Garden Areas

The South Entrance is our most recent garden bed. It was planted in late summer 2025—but it had lived in my imagination forever.

I fell in love with a garden entrance embraced by hostas—solid-coloured, variegated, and quilted-leaved. It offered variety without feeling overwhelming.

My second inspiration was an arbour in England. It showed you where the garden led but didn’t reveal the entire garden. Pure poetry.

My 2026 plan is to build an arbour that matches the pergola on a slightly smaller scale, creating rhythm and rhyme in the garden.

This was our focal-point era. The yard was beautiful and gave us joy, but it felt a little out of focus.

Then Harry found a pedestal and a low, wide urn. Both were battered and most definitely from the clearance section.

Focal point found.

We placed the urn where the main garden meets the paths leading north and south. The pergola was still at the committee stage at that point, but the urn gave the garden a sense of direction.

It took time to find plants that could thrive in such a wide, shallow container, but I think we finally nailed it in 2026.

The gardens surrounding the deck have always been our orphaned children. They weren’t really visible from the deck, so they were easy to ignore. 

Before we built the pergola and patio, there wasn’t much reason for the plantings to bother us.

It became a place for leftovers, cast-offs, and extras.

Case in point: the collar of lilies along the north side of the deck. Every year, when Harry owned the garden centre, there would be a collection of unlabelled, less-than-perfect lily bulbs. He has never liked throwing out a perfectly good plant.

So—lilies planted.

It was serendipitous. The flowers grew to exactly the right height, peeking over the edge of the deck like a floral balcony.

Some of the best discoveries in life happen by chance.

The patio was another 2025 addition. Again, the vision was not new—it simply required the time and motivation to make it a reality.

We built a dining table to match the pergola and the future arbour, and chose grey paving stones to complement the slate patio and crushed-stone pathways. 

This shady part of our yard has quickly become a favourite place. Even on days when the temperature approaches 30°C, we can relax here with a cold beverage, surveying our garden kingdom.

Harry likes to joke that the best part of our garden is the additional 20 acres maintained and mowed by the city.

Our lot backs onto a schoolyard and public green space. When our kids were small, I used to say that my best parenting tool was a pair of binoculars—I could see all the way to the playground.

The challenge has been to retain the view while creating some privacy. Carefully placed trees and shrubs shield us from most sight lines along the pathways without closing us off from the park.

That connection matters. We love the steady parade of neighbours and dog walkers who pass by each day. One group we have nicknamed the Paw Patrol, and its leader has been part of our lives for almost 50 years.

Our garden does not end at the property line. It continues into the park, through the trees, along the pathways, and into the community around us.

Back in the 1990s, water gardens were on trend. Harry’s department at the garden centre carried all the hardware needed to build your own pond, and he figured that if he was selling it, he should have some practical experience.

The pond has been one of our greatest learning experiences. How do you make it leakproof? How do you attract birds? Which plants perform best?

The current pond is our third version. The waterfalls have been reworked, and we have removed bird beaches and planting shelves along the way. At this point, we seem to have created a pond that works for us.

Watch our Garden Journal for posts about the lessons we have learned along the way.

Containers are my gardening playground. I get to experiment with colour, texture, and scale with only a one-season commitment. If something doesn’t work, we can try something completely different the following year. I have even torn apart a container mid-season and replanted it.

Containers also give me a chance to trial plants that are not reliably hardy in our garden, such as poker plants (Kniphofia) and Japanese maples.

Over the years, we have collected more than 25 pots. Some are Harry’s favourite “too good to throw out” containers, held together with Gorilla Glue. 

There is absolutely no plan or pattern. This is the part of the garden where we throw caution to the wind—and somehow, beauty happens.

This is the ugly duckling of the garden. Despite all the gardening influencers on TikTok or Instagram showing off an adorable shed, in reality, it can become a dumping ground. And when your son is a landscaper, even more treasures seem to find their way to the side yard.

Until last year, friends visiting the garden came in right through the storage area—hardly the best first impression. With the addition of a gate to the park, as well as a gate on the east side, we now have a proper garden entrance.

Add a garden tour in support of refugee families, and the side yard is looking almost Instagram-perfect.

We have big plans for 2027.

We’ll start by building a dry creek that meanders from the gate to the lower corner of the driveway. We’ve got some boulders near the pond that can be conscripted for the project.

The plantings are where the real challenge begins. We are going to attempt a Piet Oudolf-inspired design. It will need to be adapted to a much smaller space and a more limited plant palette.

But we love a challenge.