Home » Home & Style » Living With Nature » Bloom where we are planted

Bloom where we are planted

© Van Waffle

For Wesley Ford and Carol Wallace: when my words touched you, you inspired this story. Also for the whole fabulous garden of people who helped make GLBT Pride happen at Suite101.

The glory of my mother's garden is its irises, shades of deep violet and pale pink, sapphire and topaz, many salvaged from the half-forgotten borders of an older generation of farm and house wives.

At farmers market on a Saturday morning in April, Paul Shepherd sells wildflowers and shrubs started painstakingly from seeds he has collected and slowly established in his plantings at Grand Moraine Growers. At this time of year, the most beautiful is the simple white clasp of bloodroot.

A career gardener named Bob likes to make topiary of everything he sees, and most magnificent are the tight-balled tree-like forms of hibiscus with their blaring bright trumpets.

When I had a large garden, my pride was the big, bulbous, ugly-as-sin but rich-as-heaven brandywine tomatoes. I rarely eat a tomato I haven't grown myself, and it has been some years now since I had room for a vegetable plot.

Each one unique

Every garden is as unique as the gardener, and in each one the selection of plants is different, usually with one or a few specimens the grower specially favours. Just like the diversity of plants in a spring woodland, or patchworked across the prairies, individual humans have peculiar ways of growing, and their own ideas.

We can't follow every whim with our gardens. We must respect the dictates of soil and microclimate, different for everyone. In the clearing beside my cottage I cherish all the native and exotic species of fern I can afford to collect. They flourish in the cool, moist summer shade of Central Ontario. It's something I would never dream of trying three hours south in the hot-baked sidewalk border outside my city flat. There a 'New Dawn' rose is my pleasure, opening her shining fragrance every morning despite July's sultry heat.

Yes, we must let nature guide our passions, inform our vision. But the rules are few. Whatever our culture or creed, native tongue or sexual persuasion, the purpose of gardening is to grow something of beauty.

Diverse endeavours

Each of us has a different notion of aesthetics. It might be a collection of astonishing tuberous begonias in a bed of luscious colour. Or a pure white star magnolia standing solitary in the midst of a green sanctuary. Fragrance, flavour or texture will be more important to other people. Some gentleman will devote his finest days to manicuring a functional hedge along the boundary of his yard. Who is to tell any of us we are wrong?

The copyright of the article Bloom where we are planted in Living With Nature is owned by . Permission to republish Bloom where we are planted in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.