Dear gardeners and garden dreamers

Here is a collection of 10 of the best gardens we visited last year, one from every province. Feast your eyes and grow jealous of my amazing job.

From west to east, first my mother, Dorothy Dobbie, and I visited Garry and Brenda Hedberg in Surrey, BC. Garry has the most lush and manicured garden and grows nine different varieties of bamboo. My mother was thrilled by his knowledge of plants and took a video of him and his wife, which is featured on our website. In Edmonton, we stopped in to visit Leona and Colin Van Buskirk. They have a beautifully laid out garden full of colourful annuals. Mom thought she’d seen this garden before, and we weren’t surprised to find out that we’d done Leona’s sister’s garden a couple of years earlier. Two very talented ladies from the same family. Saskatchewan took us to Lorna Woods’s ranch near Moosomin. This gifted lady has collected gorgeous pieces for her landscape and her pool house, which she found, installed and decorated on her own. And she did it all for free or for a very low cost.

In Manitoba, Dorothy went to see Jonny Faykes’s garden, just outside of Winnipeg. It sounds like a wonder, with envelope-pushing bravery. A holly tree in Manitoba? This I hope to get to see in person one day.

My husband, David Johnson, made the drive with me to Margie and Donnie McAlear’s garden, near Griffith, Ontario, located roughly between Kingston, Ottawa and Renfrew. The charming couple made us a gourmet vegan lunch and showed us around the cultivated parts of their 100 acres.

I visited Denis Diotte’s garden in Gatineau, Quebec, on my own and was wowed by his incredible design, care and curation of trees, shrubs and foliage plants, with a few flowers for good measure. Denis and his partner Richard Sarault work tirelessly on this astonishing space and I was lucky to see it.

I picked up my adult daughter Claire on my drive east. Just outside Fredericton, with the help of reader Karen Robinson, we had the great fortune to see the garden of Maggie Connell. It’s a rural property complete with chickens and turkeys, where Maggie and husband Mike grow every sort of vegetable you could want for your family, and they do it in a heart-stopping landscape amid flowers and painted signs.

In Prince Edward Island, Claire and I visited Pat Uptegrove. She’s worked all over the world throughout her career but has chosen an old farmhouse in Montague to rebuild and, eventually, retire in. She takes on large-scale projects with finesse, intelligence and dogged determination.

Claire and I also visited our Editorial Board member and regular contributor Greg Auton near Halifax. I hope, when I graduate to a larger garden than Toronto can give me, that I can begin to approach the fecundity of this man’s garden.

The one province I didn’t visit this summer was Newfoundland. Another Editorial Board member and horticulturist at Memorial University’s Botanical Gardens, Todd Boland, tells the fascinating tale of his personal garden, full of shade species. I do hope to visit this garden in the future.

Add to this a feature on colour and our seed catalogue review, and you have a very cozy afternoon of reading. I hope you enjoy it!

Happy Dreaming

Shauna Dobbie

Editor

shauna@pegasuspublications.net