Social media does it again! And by "it" I mean provide us with some fantastic content to share with you, lovely readers. I was perusing Facebook last week when I stumbled upon my old friend Stephanie's beautiful blooming garden. (Stephanie and I first met in kindergarten!) One quick email exchange later and here we are with her gorgeous photos and the story of how she fell in love with her garden at first sight.
All photos courtesy of Stephanie Van Doleweerd; the garden in bloom
HGTV: Did you inherit the garden when you moved into your house or did you plan it?
Stephanie: There's an interesting symmetry between my garden and my next door neighbour's, because years ago the same woman used to own both houses and she designed the gardens based on one large yard which was later divided in two. So we have matching paths, and many of our plants spill through the fence into one another's yards. She moved away years ago, and after that the garden on my side was tended by the person who later sold the house to me. He was a single guy who worked a lot, and although his mother did a lot of the gardening (I hear), it was designed to be fairly low-maintenance.
The yard immediately made me fall in love with the property -- I was thrilled that there was no lawn to mow, and much of the landscaping had been done already, but it left a lot of blank spaces for me to fill in.
How the backyard looked under the previous owner
HGTV: What was there and how did it look when you moved in?
Stephanie: It contained a lot of juniper and cedar shrubs, and quite a few grassy perennials. I removed the shrubs to make room for more flowering plants, and I dug a vegetable patch. The mock cherry, witchwood and plum trees were already there and I just love those because they blossom so nicely. I was also thrilled to discover a late-blooming lilac in the corner. I have a soft spot for lilac bushes.
Digging the vegetable patch was interesting; the house is 106 years old, and so there were a lot of mystery objects lost in the soil over the years. I found a lot of rusty oddments and lots of broken bottles when digging. And roots -- there's a humungous maple tree in the neighbour's yard and its root system must stretch across both our properties. I can't dig anywhere without moving maple roots out of the way. It's an amazing tree.
HGTV: How did the climate where you live (northern Ontario) affect your decisions on what to plant?
Stephanie: Last year we had snow eight months out of twelve, and our growing season is quite short. As you can imagine, gardeners here are determined to enjoy every possible moment of growing time available to us. I watched for one year to see what perennials would appear on their own and when they'd bloom, and I saw a gap in the early spring so my father put in about 20 tulip bulbs in a handful of varieties. Now they're among the first to come up alongside the crocus and the daffodils and they give me lots of encouragement that spring is finally arriving!
I put out nyjer seed for the smaller birds all year, and this encourages some life into the yard while everything is snow-covered.
HGTV: What have you planted?
Stephanie: I tend to prefer perennials, so my father put in several rose bushes and the tulip bulbs. The veggie patch is all new; I transplanted some rhubarb that had been languishing behind the shed and now it's rioting across the yard. I put in Early Girl tomatoes every year, and have been experimenting with strawberries, beans, carrots, dill, oregano, chives and mint. My favourite plant in this section is the raspberry bush. After my father's lady friend, Lorraine, passed away two years ago we took raspberries from her yard in the Oshawa area and transplanted them into my garden. I have an emotional connection to those, so it's nice to see them doing so well and they give an impressive crop.
HGTV: Do you add more plants each year or nuture what returns?
Stephanie: I prefer to nurture what returns and to take a fairly Taoist approach to my garden, appreciating the things that arrive on their own in terms of gifts from friends and windfalls from the various bird visitors. It's at the stage now where I think I can just wander through it and pull the occasional weed and it more or less takes care of itself, which a nice exercise in Zen gardening. Of course I like to tinker a bit each spring. I was given a funny little gnome for my birthday this year, and I just added a toad house and some paving stones, and touched up the edges of the path by adding some more landscaping ties.
HGTV: What do you enjoy about gardening?
Stephanie: I just love being outdoors; the winters here are so long and cold that I try to spend as much time as possible outside while it's nice. I work from home, and spend most of the summer sitting at the patio table with the laptop enjoying the yard - it's like a "living" room that can only be used for a short time, so you appreciate it more when you can be in it.
Thanks to Stephanie for sharing her space with us. Do you have a great garden? We'd REALLY love to see it -- really! Send us an email to stylesheet @hgtv.ca (remove that space) with Real Garden Photos in the subject line. Send 3-5 photos and the story of your garden -- why you love it, what you have planted, how you decided on design, etc. Please keep your photos to less than 500kb a piece.
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