Beautiful Gardens - Larry Hodgson, Quebec City

Story by Dorothy Dobbie, photos by Larry Hodgson

Deck showing container plants, with the cold frame to the left.

Container vegetable garden in early spring.

The house seen from street.

“Plants are alive, they are always changing, always different. I am fascinated by plants.”

That sums up why Larry Hodgson, gardener, author, broadcaster, and blogger has spent his entire life writing about things in the garden.

“It took a while to make some money at it,” he says, but now his blog alone brings in thousands of dollars a month; he had over 100,000 hits the Sunday before our interview. Strangely enough, his biggest successes come from writing in French, both online and in print. He has published 65 books, only about 20 of them in English. He deserves huge kudos for becoming so proficient in a language he learned as an adult, but now he says that he lives in and easily slips between the two worlds.

His other world is the world of plants, a world he was born into with a gardening father who was willing to let his son experiment, perhaps because, as one of four children, Larry was the one most interested, right from the time he was a baby.

“He allowed me to plant an arboretum in the backyard,” laughs Larry. “It wasn’t very good; the trees were too close together.” His gardening love was further nurtured in high school which, serendipitously, had a green house. It did not take Larry long to become the greenhouse manager. It was here that he discovered some of the other wonders of plants, including those that were then legally frowned upon, but that is another story, Larry chuckles.

Look inside cold frame in spring.

Fountain in front of house, by street.

The cold frame on the side of the house at end of winter.

A look inside the greenhouse.

As do most young people, he took some time off to do other, then seemingly cooler things. An Anglophone in Quebec, he went to university to study languages, but after a time stuck in an apartment there his longing for plants led to a balcony garden. It helped him decide that what he really wanted to do was write about gardening and plants. And so, he did.

Now, he is immersed in the plant and plant-writing world in a way few can take the time to enjoy. His home of 27 years, where he lives with his wife Marie (he heard her laugh, found it a delightful sound, and tracked her down), is filled with plants. “I have about a hundred house plants,” he says. “I am a collector of plants.”

Indoors, they are tucked away in both traditional and not so traditional places. He does have a sunroom that is really a greenhouse facing directly south where the old dining room used to be. It is a large room, 10 feet by 18 feet and is part of the home, housing a large assortment of tropical plants that get a holiday outdoors each summer. That space is bolstered by a living wall in the bathroom. “When the kids moved out, we expanded the bathroom, put in a double tub, and filled the wall with plants,” he says.

Larry’s office is downstairs. Here he has created a little winter paradise. He converted the basement windows into a cold frame, with an expanded bank of windows that can be opened from the inside in winter and the outside in spring. Here, he overwinters such interesting things as agapanthus and rosemary as well as bulbs and other plants that need a cold period. The temperature is maintained at -7 degrees Celsius. In springtime, he sets out well-started seedlings to harden off and he has rigged up a hydraulic window opening system from Lee Valley which vents the space automatically during the daytime.

But the most interesting plant space is Larry’s fireplace. Instead of burning wood, he grows things in the firebox. He has hidden two fluorescent bulbs behind the damper where they shine down with a benign white light like sunlight from the heavens. In the winter, when he writes, Larry can swivel his chair to get a dose of green cheer whenever he wants, and he says this is often. He has created a whimsical paradise complete with a fairy garden, a fake forest comprised of a piece of cork bark setupto look like a tree with leaves made of Ficus pumila, which grows all around the walls. He has only about a three-inch depth of growing mediumat the base of the firebox, but it is enough to support sundry ferns and other little plants and ground covers. At the base of this interesting garden is a stone that says, “Turn me over.” When you do, it says, “You just took orders from a rock! Are you stoned?”

Hacquetia epipactis.

Chionodoxa bulbs in the lawn.

The first spring bulbs at snowmelt are winter aconite, or Eranthis hyemalis.

Carpet of Corydalis solida. The naturalized flowers just keep on blooming all spring.

Outside, the garden starts at curbside.When they bought the house, which was built into the side of a hill, the front yard was so steep that the previous owners and their neighbours all tethered their mowers with a rope to mow the lawn. One look at that was enough for Larry, who built a retaining wall and got rid of the grass. The yard is very shady so what grows here must survive in minimal light and be tough. That is fine with Larry who likes native plants and delights in discovering mysterious specimens planted by who or what, who knows. He did catch one culprit, though, after finding myriad walnut

trees sprouting in the yard when there were no walnuts in sight. One day, he saw a squirrel busily caching his winter store in the loose soil that was ready for planting. The nearest walnut tree was three blocks away!

A feature of the front yard is a stone fountain that Larry had built to order. True to his quirky nature, he saw a similar structure and had to have one of his own. It is basically two boulders with a hole drilled through their centres. They sit stacked atop a basin filled with water and a pump so that the fountain appears to bubble from a hidden underground spring.

Self-sown Tulipa tarda.

Hardy azalea (Rhododendron mucronulatum ‘Cornel’).

Birds love this burbling spout. The boulders are now becoming moss covered and blend with the retaining wall where he has encouraged Cymbalaria muralis (ivy-leafed toadflax) to grow. Not normally hardy in Quebec, there is enough snow cover to keep it alive, says Larry. Considered invasive where it grows naturally, the plant propagates in an interesting way. The unfertilized flower stalk seeks out the sunlight, but after fertilization it recedes from the light seeking out dark crevices in the rock where it can germinate.

The backyard is the only place for a lawn, but that lawn is a carpet of colour all spring long as the naturalized miniature bulbs bloom one after another. Raised vegetable gardens flank the deck where more raised planters support the indoor plants in summer. Things grow where they like, so the wooded areas are crowded with bulbs. Some of the plants rare in Quebec such as the pretty little yellow Eranthis hyemalis, or winter aconite, that pop up even before the crocuses.

In another spot, more early yellow is offered by Waldsteinia geoides (barren strawberry), a well-behaved groundcover that blooms in May and June, then settles down into a patch of lovely lobed, clear green leaves.

The spring garden is also graced with a pink azalea, which has offered Larry a white sport (a mutated offspring), that in his younger years he might have had some fun with. Now he lets it alone to do its thing.

Pepper brought into the cold frame in the fall.

The garden in the fireplace.

A Green Wall that has been added to the bathroom.

Soon the crabapple will be in bloom, calling Larry from his basement lair where he happily writes about his multi-hued friends, while Marie luxuriates in the hot tub among the summering tropicals. Larry is still as busy as ever, writing, doing television and radio and judiciously choosing the odd commission for his skills.

If he thinks about it, and he is probably too busy to do so, he will leave a wonderful legacy, not just in the fruits of all his creative labours but in a son who is a very unusual man: he is a landscape architect who actually knows and cares about plants.

When you stop and think about it, what more could a man want?