Canada's Local Gardener Vol 4 Iss 2

How to access bonus editorial features

Born in Montreal, Perry Mastrovito is a multi-award-winning professional photographer and author based in Laval, Quebec. Inspired since his youth by the natural and built environments, Perry pursued his passion for photography by studying graphic arts, printing and commercial photography before starting his career in 1978.

Perry specializes in photographing Quebec’s private gardens, old homes, log cabins and landscapes. His home and garden features are regularly published in home decor and garden magazines including in the Homefront section of the Montreal Gazette. He also enjoys exploring other subjects and creates in his studio and in various locations around the world (40 countries to date), conceptual and editorial stock images for several Canadian, US and European based stock photo agencies.

Perry is also the author of seven coffee-table books: Images du Québec, Old Homes of Quebec, Quebec’s Cities and Regions, Private Gardens of Quebec, Log Homes of Quebec, Old Homes of Quebec Volume 2 and his latest book – Private Gardens of Quebec volume 2 (160 pages, $39.95), which features close to 40 various thematic gardens. The book, published by Broquet, is available in bookstores and online. Visit www.perrymastrovito.com for more info. d

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Contributors

d orothy d obbie, shauna d obbie, Leanne d owd, david Johnson, Perry Mastrovito, anthony di n ardo.

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Greg auton, John Barrett, Todd Boland, darryl Cheng, Ben Cullen, Mario d oiron, Michel Gauthier, Larry Hodgson, Jan Pedersen, stephanie rose, Michael rosen, aldona s atterthwaite, and Trudy Watt.

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Canada’s LoC aL Gardener is published four times annually by Pegasus Publications Inc. It is regularly available to purchase at newsstands and retail locations throughout Canada or by subscription. Visa, MasterCard and american xpress accepted. Publisher buys all editorial rights and reserves the right to republish any material purchased. reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Ottawa-Carlton Master Gardeners’ Meet the Monarch event wins competition

What did you do for Year of the Garden in 2022?

Did you Live the Garden Life?

The Master Gardeners of Ontario got into the act by sponsoring a competition among its member groups to hold an event on sustainable gardening, including the colour red, designated the colour of Year of the Garden. The OttawaCarlton group took first prize with an event targeting all ages called Meet the Monarch. Julianne Labreche, one of the Master Gardener organizers of the event, told Canada’s Local Gardener all about it. You can hear more from Julianne in a future Flora and Fauna podcast.

Meet the Monarch was held over a weekend in June and tied in with Indigenous celebrations for the upcoming holiday. It was at Kitchissippi United Church, where the Master Gardeners maintain a native garden. Kitchissippi United Church is located in central Ottawa near the shores of the Ottawa River, on traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin people.

Algonquian drummers welcomed people at the entrance to the garden, offering aboriginal blessings and sharing Algonquin stories of Creation, including a story about the butterfly: The Great Spirit gathered up shining stones from the mountains and scattered them as flying creatures. This was an evocative way to draw children into the celebration and familiarized all attendees with the legend.

Further into the garden there were various stations for sustainable gardening information from Master Gardeners, like water conservation, no-dig gardening, native plant use and other environmentally friendly methods. There were hand-made posters from the Master Gardeners, such as one about leaving the leaves in the fall rather than raking them into bags, and there were professional

posters from the Canadian Wildlife Federation on butterflies and bees. And there were many Master Gardeners available to answer questions on anything to do with gardening.

Kids could watch a planting demonstration and plant their own seeds in an area called Big Plants for Little Hands. Some children dressed in colourful pieces of fabric and made a bug parade to celebrate the wonderful

Photo

Monarch butterfly in the garden.

Visitors were greeted by Algonquin drummers.

Photo by n ora Patriquion.

Monarch caterpillars eating milkweed leaves.

A sale of native plants was very popular.

Photo by Julianne l abreche.

Photo by Isabella d isley.

world of bugs. And in the afternoon, children and parents or grandparents could sit together and listen to stories about insects (including butterflies) read by Master Gardeners. There was also a play about a monarch caterpillar put on by a group called the Monarch Teacher Network of Ottawa.

There was a native plant sale, with offerings like bloodroot, wild ginger, anise hyssop, cardinal flower

and wild columbine. And of course, what would any community event be without a bake sale? But this one was special, featuring cookies cut and cupcakes iced to look like bugs and flowers.

The event was a great success. Bringing in the colour red, some visitors were able to take home vases of red flowers that were decorating the space for the day. Red snapdragons

(not native but not invasive) were a real hit.

Julianne summed it up nicely: “There are so many different ways to enjoy the garden life. Time flies quickly while we nurture our plants, grow healthy food, weed out invasive species, feed birds and watch beautiful butterflies. In this way, I suppose, sustainable gardening sustains us too.”

Sign for a children’s activity.

A floral display by Master Gardener Claire McCaughey.

Photo by Julianne l abreche.

Photo by Julianne l abreche.

Potential to Grow

New gardening show in Winnipeg connects audiences with experts

Living Green, a consumer trade show and sale, is the latest and newest event hosted by the Red River Exhibition Association. The organization is most known for putting on Winnipeg’s annual 10-day fair, the Red River Exhibition – or The Ex.

Today’s fairs started as agricultural exhibitions with livestock and horticultural displays and competitions that served to advance agricultural innovation. As an agricultural society, the Red River Exhibition Association continues to look for ways to deliver on that mandate while carrying out its core business of putting on events.

“As we evolve over time as an agricultural organization, we start looking at what is of interest to an urban audience,” explains Garth Rogerson, Red River Exhibition Association CEO.

The idea of a dedicated gardening show in Winnipeg took root after the explosion of interest in gardening brought on by pandemic lockdowns. A 2021 survey by Dalhousie University and Angus Reid shows that gardening has never been more popular in Canada. People of all ages got into gardening over the last two years, and 85% of Canada’s new gardeners live in cities.

Connecting the urban audience of Winnipeg with gardening experts seemed like a natural fit for the Red River Exhibition Association.

The show’s format offers guests the chance to connect with and buy directly from exhibitors like T & T Seeds, the Manitoba-based company known for its seed catalogue.

“We’re well known across Canada, so we’re excited to have the opportunity to get our name out locally and be more connected with the community here,” said T & T Seeds marketing manager, Stephanie Guerra.

Living Green’s speaker series and rotating workshops will provide opportunities to learn from experts –a key feature of the event from Rogerson’s perspective.

“My mom used to throw seeds in the garden and had the most amazing tomatoes ever. I grow them and I have black spots,” says Rogerson. “It makes me mad that I don’t know

how to grow a decent tomato. Where do you go to learn these things other than searching all day on the internet? I want to talk to an expert and ask my questions.”

Guerra says being able to answer those questions – from both new and seasoned gardeners – is essential.

“The number one question we get asked is ‘what should I grow’,” explains Guerra. “It can be difficult for new gardeners to get information about what’s best to grow here in Manitoba. When someone asks what the best tomato is to grow on the Prairies, we take that extra step to help guide those new gardeners.”

With the addition of a seed swap,

Living Green will also foster growth and connection in the gardening community.

“You can feel the passion,” Rogerson says of those in Winnipeg’s garden and plant community. “If you take that passion and present it to the public, there’s some interest and excitement.”

Living Green is for anyone with an interest in gardening and living a greener lifestyle.

“We want people to leave with something of real value,” Rogerson explains. “Whether that’s learning what tree will grow best in our soil conditions or having a better understanding of where your food comes from and how to grow a big garden or even how to grow a tomato plant on your balcony.” d

Living Green runs April 7 to 9, 2023 at Red River Exhibition Place in Winnipeg. For more information, visit redriverex.com.

Living Green will help you get more out of your garden!

Shoebox full of dreams

story and photos by leanne dowd

What do you do on a chilly winter morning, looking out the kitchen window at the snow drifting by, hot coffee in hand? If you are a gardener and it is November, you are hungrily digesting listings of seeds and plants available by companies that have already updated their information for the upcoming growing season of 2023 online. You are pacing at the mailbox waiting for the new catalogues to appear. Remember the childhood years of waiting for that gigantic Sears Christmas catalogue to arrive, a combination of toys galore and impromptu foot stool? There are no visions of sugar plums in your head now. There are visions of green sprouts emerging in the spring, what new plant acquisitions you want the most and will inevitably find room for in garden beds filled to capacity. Enough plants? I know not of what you speak. You are contemplating what seeds you are going to buy. Maybe you have filled some online carts with desirable seeds and/or plants, the virtual version of window shopping. If you are like some of us (ahem, no comment) you have already purchased your tomato seeds and have them safely tucked away in the freezer. In spring they will be seeded into flats and grown in the greenhouse until conditions are favourable enough to plant them out. Even the reminiscence of it puts you back in that toasty warm, humid greenhouse, gingerly transplanting seedlings; lingering for hours there in favour of house-

hold chores. Nothing beats taking your morning coffee in the sunlit greenhouse of spring.

It would be a travesty of justice if those favourite varieties sold out because you weren’t quick enough out of the gate. Ok, that’s perhaps a little dramatic but you would have to wait a whole year to have the opportunity to get your coveted seeds again. Will you start some of your own annual flower seeds to save a few quid at the greenhouses in the spring? That’s an oxymoron. We all know that money saved goes to buying more at the garden centres because, after all, you were thrifty. The bolder among us might attempt to start perennials, trees or other species requiring more patience and long-term commitment before they can be turned out of their pots. Are you one of those gardeners that saves seeds in the fall by the handful, organizing them in containers, envelopes or bags with the intention of starting them all the next spring in flats or by scattering them directly onto the moist, black earth of spring, a scent that is heady to a gardener’s nostrils? Who among us has been digging to the bottom of the freezer for the last roasting hen only to surface with a grocery bag containing seeds saved in 2017? Many a shoebox has gone to better use as a seed organizer.

The plans for expansion of garden beds and building of trellises, the addition of decorative elements, the dreams of a greenhouse, or bigger greenhouse, begin now. A

Looking out the kitchen window at the winter garden.

greenhouse, like the size of one’s heart, can never be big enough. Reflections churn on the past growing season, with the trowels, hoses and wheelbarrows stored for the winter. The dahlia tubers and gladiola corms are in cold storage. Over the next cold months, what sustains a diehard prairie gardener is the promise of what next year’s garden will bring. Pictures of sky-high sunflowers, a tomato that gained bragging rights, an area of lawn that was repurposed for use by a potting shed or perennial bed will be gone over again and again until the weather

begins to warm in the spring and we can once again turn our minds to beginning the planting for the new year. The more industrious will be planting seeds of perennials and other slow-to-grow plants as early as January. A good deal of thought goes into planting times for various seeds. Each must be started at the opportune time so you don’t end up with tomato plants sprawling on tables by living room windows, abandoning hopes of seeing the vegetable bed outside.

A pilgrimage begins in May. Gardeners who are in it to

Waiting for seed catalogues.

Dreaming of what to put in pots. Other than snow.

Photo by m amageek.

Seeds in the

win it are antsy to be the first at the greenhouses because, as we all know, the new introductions and most popular items sell out quickly and lead to a bitterness that lasts the season. How dare the others get there first?! Didn’t they know how much you wanted that ‘Butter Pecan’ Echinacea, or that new blue iris that you can’t remember the name of but will know when you see it? What if someone ahead of you snatches the last of the ‘Blueberries and Cream’ petunias that you had your heart set on for the pot beside the back door. Now you will have to repaint the door! We who have fallen hard for the love of gardening will spend what seems to those that don’t share the fervor an exorbitant amount of money on plants. But how do you put a price on that level of contentment or the wonder you feel when you see a hummingbird hover over a bloom? Surely those who don’t “get it” must concede

that in the realm of hobbies it rests as one of the least egregious? It harms no one, benefits the mental and physical health of the gardener, provides food and beauty for those that surround the gardener and, when done ethically, can give back favourably to the earth.

While we sit sipping our coffee, we can conjure all kinds of garden improvements, additions, extractions, amendments and adjustments. It is one of the greatest joys of the winter months. We are gifted time to rejuvenate our bodies and catch up on recordkeeping and other garden related activities that can be done indoors. We are gifted hours to reflect on the successes and trials of the past season and feel anticipation build towards the coming growing season. It begins now and by the time the snow begins to melt next spring we will be ready to plant those seeds and hit the greenhouses in hoards once more. d

Scabiosa ‘Paper Moon’ is sure to sell out early at the nurseries. Astilbe ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ will be on everyone’s buy list this spring.

greenhouse. Blue door under wisps of clematis vines.

Canadian seed catalogues

It’s time to order seeds for 2023!

We believe that this list is up to date as we go to press. We aim to include every English-speaking seed order business in Canada. If we have missed any, or if any are no longer in business, please let us know. Email shauna@pegasuspublications.net

Alberta

A’Bunadh Seeds

Cherhill

abunadhseeds.com

Tomatoes, vegetables, some flowers

Bright Bush Farm

Wembley

brightbushfarm.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Casey’s Heirloom Tomatoes

Airdrie

caseysheirloomtomatoes.ca

Tomatoes, peppers

Wild Rose Heritage Seed

Lethbridge

wildroseheritageseed.com

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

British Columbia

BC’s Wild Heritage Plants

Sardis

bcwildheritage.com

BC native plants

Brother Nature

Victoria brothernature.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Eagleridge Seeds

Salt Spring Island

eagleridgeseeds.com

Rare and endangered heirlooms

Eternal Seed

Powell River

eternalseed.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Ferncliff Gardens

Mission ferncliffgardens.com

Dahlias

Full Circle Seeds

Sooke fullcircleseeds.com

Retail open Saturday morning and Tuesday afternoon. Vegetables, flowers

Manhattan Farms

Vernon manhattanfarms.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Metchosin Farm Seeds

Metchosin

metchosinfarm.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Ravensong

Comox Valley

ravensongherbals.com

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Salt Spring Seeds

Salt Spring Island

saltspringseeds.com

Since 1986, they have been encouraging gardeners to grow their own food, medicine, seeds and beauty! They grow all their seeds organically, with over 500 varieties to choose from and specialize in beans, grains and medicinal herbs.

Vegetables, flowers, grains

Sunshine Farm

Kelowna sunshinefarm.net

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Tatiana’s Tomatobase

Columbia Valley

tatianastomatobase.com

Tomatoes, vegetables

West Coast Seeds

Delta westcoastseeds.com

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Manitoba

Heritage Harvest Seed

Fisher Branch

heritageharvestseed.com

Rare and endangered vegetable, flower, herb, grain

Lindenberg Seeds

Brandon lindenbergseeds.ca

This is one company that still does things the old fashioned way. You can order their print catalogue of new and unusual varieties along with old favourites on their website. This Manitoba company started in 1935 with the philosophy that supplying quality seed at a fair price was the best value. They purchase their seeds from reliable growers and test and retest them to keep quality high.

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Sage Garden Greenhouses

Winnipeg sagegarden.ca

Retail open year-round.

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

T&T Seeds

Headingley ttseeds.com

Retail open year-round. Vegetables, herbs, flowers

New Brunswick

Atlantic Pepper Seeds

Harvey pepperseeds.ca

Peppers

Mapple Farm

Weldon mapplefarm.com

Tomatoes, vegetables

Rainbow Seeds

Roachville

rainbowseeds.ca

Vegetables, some flowers

Newfoundland

Perfectly Perennial St. John’s perfectlyperennial.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

The Seed Company by EW Gaze

St. John’s theseedcompany.ca

Retail open year-round. Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Nova Scotia

Annapolis Seeds

Nictaux annapolisseeds.com

Vegetables, herbs, flowers, grains

Cochrane Family Farm Upper Stewiacke cochranefamilyfarm.com

Halifax Seed Company Halifax halifaxseed.ca

Two retail locations open yearround.

Vegetables, herbs, flowers, grass

Hope Seeds and Perennials

Annapolis Royale hopeseed.com

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Howard Dill Enterprises Windsor howarddill.com

Pumpkins, gourds, squash

Incredible Seed Company Bridgewater

incredibleseeds.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers, trees

La Finquita

Wallace Bay

lafinquita.ca

Wild herbs, edibles

Ontario

Agro Haitai

Lynden

agrohaitai.com

Asian vegetables

Berton Seeds Company Ltd

Toronto

bertonseeds.ca

Italian vegetables, herbs, flowers

Florabunda Seeds

Keene

florabundaseeds.com

Since 1999 Florabunda Seeds has specialized in Non GMO, Non Hybrid, Untreated, Interesting & Unusual, Heirloom

Flower, Vegetables & Herb seeds. Free catalogue upon request.

Vegetables, flowers, grasses

Greta’s Organic Gardens

Ottawa seeds-organic.com

Vegetables, some flowers

Hawthorn Farm Organic Seeds

Mount Forest

hawthornfarm.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Heritage Seed and Produce

Kingston

heritageseedandproduce.com

Vegetables

Kitchen Table Seed House

Wolfe Island

kitchentableseedhouse.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Matchbox Garden Seed Company

Caledonia

matchboxgarden.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Norton Naturals

Eastern Ontario nortonnaturals.com

Native and perennial vegetables

OSC Kitchener oscseeds.com

Vegetables, herbs, flowers, turf, trees

Piebird Farm Sanctuary

Nipissing store.piebird.org

Vegetables

Richters Herbs

Goodwood richters.com

Retail open year-round. Herbs

Seeds of Imbolc Fergus seedsofimbolc.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Stems Flower Farm Cookstown stemsflowerfarm.ca

Farm open late May to Thanksgiving.

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Stokes Seeds

Thorold stokeseeds.com/ca/ Retail open year-round.

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Terra Edibles

Foxboro terraedibles.ca

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes! Separated by colour on the website. ‘Banana Legs’, ‘Osu Blue’ and ‘Emerald Green’, to name but a few; photos and descriptions help in your online shopping experience. Located in Foxboro, Ontario, Terra Edibles has been serving customers since 1993. They also offer many choices of other vegetables

(especially beans), and herbs and flowers.

Tomatoes, vegetables, herbs, flowers

Urban Harvest

Warkworth

uharvest.ca

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Urban Tomato

Peterborough

urbantomato.ca

Tomatoes, peppers, other vegetables and flowers

William Dam Seeds

Dundas

damseeds.com

Vegetables, herbs, flowers, turf

Zappa Seeds

Waterloo and Brampton

zappaseeds.com

Vegetables

Prince Edward Island

Veseys Seeds

York

veseys.com

For 80 years this company has operated out of a farm on PEI. They have a wide selection of a wide variety of seeds plus bulbs, starter plants and gardening products. Plus they have a guarantee that says, if you aren’t satisfied, they’ll replace the product they sent you.

Retail open year-round.

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Quebec

La ferme cooperative TourneSol

Les Cedres

fermetournesol.qc.ca

Vegetables, herbs, floers, grains

Mount Royal Seeds

Montreal

mountroyalseeds.com

Trees, woodland plants

Solana Seeds

Repentigny

solanaseeds.netfirms.com

Tomatoes, vegetables, flowers

WH Perron

Laval

whperron.com/en

Vegetables, herbs, flowers

Saskatchewan

Early’s Farm and Garden Centre

Saskatoon earlysgarden.com

Early’s has been serving Saskatchewan growers with quality products and expert advice for over 115 years. Early’s has one of the largest garden seed selections available all year

Classifieds

BOB’S SUPERSTRONG GREENHOUSE PLASTICS. Pond liners, tarps. Resists Canadian thunderstorms, yellowing, cats, branches, punctures. Custom sizes. Samples. Box 1450-O-G, Altona, MB, R0G 0B0. Ph: 204-3275540 Fax: 204-327-5527, www.northerngreenhouse.com.

FLORABUNDA SEEDS

Saving the Seeds of Our Past Heirloom Flowers, Vegetables, Herbs Wildflower Mixes - Unusual Varieties

Non-GMO, Un-Treated Seeds

www.florabundaseeds.com

contact@florabundaseeds.com

(P) – 705-295-6440

P.O. Box 38, Keene, ON K0L 2G0 Free catalogue available upon request. Cross Canada Shipping

NOTTAWASAGA DAYLILIES –

Field grown daylily plants, over 500 varieties. Order now for May/June delivery. For pictures, catalogue and order form visit www.wilsondaylilies.com , or request catalogue by mail. Our farm, located near Creemore ON, is open for viewing, Friday through Monday from 10AM to 5PM from Canada Day (July 1) through Labour Day. Nottawasaga Daylilies, PO Box 2018, Creemore, ON L0M 1G0. Julie & Tom Wilson 705-466-2916.

To place a classified ad in Canada’s Local Gardener, call 1-888-680-2008 or email info@localgardener.net for rates and information.

Join the conversation with Canada’s Local Gardener online! www.localgardener.net

Facebook: @CanadasLocalGardener

Instagram: @local_gardener

Twitter: @CanadaGardener

How

long! Perfect for spring prep, or winter indoor gardening too! While placing your seed order on their website, you can check out their other gardening supplies, as well as lawn, yard care, pet and livestock items as well!

Two retail locations open year-round.

Vegetables, herbs, flowers, grass

BeautifulGardens

rose and Tim Kelly Paradise, newfoundland

story by dorothy and shauna dobbie, photos by david Johnson

The garden of Rose and Tim Kelly is on a half-acre piece of land just outside of St. John’s in the town of Paradise. First glance reveals the narrow front of a pieshaped lot and a sedate house with a manicured lawn and some well-chosen trees and shrubs. An elegant Grecian

A welcome sign, backed by yellow loosestrife.

A fairly sedate house in front.

Fishing in the pond.

A Grecian lady, between yews and goatsbeard, feeds the birds.

lady feeds the birds, who are never forgotten in this garden, in a gap in the yew hedge. All seems perfectly to be expected in this neighbourhood.

But look again. A shady pathway is there, its entrance heralded by a pink peony that begs the visitor to explore further. As you meander down this woodland walk from the front of the two-storey home to the back, you realize that there is a lot more to this garden than immediately meets the eye.

Emerging from the walk, it is a surprise to learn that this is a multileveled backyard where a first-storey balcony shelters the deck outside the walkout basement. The yard is a large one, with a swath of manicured lawn sweeping downhill to a woodland garden on the left, connected to a man-made forest by a natural looking pond and waterfall straddled by a wooden bridge on the right.

Rose has been gardening here for around 25 years, with the help of Tim, who maintains the lawn and who builds sheds, ponds and decks. Now, when I say “sheds”, I mean something rather like a greenhouse, with big windows in it. He is a master craftsman. And the two have done everything themselves.

The feeling is one of serenity and peace, an atmosphere that is enhanced by Asian-esque statuettes and features such as a stone lantern. Moss grows on the floor of the woodlot, giving the garden a sense of Japanese traditions.

The beauty of the garden relies partly on an array of shrubs such as the barberries near the arbour to the woodland garden and pond, as well as roses, beauty bush, lilacs, snowmound spireas, weigela and various hydrangeas. Trees include flowering Japanese dogwood, magnolia ‘Elizabeth’, ivory silk lilac, a ‘Sargent’ cherry, ‘Fat Albert’ blue spruce and three ‘Bloodgood’ Japanese maples. All were chosen by Rose. She completed the Master Gardener course at Dalhousie and has taken a design course at Guelph University. Garden design is a particular passion for her and it shows.

The Japanese maples along with some choices of rhododendrons add colour in and around the forest, and selective plantings of shade lovers like astilbe, rodgersia, and Lady’s mantle

Hydrangea vine climbs around an old tree.

Japanese stone lantern in the forest.

Rose and Tim Kelly.

Looking through the arbor.

draw the eye to the understorey. Most of the forest trees were planted by Rose, save for the remains of some birch that were already there, and some black spruce and balsam firs that elected to grow from seed. The birch skeleton has been adorned with a basket of petunias and a birdhouse, and a healthy pyramidal Alberta spruce.

Behind an aging spruce, dripping with old man’s beard – which is Usnea, a lichen that grows everywhere in the area – is the afore-mentioned shed of windows, where all their magic begins. What makes this unique is the deck that surrounds three sides of the building. From here, the Kellys can survey the beauty of the haven they have created together.

The Kellys created an inspiring work of love, a tiny woodlot of trees nurtured over the years to provide a haven for wildlife. Looking through the trees to outside of the yard, where you are back in suburbia, is all that can attest to your actual location. d

Who lives in there?

In the woodland garden.

Garden shed with a view.

Stairs to the wrap-around deck.

Black lace elder and flowering dogwood trees.

The front of the house.

Rob DeWolfe and Mike Haddad.

A basket of tillandsias.

BeautifulGardens

rob deWolfe and mike Haddad

riverview, new Brunswick

story by shauna dobbie, photos by david Johnson

When you approach the home of Rob DeWolfe and Mike Haddad just outside of Moncton, be sure to use the driveway to get up to the front door; the stairs that lead down through the yard are overgrown with ornamental grasses leaning over the sides and sedums creeping up through the cracks, and there are a couple of garden accents and a pot crowding the way. It seems impossible that the whole front yard should be kept within the confines of… well, of the front yard. In addition to plants, there are trees including: two topiaried Amur maples, six Japanese maples, a corkscrew hazel, a gingko, a weeping pine and a weeping larch and two magnolias. And everything seems overjoyed to have found a place under the plant-loving hands of Rob and Mike.

In the distance you can make out the pale yellows of perennial foxglove. Reliable pollinator attractants such as rudbeckia, mullein, lilies, roses, iris, feverfew and many others share the space. Korean feather reed grass waves its frilly fronds at the slightest breeze, offering textural relief and movement to the medley of colour.

When you go around the back, you see more of the same. There is no grass to mow here. There are hundreds and hundreds of interesting plant specimens, many of them native to North America, covering every inch of the extensive garden space, their variety guaranteeing an ongoing parade of colour throughout the season.

Rob also has several plants in his garden with which many Canadian gardeners may be unfamiliar. One

is Kalmia latifolia ‘Kaleidoscope’ or mountain laurel. It is a shiny-leafed shrub wearing bright red berries that open to cup-shaped cherry flowers with white highlights. The shrub is rounded, growing to 10 feet tall in some areas but likely to reach only 3 feet in New Brunswick. It is not for everyone, insisting on well drained but rich,

highly acid soil. It has an encouraging lifespan of 50 years or more and is not fussy when it comes to sun or shade. It is native to eastern North America extending to southern Quebec.

Then there is the young Japanese umbrella pine tree, Sciadopitys, with its airy needles and promise of a stunning future of structural change as it grows

View from the house, toward the street.

Part of the back yard.

The umbrella pine.

An interesting azalea.

from an attractive open shrub to a potential 60-foot tree with an umbrella shaped canopy. It is rated Zone 7, so it will surely maintain a smaller stature here. It does not tolerate temperature swings but if sheltered it might be okay for a few years.

Certain themes have developed in the garden as tastes progressed from one level to another.

Ferns are favoured. Beautiful Athyrium filix-femina ‘Victoriae’ or Victorian lady fern with its frilly, drooping leaves, is a Scottish import, hardy to Zone 4. It’s pinnae (leaf parts) have an interesting criss-crossing habit forming the letter x. The drooping tassels at the end of the fronds have split tips. This a truly fascinating plant that was all the rage during the Victorian fern frenzy of the 1860s. This is just one of the many ferns in their collection. Another is the increasingly rare, broad leafed hart’s tongue fern that is native to North America.

Sharp-edged and prickly plant pref-

There is a pond, behind masses of grasses.

Some prickly cactus and a tiny fairy house.

erences can be seen in the beautiful and intriguing eryngium, or sea holly, which Mike collects, his favourite being ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’. They like a sunny spot, but most are not fussy about soil, preferring slightly dry and a poor-to-not-too-rich medium. Once again, these plants favour at least Zone 4 and are so rewarding if you have the right microclimate. The sharp collection includes potted cactuses and prickly succulents. Even some of the poppies have sharp-edged leaves.

The back yard has it all: a sheltered pond surrounded by greenery including Japanese forest grass, epimedium and kautia, and even a swimming pool. But as always, the focus is on the plants. Once again, there is no room for lawns and grass mowing as Rob and Mike have found a better use for all that space: such beauties as a purple clematis, exotic-looking hellebores and tall, slender martagon lilies.

There is an embarrassment of trees and shrubs back here too, including a columnar apple, a deutzia, rododendrons and azalias and a ‘Susan’ magnolia, which blooms and reblooms into the summer. Hanging from some of the trees are orchids, and snakeroot, Oregon grape, tree and herbaceous peonies, mini Miscanthus zebrinus and more fill in spots on the ground. Mike has a 5-foot piece of driftwood growing staghorn ferns that he hangs.

Potted plants are all over the deck, filled with succulents, cacti and more. One features an Anemone coronaria, its brilliant blue repeated in some metal flowers that decorate the pond, where decorative dragonflies appear to flit among the greenery. A pedestal holds a clay turtle filled with succulents. A wire basket is filled with tillandsia, those epiphytes that don’t require soil. One pot here has the summer remains of a poinsettia, one there has a few spikes of dracaena, the type you often see paired with zonal geraniums.

The pots with tropical or tender plants have been dragged inside for the winter now. Alocasias, colocasias, brugmansias, phorium and others. Rob counts 112 of them on four levels, plus Mike’s cacti. Some are dormant and some continue to grow, having the choice of an east or west window. The gardeners are spending a bit of time down south during the winter, surely gathering rest and ideas for another glorious year in the garden. d

A few of their pots.

Close-up of zig-zag fern.

Mike is particularly fond of eryngium.

story by shauna dobbie, photos by david Johnson

The back porch that looks out over the lake.

Photo by s tephanie a ppleby-Jones

Although born a gardener, Stephanie Appleby-Jones sharpened her skills on her ¾-acre lakeside property and honed them to a very fine edge at the Dalhousie Agriculture College, where she eventually earned a Masters, focusing an native plants and green roofs.

She and her husband, Tim Jones, who provides plenty of the brawn for her visions, bought the house 27 years ago. They brought seven truckloads of plants from their previous home to this house on Thomas Lake, in Fall River, Nova Scotia, near Halifax. With young children, she started the transformation of the treed and grassy lot – with a tennis court – into the current heaven, with natural plants feeding bees and birds on the way down to the lake and more cultivated

Hostas.

A fattening walking onion head in front of some hairy borage.

Down the stairs through the wild garden.

Springtime in the garden.

Stephanie Appleby-Jones.

Photo by s tephanie a ppleby-Jones

areas closer to the house. She planted a row of rhododendrons under the neighbouring oak trees, where she knew the soil would be acidic. They didn’t have much money at the time, so the rhodos were small, but today they make a lovely hedge.

More flowers went in at the front of the house, which was a sunnier spot. She brought in truckloads of soil and rock to outline borders. Inspired by a course, she started mixing in an edible landscape here with lots of herbs and carrots and lettuce and such.

The tennis court became part garden and part parking lot for Tim’s business. A chain-link fence between parking and garden is broken up with an arbour. You can’t see the fence, which extends around the side yard, owing to vines and shrubs. Honeysuckle and clematis negotiate for space along the fence and Virginia creeper coats the arbour in green. Poppies, allium and delphinium, hostas, Hakone grass and daylilies each find their place. In the centre there is a lawn of moss and turf above the septic bed, surrounding an enclosed firepit. She loves to sit in the sunroom and gaze at a fire outside through the winter.

Down toward the water is the area Stephanie refers to as her wild garden. She doesn’t garden so much here as oversee and encourage the natural landscape. Yellow hawkweed and pink filipendula fill up the sunny parts of the wild garden. She gets rid of exotic invasives and encourages native plants, and she’ll plant native

Looking over the lawn toward the sunroom.

A box of lettuce.

Looking over the cottage garden.

trees. She doesn’t want too many of any species to take root in the area. She’s dealt with the beech leaf weevil, which has destroyed so many beech trees in Nova Scotia, and now she is thinning the hemlock trees area to cut down on the hemlock woolly adelgid, a fuzzy-looking aphid-like insect.

Stephanie has many remarkable plants that demand your attention. “I worked in a greenhouse for a while,” she explains. “I brought home plants every time a new shipment came in.” So, she has a row of lace cap hydrangeas, masses of holly, a corkscrew hazel with crinkled leaves and tortured branches. Around the front there is a Nootka cypress that they planted when it was young. Today it is a graceful welcome to the house.

This garden is not confined to the outdoors. The sunroom is stuffed with plants in winter and just after Christmas, daffodils and hyacinth are exuding flowers there among the overwintering tropicals. It looks out on the side garden and over the lake, and she spends many hours in it when she can’t be outside.

Defining the character of the garden are the pink poppies, a gift from her mother-in-law, many years ago, that grow in abandon among the vegetables and herbs. Homey touches such as the screen she fashioned from some old closet doors and adorned with china plates hides an ugly heat pump on the deck.

She is a crafty gardener. Since she decided the sun was to be avoided as much as possible (she had a brush with skin cancer), she has turned to making lovely things from repurposed wool which she sells at craft shows. She’ll do a couple of garden designs for friends and she continues to exert her will on the garden while keeping out of the sun. She is excited that Tim has just retired, which means he’ll be available during the day to lift, carry and weed!

The yard is a year-round joy and Stephanie adorns the handmade arbours with twinkle lights to share the joy with others. She does a lot of that. When she arrived, she began transplanting peonies. She had so many that she shared them with the neighbour she met that day. Now a row of peonies extends down the block.

Stephanie has made her mark on the neighbourhood. d

Contorted leaves and branches of corkscrew hazel.

A walking onion, ready for replanting.

A group of planters on the deck overlooking the lake.

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BeautifulGardens

Charleen and Keith Wornell Charlottetown

story by dorothy dobbie, photos by david Johnson

Now that she’s retired from nursing and diabetes education, Charleen Wornell has turned to her garden to stir her energies and imagination. With the full support of her woodworker husband Keith, himself retired from an illustrious career in social and economic policy in PEI and Atlantic Canada, Charleen has turned their big, comfortable suburban yard into a land of milk, honey and flowers.

The house behind a floriferous front yard.

The front yard of the cottage style house is an explosion of colour, with plants carefully positioned to have breathing room and surrounded by mulch to keep them healthy and attractive. Overshadowing and protecting the house and garden on one side are two giant spruce trees and a big magnolia on the other side. More large trees can be seen behind the house. They lend an air of intimacy to the scene and the evergreens

shelter a table and chairs under an umbrella where the couple can sit in a shady spot.

In the front garden, a gravel path lined with bricks leads to the back. More walkways have been laid through the garden for ease of access and care. You can meander for ages among the pink, yellow and blue blooms, under an iron arbor and beside a little pond that features two heron statues and a stone ball on a pedestal artwork.

Charleen clearly cares about plants. Many are tagged with genus and species so she can keep tabs on how they do and to help when people ask “what’s that?”. The results are obvious; clumps of Shasta daisies are huge and healthy. The giant rounded leaves of gunnera contrast with tall swords of Iris pseudacorus and more delicate stands of old-fashioned rose campion or the blue spikes of veronica.

Many are the latest varieties of

old favourites. Coreopsis (tickseed) ‘Uptick’, with maroon splotches on yellow, is one. Another, Penstemon ‘Midnight Masquerade’, has deep purple foliage. But good old fashioned Lavatera (mallow) is still an eye-pleaser in her original dress. Bright yellow evening primrose or sundrops glow against pinks spikes of astilbe. Hosta are everywhere, in about a dozen iterations of different species.

The garden is filled with butterflies and bees that can’t resist the honeyladen scents wafting through the air.

A cozy place inside the screened gazebo.

A shady spot under the evergreens.

Happy and healthy astilbe.

Light pink mallow above hosta and heuchera.

In the corner, a border in part sun with birdhouses.

Milkweed, Joe Pye weed, astilbe, evening primrose, gooseneck loosestrife, many interesting sedums all vie for their attention. Near the house, a huge, red PEI rock is set off by the blue needles of a topiarized corkscrew-shaped juniper and the shining leaves and mounded form of a rhododendron shrub.

Flowers continue along the sides of the house and surround a pretty outbuilding. This is a special little garden edged with square cut stone and showing off an ornamental, iron lamp standard and a stone birdbath. There are a few birdhouses here, like elsewhere in the garden, that say: everyone is welcome!

A series of boxed gardens growing sundry herbs and vegetables line one side of the backyard on view from the comfortably furnished, screened gazebo across the way. More large trees and their shade limit the serious growing of vegetables.

In one corner, a hammock and some chairs hold the promise of rest on a hot summer’s day after long hours of working in the garden. The garden is luxurious and tidy, so we hope the hammock gets some use! d

A small pond surrounded by objets d’art.

A hosta blooms in front of sundrops and an ‘Aurea’ barberry.

A flagstone path on the flat terrain next to the house leads to the gazebo on the raised patio deck from where Serge and Sylvie like to sit and admire their garden.

BeautifulGardens

serge and sylvie laval, Quebec

story and photos by Perry mastrovito

Maintaining a backyard garden with a menagerie of plants, flowers and trees when you have the right topography, soil rich in nutrients, live in a zone where you can more or less depend (hope, nowadays) on the natural cycle of the seasons can be a challenge at the best of times. The challenge can be even greater if what you mostly have as land in your backyard to design and create your dream garden on, is a steep slope that descends towards the house.

When Serge and Sylvie decided they wanted to establish a garden in their backyard in Laval, Quebec in 2010, their first step was to take a good look at the topography they were dealing with and how much space was available. The couple also examined the composition of the soil and took notice of the amount of sunlight the area set aside for the garden would receive. After going through this pre-planning exercise and developing a master plan for their garden, Serge and Sylvie were able to visualize that besides having beds for plants, flowers and trees to grow in, part of their sloped terrain would be ideal for creating a 3-foot by 15-foot long cascading waterfall that empties into a 5-foot by 10-foot pond. They also envisioned that a set of steps designed with natural stones could be both a point of interest in the garden and very practical for reaching the more difficult areas to do weeding, looking after the plants and shrubs, and carrying out other maintenance tasks.

However, with a sloped terrain, Serge and Sylvie knew they would be facing some serious obstacles

and potential problems. In order to prevent the garden from sliding down the slope or becoming a waterslide during heavy rains in the summer and having excessive water runoff from melting snow in the spring, the soil on the slope first needed to be stabilized by building retaining walls. Their master plan called for walls to be built at three different levels end to end with either large concrete blocks or natural rocks with spaces between the levels forming terraces to create borders and beds on.

You would think that rocks are rocks, but nothing could be further from the truth as Sylvie found out. Her research on the subject led her to discover that certain types of rocks are more prone to decay than others, while some rock surfaces are better suited to providing a habitat rich in acidity or alkalinity for lichen and mosses to grow on. Also, some rocks are more resistant to water infiltration, which is important to know because repeated freeze and thaw cycles (ice wedging) over time can change the physical appearance, forming cracks or, in some cases, even splitting a rock in two. Large flat surfaced granite rocks from a local quarry were selected as opposed to using manufactured concrete blocks like those seen on construction sites so that the retaining wall structures would look as natural as possible and blend in with the vegetation and design of the garden. Low-growing and spreading plants that make good strong roots in order to remain firmly anchored to the soil to reduce the risk of getting washed away by a heavy downpour had to be researched as well. The couple's choice included many varieties like hostas, Lady's mantle ( Alchemilla mollis) and ornamental grass (Hakonechlo macra ‘Aureola’). Thick mulch was added to retain moisture, add contrast and also prevent the soil from being hit directly by the rain.

All things considered, Serge and Sylvie managed to squeeze quite an assortment of colourful plants, flowers, trees and shrubs into their 60-by-120-foot garden. And the visual perspective is well balanced with the size of the house and gazebo, thus avoiding the feeling of being overwhelmed or invaded by the plantings and features. The waterfall and pond for instance are situated near the

Red begonias add a pop of bold colour to natural mulch borders with mixed plants.

Bird feeders hung from a pole attract various types of birds to the garden. Many of these same birds planted on the slope.

The firmly anchored moss- and lichen-covered natural stones form walls to retain the soil and provide terraces and beds where hostas, Lady’s mantle and Hakone grass can flourish on solid ground.

make their nests in the trees Serge and Sylvie managed to squeeze quite an assortment of plants, colourful flowers, trees, shrubs etc., into their 60-by-120foot garden.

The lighting in this view of the pond and waterfall is just spectacular. The ‘Johnson’s Blue’ cranesbill soften the rocky contour of the pond.

The 3-by-15-foot long waterfall which cascades down into the pond is bordered by golden creeping Jenny and ox-eye daisies in a planter.

far end of the slope and in line with the back of the house and raised patio deck.

Serge and Sylvie spend countless hours every week tending to their garden to keep it in showcase condition, and love to sit and admire their garden from the raised patio deck covered over with a canvas gazebo or the Adirondack chairs on the grass lawn. When they recently redid their kitchen, they got rid of the old windows and had a single panoramic window installed so they could observe and admire even more of their garden from the comfort of their kitchen and while seated at the dining table.

Since this garden is a short walk from where I live in Laval, I've had the chance to witness over the years, the ongoing natural and human-induced evolution taking place in the garden from spring to fall. I've also observed that by the middle of July, the garden is pretty much in full bloom. And when I happen to pass by around the time the daylight starts to fade into night, the strategically placed LED lights that automatically come on, transform the garden into a luminous fantasy-like and surreal landscape.

For Serge and Sylvie, admiring and working in their garden gives them great satisfaction and pure joy that envelopes them in a sense of wellbeing in what they call their 'haven of peace'. And for my sake, a photographer's paradise. d

LED lights placed in strategic locations about the sloped terrain reveal the vegetation in a new light, so to speak.

Irises, rodgersia and goatsbeard surround a statue.

Dawn redwood, now home to several birdhouses.

BeautifulGardens

dolores and Walter Bouw st. Catherines, ontario

story by shauna dobbie, photos by david Johnson

“We have enough to do with gardening and quilting that we don’t need a computer. We’ve survived over 80 years without a computer!”

So say Dolores and Walter Bouw, and thus, I communicate with their daughter, Joanne.

Dolores and Walter came from the Netherlands in the 1950s as the children of people in the horticultural trades. They met in Canada, fell in love, and continued to work like dogs. They were market gardeners for 25 years while he worked in the steel industry and for 10 years at Toronto Parks. Dolores was in

The trees are planted a good distance apart.

Newer hostas with their tags.

Hostas are so happy in the dappled sunlight.

An old farm implement. charge while Walter was working outside the home. Along the way, they had four children, two boys and two girls (they now have 10 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren), and they moved into their property in 1980. Then they started gardening on the enormous hill.

Today, the property is thoroughly cultivated and looks like a big, oldfashioned park, with many healthy mature trees on three tiered levels of land. The serene feeling you get in the garden is the same as you get in an arboretum; you would just love to lie on the grass and look up at the clouds. Trees are positioned just far enough apart that you can see them in their entirety and close enough to enjoy dappled sunlight in most places. Grass grows lush and healthy; Walter digs dandelions weekly to keep it green, and he fertilizes in the spring and fall.

One of their many passions is hostas and they have about 300. If there isn’t enough shade for them, they’ll set up umbrellas to protect the plants. The previous owners of the home had hostas and the Bouws just kept collecting. Hostas exploded in popularity over the last 40 years, making them easier to find but harder to obtain a complete collection. There are more than

Looking up through the limbs.

3,000 registered varieties right now. Through the growing season, they’ll go on daytrips to hunt for the latest introductions of hostas and other perennials, and annuals as well. At home, the plants will be put in the ground and a label added announcing the name and the height. In the spring, the gardens burst forth with blooming bulbs, magnolias and redbuds. As those settle down, watch out for a parade of lilies, irises and poppies,

all backed by trees, ferns and, of course, hostas.

Some people continue to add years to their ages but never stop working, and this is true of Walter and Dolores. She fed us homebaked goods during our visit and he told us that, a few years ago, he built stone stairs through the tiers of gardens and laid stones at the margins of existing beds. As we walk through the borders, Dolores will bend over and snap out a weed

or push a recent planting back into its hole. In the fall, Walter will lug his huge banana plant into the basement and then back out again in the spring to soak up more sun. And in his spare time – spare time! – he makes birdhouses, some of them quite intricate.

It is hard for us to leave this place after a couple of hours, but it is a job and we must. As we drive away, I think that it will stay in my mind for a long time. d

One of Walter’s more intricate birdhouses.

Walther Bouw.

Dolores Bouw.

The pool in the foreground, the gazebo a few steps off.

BeautifulGardens

myrna driedger

Winnipeg, manitoba

story and photos by dorothy dobbie

She is all about being a grandmother, is Myrna Driedger, Speaker of the House in the Manitoba Legislature. It has transferred her Charleswood backyard garden from a place of adult entertainment into a haven for a little girl who believes in fairies and that her grandmother has a special relationship with them.

Under the old crabapple tree, next to the gazebo, is a magical home for little people. A toddler-size chair and two toadstools sit at one end of this special land so that little Addi can preside over her kingdom in comfort. There are all sorts of delightful things here to look at in a small village populated by a shoe house, a tree house and other fanciful dwelling places where some interesting characters can happily live.

The village “square” is strangely round and here little people of all kinds mingle to play and chat and even take a nap. Looming in the background

Annabelle hydrangeas go from creamy white to green under the summer sun.

Shade-loving ferns and impatiens and the foliage of bleeding hearts front the border. In the back, ‘The Rocket’ ligularia towers over all.

is a blue, hand-painted rock proclaiming this to be Addi’s Fairy Garden. Hostas provide the greenery contrasting with the gnarled wood of the old tree which generously feeds the village with ripe fruits that drop from the heavens. Every little breeze sets up a symphony of sound from the collection of wind chimes made from shells and beads and other odd wind chime materials.

Mature trees line the fence and Myrna is filling this in with some new shrubs, including an alternate leafed dogwood with its shiny leaves and berries on pagoda shaped branches, and hardy viburnum.

Elsewhere in the garden, under the trees, Myrna shows off her collection of garden whimsy in a raised garden that surrounds the kidney shaped in-ground pool. There is a pool slide here, of course, and a grownup-size floating lounge. Annabelle hydrangeas are fat with flowers. Rudbeckia is just taking hold.

Myrna loves to enhance the local plants with touches of exotica.

Tropical plants are everywhere, growing among the perennials and spilling out of pots and planters, adorning one edge of the pool and the steps into the house and the outdoor kitchen counter.

At one end of the garden, beside Addi’s fairyland, is a screened gazebo, providing shade from the blazing heat of a Winnipeg summer as well as protection from mosquitoes at dusk and pesky wasps in

Tropicals are just like us, they love the outdoors in summer.

A fairy garden for grandchildren.

Hostas and ferns with ripening apples above.

Myrna recounts her perennials.

A great black urn encircled with vines.

Wonders right outside the back door include the fabulous tri-coloured Tradescantia

out for some summer warmth.

Three paper lanterns on a trellis.

A bookshelf on the patio holds things that matter.

zebrina,

late summer. It is filled with comfortable furniture arranged to accommodate good political chats.

Myrna loves to collect garden art and the back doorstep features a wonderful clay pot encased in rustic vines. This sets the stage for plantings of variegated tradescantia, dragon wing begonia, brilliantly coloured croton, asparagus, and Boston ferns. All of this surrounds the visitor who stops in for a bite to eat or drink a cool glass of wine under the shade of an umbrella at a glass table surrounded by comfortable chairs.

In a calmer mood as you enter the garden, is a shade planting featuring impatiens, bleeding heart, native fern and Ligularia ‘The Rocket’. This is where Myrna is practicing her serious gardening skills as she explores perennials that she is trying for the first time. Astilbe and liatris, salvia and ferns backed up with all-season colour by annuals such as impatiens and the tall, ‘State Fair’ zinnia.

Myrna’s garden is a friendly garden, a place where adults can mingle and enjoy a swim, or a barbecue prepared in husband Hal’s handy outdoor kitchen. It is also a place for the grandchildren to learn the wonders of nature and where they can believe for a while in magic.

You can feel the lingering warmth and laughter of a place as well loved as the people who live there. d

All kinds of doo-dads hanging from a tree.

BeautifulGardens

denise and alan mlazgar

Fort Qu’appelle, saskatchewan

story by dorothy dobbie, photos by shauna dobbie

Almost the last thing you would expect to see in the middle of the Saskatchewan prairie farmyard is an English country garden, but that is exactly what Denise and Alan Mlazgar have created on their 110-year-old property. Settled by Alan’s family back in 1910, it is still a working farm.

“I was a small-town girl, but I loved to help my parents in the garden,” said Denise. “I always had a passion for flowers.” So did Alan. When Denise and Alan moved onto the farm in 1989, they had the mutual dream of creating a flower garden beside the house instead of the usual vegetable patch. They do have a vegetable patch, but the veggies grow in a series of raised beds off to the side. Instead, beside the house, where they can gaze at it from their deck, is this heavenly construction with hundreds of different varieties of flowers, shrubs and trees.

A thousand perennials . . .

Reminders of yesterday rusting among the flowers.

“When we first started out, we couldn’t afford much, so I planted many, many perennials from seed,” she said. “We would watch for end of season sales.” Over the following years, the garden took shape through hard work and sheer force of will as the Mlazgars worked to raise a large family and keep the farm going.

They had a few notable challenges, one being that their water comes from a shallow well that is only 20 feet deep. In the periodic years of prairie drought, hauling water from the dugout to keep the garden growing was Alan’s job. The summer of 2021, when this garden was photographed, was particularly hot and dry. Alan was hauling 1,000 gallons a day to keep it beautiful. The water resource is pumped through a series of hoses attached to sprinklers that Denise can move around a bit to make sure

An English country garden.

Delphinium.

Part of the white garden. First year, but now filled in with white flowers.

Some of the clever ways Denise and Alan have decided to grow vegetables.

everything gets its share. Straw is used as a mulch in generous quantities to keep moisture in and prevent the blazing prairie sun from baking the ground.

“Now we have the dugout attached to the well, so life is a bit easier for Alan,” notes Denise, who says he is always ready with “hammer and hoe” to attack her new projects. He helps with the deadheading and weeding. Denise attends the greenhouse. After all these years, they work together as a well-oiled machine.

The garden is a botanical work of art in the style of an English country garden, well planned and intimately understood by Denise. But some of ornamental features are definitely Canadian. The skeletons of farm technology from days gone by rust contentedly among the flowers. The rest is there: white trellis fences and arbours surrounded by climbing roses, cobblestone pathways meandering throughout the garden and encircling a fishpond with a tinkling fountain and plants, plants, plants.

Masses of silver mound artemisia and spurge thrive in the dry heat. Orange Prairie lily (she has many varieties of lilies, including some tall Martagons), daylilies, cool-coloured columbine, pink and orange Maltese cross, tall stately ‘Pacific Giant’ delphinium, Joe Pye weed, peonies, poppies, rudbeckia, salvia, perennial bachelor buttons, ‘Lorraine Sunshine’ heliopsis with its striking variegated foliage, even hardy succulents – and that is just the short list. Tall and reliably blooming giant fleece flower provides a backdrop to shorter flowers. Spring blooming bergenia lends it shiny leaves to the scene in summer. Many are plants you would find in a typical English garden, but there are others too: prairie liatris, milkweed, helianthus . . . And when a short-lived perennial passes on, Denise notices the hole and if she can’t remember exactly what grows there, she will check her photo record from years gone by. “There are a lot of micro climates in my garden,” she explains as she recounts how she will move a plant that isn’t thriving to another location and give it another try.

A rock garden is home to ground hugging campanula flowers, saxatile alyssum (the pretty golden one), sedums and hardy hens and chicks. Bearded, German and Siberian iris are featured here and there. “There are 20 to 30 varieties of peonies, both the herbaceous kind and the Orientals,” says Denise. “And I recently counted 56 varieties of roses, 29 of them in the rose garden.”

Maltese cross.

Denise and Alan on their repurposed swings on the patio.

Columbine.

Ah, yes, the rose garden. Ten years ago, a colic-y grandson inspired the family to dream of a place where they could just get away from it all, “A solitude place,” said Denise. So, the kids got together and cleared a small landscape out of the woods behind the English garden and there they planted roses. At one end is an arbour made from the wood they cleared.

Then there is the more recent white garden, in its first year of construction as it was photographed but now much filled in, says Denise. It features a wooden deck pathway inside a cleverly designed fence of carved railway ties. At one end, an old bathtub holds a water garden.

Next to the white garden is an outhouse furnished with a hobbit-like theme. It was built for one of the five family weddings they have held in the garden. The outhouse was a great attraction because of its novelty and “luxury” furnishings.

Novelty is the theme of this area. A brick paved patio holds four salvaged benches hung as swings and a round table made from a wooden cable spool to which Alan has added an augmented top. It serves very well in this rustic setting. All around are reminders of Alan’s talents. He has built little whimseys such as wee folk houses between two trees joined by a walkway and a clothesline holding tiny clothing items for the delight of grandkids. The outhouse exterior itself uses round windows (washing machine doors) as eyes, a former bedpan for a nose and half a tire filled with red impatiens for a smiling mouth.

This is just a short tour of the remarkable outdoor home these two have built. The deck is also home to interesting constructions filled with annuals. And then there are the alpacas across from the lineup of veggie beds. They strut around their enclosure, protected by a confident looking male who is clearly the boss. This is just one more attraction as to what one day, in Denise’s fertile imagination, could be a retreat or a bed and breakfast.

The Mlazgars have built a tribute to their love and their partnership in the enterprise called life. Their children were an integral part of building the bones of the garden and always have a home to come to, and they know that Mom and Dad will be there with a warm hug, a good meal and a beautiful garden to gather, relax and heal from the stresses of life. The grandchildren will have memories galore to carry them confidently into the future. d

Just outside the white garden on the way to the biffy and the patio.

Overview of the white garden in its first year.

More rusty farm implements make picturesque ornaments.

Raised

grow intensive crops without backbreaking labour. Portulaca thrive in a refashioned white planter.

Poppies.

gardens

BeautifulGardens

sayuri and arthur mah

red deer, alberta

story by dorothy dobbie, photos by dorothy and shauna dobbie

Sayuri, known to her friends as Sai, and Arthur Mah have lived at their current Red Deer home since 1995 and have long ago completely adjusted to gardening in Alberta where conditions are much harsher than those of Sai’s native Japan.

It is not hard to pick Sai’s house out on the street. It is the one with the wilderness of flowers and other greenery. She has planted favourite trees; a pagoda dogwood on the left presides over a perennials bed, and on the right, a lovely linden shelters shade loving plants. In between, an oddly shaped rock stands on end in a bed of pebbles. Carefully chosen

Hostas and lamium in the front yard.

Sai talks about her garden.

Sai and Arthur’s front yard.

This is but a small sample of the succulent delights of Sai’s back yard.

dwarf shrubs and some

An Itoh peony ‘Border Charm’ takes pride of place among the herbaceous peonies in the garden. She has planted Lamium ‘Beacon Silver’ and several varieties of hosta as well as spotted lungwort and other sun-shunners under the linden. She loves the shy and ephemeral lady slippers best.

This is all prelude to a trip to the wonders of the back yard. Behind a gate labelled “Secret Garden” lies a surprise. Instead of the usual display of perennials and other pretty plants, we discover a deck holding a world of succulents. They are everywhere, in small pots and large. Exotic varieties of their air-

A pot of succulents hints at what is still to come.

The wall is lined with air plants and other exotica. A corner of the garden still in progress.

prairie driftwood stand at the base of the rock. This central border flows into a plantation under the linden tree

dependent cousins, Tillandsia, are hanging from the walls of a lovely potting shed.

And the biggest surprise of all? Sai is growing Lithops, a little-known succulent from South Africa that looks like a stone and is, indeed, known as the living stone. It grows quite low against the ground with is leaves inside the plant to discourage desert grazers. This fascinating plant has a little window on the surface to allow the sun to shine through and nourish the flowers that will emerge later in a burst of glory with daisy-like petals in fluorescent colours of yellow, orange, red, pink, and white. After a period of growth, the pebble-like plant splits and the flower emerges. The tricky thing about lithops is knowing when and when-not to water

A working potting shed.

The pebbles symbolize life and death.

The shed where Sai works her magic.

because in the wild they often get less than an inch of rain a year.

Sai is a serious grower of these plants. Her succulents are treated to a special soil mix, a very granular product called Turface Athletics, a calcined clay material used to condition sports fields. It seems well suited to the dry, aerated soil needs of all the succulents.

“I have approximately 360 or more succulents, including five or six varieties of lithops,” confesses Sai. She says she brings the succulents into the house on the main floor as well as into the basement for the winter. “My love of succulents came about when I noticed how resilient they are and how easy they are to propagate. I have about 40 varieties and my favourite is Echeveria,” she adds.

The other unusual plant was tillandsia, and Sai had the one known as Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides) an epiphytic (air growing) flowering plant, hanging from the potting shed wall. The difficult to grow (in this climate) staghorn fern (Platycerium) was also on display as were all sorts of other exotica.

Inside the potting shed, it is easy to

see that this is a working garden – all the tools of her trade are in positions of abandoned action. There is much going on in Sai’s world.

Sai has a willing helper in her husband Art, who is clearly very proud of his inventive wife. He digs and builds and does the heavy lifting to accommodate her wishes. To help the plants and Sai, Art has added extra windows and two skylights to encourage light to come into to the potting shed so that it is almost a greenhouse, (although they also have a three-season greenhouse at the end of the garden). Rainwater is collected in a big barrel for additional treats to the plants.

A border on the far fence of the back yard sports more of Sai’s shade lovers. The back yard is lined with trees. “I’ve planted around 20 trees,” said Sai. “Three Swedish aspens (backyard), two Evans cherry trees (one is gone), the linden in the front yard, the espalier apple tree, a number of cedars and junipers, Korean maple, Alberta spruce, Japanese silk lilac, birch . . . my favourite tree is the birch!” She has also planted two Scotch pines in the back yard. And

the “espalier tree” is a ‘Goodland’ apple, which now lines up obediently along the fence. It will be interesting to see how it does in the harsh Red Deer winter climate over the next few years.

“At this point in my life, I don’t think that I would change much to the gardens,” comments Sai contentedly. “Perhaps I would enhance the beauty with a few more hardscapes or sculpture or artwork.”

Her view of life and the garden is summed up as you leave this private haven. You are taken momentarily to Sai’s homeland with a Zen-like area that has been established at the side of the house. A pebble path on a bed of fine gravel and bits of driftwood lead to a bamboo-lined fence. “The pebbles in my Zen garden represent life,” she said. “The wide part being birth and the narrower representing death.”

That truly is also the life of a garden. d

Editor’s note: Thank you to Gloria Beck of Parkland Garden Centre for introducing us to Sai’s garden. Watch for the next issue to see more Red Deer gardens that Gloria found for us.

Poppies. Martagon lilies.

BeautifulGardens

eleanor Penner langley, BC

story by dorothy dobbie, photos by dorothy and shauna dobbie

Some gardens are wild and helter-skelter, some are tame and manicured. Eleanor Penner’s garden in Langley, British Columbia, would certainly qualify as the latter. She needed a place of repose after losing her husband suddenly and moving from her former acreage in Milner to this beautiful home and garden has been the perfect answer.

Yet, when I call this garden to mind, what stands out are the climbing roses and they are anything but tame and timid. They tower over the back garden in a rose benediction, 10 feet tall and bursting with yellow, peach and red blossoms, interspersed with the purple blooms of a ‘Jackmanii’ clematis vine that has used her rose companions as a ladder to reach for the sky! Hidden in there somewhere is also a flowering wisteria vine. The roses generously share their petals with the manicured lawn below, showering scented colour all around.

The flowering sisters growing up and along the trellised back fence dominate smaller evergreen shrubs, among these some blue-green pyramidal yew and a chartreuse cedar. A variegated dogwood sets off a corner.

Pacific dogwood blooms beautifully.

Looking toward the street from the front yard.

Lush lawn and plantings surround the house.

Eleanor has added the odd hydrangea or an annual here or there, but her main labour comes from deadheading and tidying in summer once the spring cleanup is done. “I do a little puttering around every day,” she says, but she noted how much that puttering added up to after being away for several weeks last June.

The backyard is relatively narrow, surrounded by the roses and other shrubs and lending Eleanor a privacy that is sweetly scented and blissfully peaceful. She can sit on her awninged deck and bask in this intimate haven away from the rest of the world.

The garden is much more than the back yard, however. It extends along the side of the house to the front yard and is carried down the public sidewalk. The publicfacing side of the fenced garden is highlighted by several well-trimmed Pacific yews on the street side, punctuated by smaller shrub roses, daylilies, and spurge. At first when she moved here, Eleanor trimmed the yews herself, but there are 21 of them and she feels that maybe ladder climbing is now something better left to another.

The lawn is as meticulously kept as the rest of the garden. Beds are edged by trimmed lawn, soft as a cushion. Eleanor mows it but has decided the heavy gas-powered edger is a bit too much, so a service comes in and keeps this meticulous. The arched portico to the red front door is flanked by red pots holding more yews, some trimmed, two growing naturally. Vigorously growing calla lilies, their startling white blossoms

Petals of big red roses decorate the lawn.

The yew hedge looks like it’s part of the fence.

Eleanor on her front step.

Yellow creeping Jenny pokes through blooming thyme.

A water fountain burbles softly.

echoed by the white blooms of a flowering dogwood tree, stand nearby to complete the picture.

There are many little secrets in this garden. A mosaic of low growing groundcovers hugs flat pavers creating a bed for turquoise-coloured stones and pretty rocks as well as low lying ornaments. They are wetted by three bubbling, pierced rock fountains. The birds love this, says Eleanor who keeps it running all year long, even in winter.

The borders in the garden are a mosaic of texture, form and colour so interesting and varied that they could entertain for hours. The colour is introduced through foliage more than by blossoms. Chartreuse shades of creeping Charlie and certain hosta glow against darker foliage.

There are short and tall grasses and frilly ferns – small roses, too – and the interesting skeletons of spring blooming Allium ‘Giganteum’.

There are no weeds to be seen anywhere. While Eleanor did not create the garden, she cherishes it and keeps

it in pristine condition. The neighbours call it “Langley’s Butchart Gardens”, she says.

There is a large variety of plant material: ferns and astilbe, lily of the valley, Jacob’s ladder . . . all sorts of shade loving plants you don’t see everywhere.

As with the roses, this garden loves to surprise with height. Several very tall martagon lilies decorate the font yard, positioned in front of the living room window to be proudly displayed when in bloom.

Red wax begonias line the margins of more formal street-side beds. Topiarized trees and shrubs emphasize the dignity of the house and its surroundings. Then, occasionally, you are surprised with such notes as the flame tipped leaves of the Japanese maple ( Acer palmatum ‘Akane’), its leaves glowing in the early summer before they turn red and orange and yellow in fall.

This is a garden of peace and repose, just the loveliest way to calm the heart and mind and to offer joy after a journey. For Eleanor, the journey continues both on her frequent international travels and here at home. d

Callas emerge, white and perfect.

Orange hawkweed.

Gorgeous corner of the garden.

Enjoy

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Read, relax, enjoy.

– By Anthony Di Nardo

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Taken from Anthony Di Nardo’s book of poetry Forget Sadness Grass, compliments of Ronsdale Press.