a certain point—for Sandy and me it was in the late eighties—the lure of ornamental gardening began elbowing its way into the process. The island’s big vegetable plots became complemented—in extreme cases, usurped—by equally ambitious rose arbours and perennial beds. Shortly thereafter, a mania for ornamental landscaping swept across the culture, as it does every few decades. Lawns and tennis courts were torn up and swimming pools filled in to provide space for dreamy plantings. Throughout the nineties, glossy new gardening magazines were launched, the number and size of garden clubs grew exponentially, specialty nurseries abounded, gardening television programs were inescapable and the gardening sections in bookstores threatened to push mere literature out the back door.
Plus, flower and garden shows—from the modest to the monumental—were mounted in many communities. Ever the opportunist, I became a regular at several of them, learning to appreciate in the process how these extravaganzas could get us jump-started midway through what otherwise might have been a decent period of hibernation.
The Northwest Flower and Garden Show in Seattle has, over its twenty-six years, grown into the third-largest such show in the United States. It’s mounted in early February, and invariably packed with enthusiasts from all over the region. But for a really startling contrast between stark winter outside and blooming gardens within, no West Coast show could compete with Canada Blooms, the humongous flower and garden festival held in March, when Toronto can be at its least appealing. Back in the day, the festival was housed in the cavernous Metro Toronto Convention Centre and soon became one of the major garden shows in North America, attracting well over a hundred thousand visitors during its five-day run. The opening-night gala was a glittering affair adorned with divas, danseuses and the horticultural who’s who of Upper Canada.
As befits the Big Smoke, everything was big at Canada Blooms—six acres of feature gardens, over a hundred entries in the floral-design competition, and sufficient lectures and demonstrations to earn one a PhD in horticulture. With abundant room, the festival gardens—high on forced bulbs, hardscapes and artistic extravagances—could be lingered over and savoured at a leisurely pace with none of the crowding and jostling that might plague smaller indoor shows. Participants who actually enjoy the ebb and flow of compressed humanity could squeeze into the market area where over two hundred vendors offered plants and accessories. While much of the show was necessarily Toronto-centric, Canada Blooms did strive to live up to its name by bringing in speakers from across the country, and this is how I got my muddy foot in the door, being put up at a nearby swank hotel and descending periodically to the convention centre in order to pontificate to audiences that sometimes numbered six hundred or more. Proceeds from the show went to support many civic gardening projects undertaken by the Garden Club of Toronto, which is an aspect of garden shows I especially appreciate.
Canada Blooms has evolved somewhat from the glory days of the nineties, as it’s now combined with the National Home Show at a new location. But it still offers over two hundred hours of talks and demonstrations, though speakers now tend to be more local than previously (yes, I do miss my splish hotel). Nevertheless, it remains one of Toronto’s top festival events and the tour buses continue to roll in.
But garden trends do come and go, and eventually the worm began to turn, as more and more enthusiasts came to realize just how much work and cost and commitment was involved in maintaining the splendid designer garden they’d installed. A great retraction ensued. Small specialty nurseries tumbled out of business. Gardening television shows dwindled. The glossy magazines either quit or morphed into patio décor advertisements. The bloom was off the rose. And while the really big shows, some after a period of wobbling, managed to survive the shift in mood, many succumbed to the inevitable. One of my favourite smaller shows to bite the dust was the annual “A Celebration of Island Gardening,” put on by the Central Vancouver Island Botanical Gardening Society. Monies raised by this show went toward fulfilling the society’s dream of creating a botanical garden in Nanaimo. Held in March in Nanaimo, the show had none of Toronto’s expansive glitz, but did enjoy a wonderful neighbourliness and a hands-on practicality that had pruning-workshop participants gathered outdoors around a tree while an expert demonstrated. Besides workshops, there were commercial exhibits, educational programs and a speakers’ series.
When it came to outdoor shows later in the season, coastal growers were for a while doubly blessed. The Victoria Flower and Garden Show, previously held indoors in downtown Victoria, moved outdoors to a couple of different locations, including a stint at Royal Roads University on the grounds of stately Hatley Castle, with the Strait of Juan de Fuca and snow-capped Olympic mountains as the perfect backdrop. Theme gardens, speakers and demonstrations, castle tours, a Japanese tea ceremony, a children’s gardening zone and a market area on the lawn made for a delightful experience in a wonderful setting. But, unhappily, the show is no more.
Neither, alas, is Vancouver’s VanDusen Flower and Garden Show, which in its heyday was the largest outdoor show in North America, covering eleven acres of the Great Lawn area of VanDusen Botanical Garden and drawing upward of twenty-five thousand people, with proceeds going to help support the garden. It too kicked off with a gala preview party, typically with a more West Coast bacchanalian flair than Toronto’s tuxedo-and-gown affair. Among the show’s many enticements were theme gardens, a marketplace, a master gardener’s clinic, competitions, new plant introductions, an entertainment stage and horticultural, craft and speakers’ pavilions. Food and cooking were featured as well, with many of the city’s celebrity chefs holding forth in the Gourmet Gallery.
I miss these shows because they were wonderful gathering places for the gardening community. But times change, and I like how the issue of food security and sustainability has caught the imagination of a new generation of growers. Seedy Saturdays are booming, allotment and schoolyard gardens are thriving. Like many other communities, Denman’s now blessed with an influx of smart new gardeners who are taking the growing of edibles to heights scarcely dreamed of back in the hazy seventies. Given the demands of the day, these are healthy developments, but I still miss my splish hotel room.
Wild Pursuits
Nothing stimulates the designing gardener’s imagination more agreeably than an extended ramble through wild places. Nurseries, garden shows, tours and similar events all have their purposes, but none quite compares with the ancient wisdom to be gleaned from Mother Earth herself.
Long ago, garden master Lien-Tschen wrote: “The art of laying out gardens consists in an endeavour to combine cheerfulness of aspect, luxuriance of growth, shade, solitude and repose in such a manner that the senses may be deluded by an imitation of rural nature.” Subscribing to a similar philosophy, Sandy and I took ourselves off for several weeks in March to absorb what we could of nature’s late-winter beauty before the crush of our spring planting.
On Whidbey Island in Washington State’s Puget Sound, we camped alone in a mature Douglas fir forest. Spaced widely apart, the stout old firs rose through a dense understorey of salal, the native broad-leafed shrub whose glossy green leaves are used in commercial floral arrangements. Growing in impenetrable thickets two metres tall, the salal formed softly undulating waves of green against which the emergent boles of the firs showed vividly. The kind of effect you could spend forever trying to achieve with clipping and shearing.
Walking along high sea cliffs in the same park, we frequently stopped to admire the gnarled limbs of firs dwarfed and twisted by wind. Increasingly, gardeners are recognizing the values of dead and dying “wildlife trees” as habitat for insects and the birds that feed on them, as well as for the various creatures that nest in their cavities. The gnarled sea-cliff firs, clinging to life in the teeth of wind and drought, reminded us that even in their extended death throes, old trees can be extraordinarily beautiful.
We hiked along headlands where grassy banks dropped a great depth to the sea, the smooth clarity of their descent as satisfying as a freshly mown lawn, contrasting with the sweep of water in a pleasing interplay of vivid green and shining blue surfaces. Sprawled on the grass of
