Garden mania

Welcome to my garden. It is not my current garden but it is the one I spent the most time developing. It is also my largest garden, thereby providing the biggest scope for learning new things and trying different ideas. I have such fond memories.

One of my favourite things was to walk in the garden, morning coffee in hand and see the beds being watered by our watering system. Our first years there were manual watering so it was a real treat to see the system we put in doing its job.

We loved and tended this garden for 11 + years. I think you always leave a piece of yourself in your garden when you move on to others. This garden will always be near and dear to my heart. It was about three quarters of an acre of land and you can dream a lot of big dreams in that amount of space.

There were many very special Garry Oak trees on the property.

Looking through the foxgloves toward the herb garden.

So many of my favourite roses lived here.  Many old shrub roses mixed with some David Austin roses.  Always, a bird bath, to attract our little visitors.

Over the years I’ve created and planted quite a few gardens.  I still feel like I know very little about gardening and love nothing more than pouring over garden books.  When will I know enough to consider that I might be an actual “gardener”??

We kept an area in the back of the garden sort of wild, like a meadow and just mowed a path through the tall grass.  We were inspired by gardens we had seen in France and the UK.  

I’m so lucky that my husband shares my passion and desire to have a beautiful and esthetically pleasing garden.   When we travel we seek out famous gardens to help us learn and further enhance our own garden.  We’ve been truly blessed to have had amazing spaces to garden in and to create and personalize.

I was raised in an apartment in Montreal and there was no garden, however, my Grannie's garden in Calgary, where we visited every summer, was an actual dream for me.  As I look back, I realize it was a very tiny urban garden but Grannie grew all of the best flowers.  She had peonies and roses, the whole side of the garage was sweet peas (truly unbelievable), the back lane was planted with potatoes and every nook and cranny was crammed with floral treasure.  Every table in the house had a small nosegay of flowers, all summer long.  It might be just a tiny pansies and a sweet pea or two but fresh picked flowers were everywhere.  On each nightstand was a bouquet of sweet peas.  This magic really formed my feelings about gardens.  It was such a powerful world.  This tiny postage stamp of a garden created lasting magic and memories.

We had a secret garden, enclosed by a yew hedge that had a sweet little pond. We came here often to sit and to feed the fish, especially when our daughter was a little girl. We named all the fish and the gargoyle's name is Geoffrey.

This is one of my favourite pictures taken in the garden in our 11 years of living there. My daughter, maybe aged 8, swinging on her tire swing, aka Blackie, oblivious to the photo and any cares in the world. No wonder I love gardens. xoxo