2019 Garden Tours: Photo Album

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In 2019, OHS members had the opportunity to visit the gardens of four members on a warm July evening.

Photo credits:  Josie Pazdzior and Jennifer Mix

BeritErickson has transformed her ornamental perennial gardens into habitat gardens.  After losing a tree, she created a pollinator garden to replace the weedy front lawn. It quickly attracted many kinds of bees, butterflies, and birds, as well as interested neighbours.  In the back yard, the sloping, unproductive vegetable garden became a circulating pond and stream where birds bathe and drink daily. A hummingbird garden on the dry-stone terrace includes flowers for nectar, and plants that attract small insects for them to eat.  She also enlarged the remaining beds to form a mini-meadow that is alive with pollinators and beneficial insects.

Berit also has a blog – The Corner Pollinator — which includes information on how to build a pollinator garden.

Edythe Falconer focuses her efforts on creating plant guilds that contain many edible plants, most of them perennial, and plants that attract pollinators. She uses no chemicals in the garden and leaves the grass cuttings for worms on the clover-based lawn.

Caroline da Silva explained how her garden had evolved as her gardening knowledge had expanded.  Her walled garden now houses a growing collection of plants – some common, some more exotic – peonies, lady’s mantles, heucheras, Korean lilacs, cimicifuga, bleeding hearts, roses, barberry shrubs, a smoke bush, and many more. Slowly, the lawn area diminishes, the beds grow, and the patio becomes surrounded by perennial joy.

Tuula Talvila’s front yard is dominated by a mature silver maple over a side bed holding spring flowers such as native merrybells, trilliums, mayapple, and bloodroot, plus an increasing collection of tulips. Later in the season come the shade-tolerant hostas and ligularia. Once the spring bulb show ends, a centre bed with a blue and purple theme fills with columbine, balloon flower, echinops, and three large blue false indigos, followed later by monkshood and aster.   In the sunny backyard, efforts over the past nine summers are turning it from a grassy rectangle into a collection of different garden areas. Original lilacs and peonies have been joined by clematis, ferns, a dwarf ginkgo and a host of rarely encountered native plants growing in profusion.  The yard also came with a vegetable patch including some delicious rhubarb, and asparagus is  the latest addition.