in a contained area, blooming blissfully. It was, dare I say it, gorgeous.

That’s the kind of gardener Kim is. She follows her own sense of what is beautiful, and once you see it through her eyes, you may find it beautiful too.

Kim loves Halloween, as this flying witch weather vane attests.

Feverfew, fresh as a daisy.

Pink veronica behind orange Maltese cross.

About seven years ago, Jim had a stroke. He was pretty young for it, and he has recovered well, but during the time he was home he was bereft. Kim sent him out to the garden, where he was able to do as little, and increasingly as much as he could. Surrounded by beauty and nature and peace, he regained the use of his muscles. His doctor says gardening helped him through it.

One of his special projects was to put in the fire pit at the side of the yard. It provided a place for their teenagers to hang out with friends and watch movies. Jim wired the place for sound. The kids are older now, but they’re back at home and they still have friends over for movie nights.

The garden changes every year, depending on what annuals are available and what catches Kim’s interest at the garden centre. What doesn’t change, though, is the sense of heart that goes into the place. It truly is beautiful.

Ornaments from around the garden show Kim’s love of animals and her sense of whimsy. Here are just a few of these treasures you'll find around the yard.