Jane Eaton Hamilton,
a Master Gardener, has become a contented
garden writer. Her column The Adequate
Gardener can be seen at www.icangarden.com
and at www.yougrowgirl.com.
You can also find both her writing and
photography in the October 2004 issue
of Fine Gardening magazine.
Please note that a few
recommendations for nurseries and gardens
in Vancouver are at the end of this page.
You Grow Girl**** "I
like this site. Visit the gardeners' journail
and the Adequate Gardener. Lots of fun."--Tasmanian
Gardener
Hot Link: You Grow Girl.
"A fun site produced by a crew
of hip, plant-loving women from Ontario.
The 'Adequate Gardener' will remind you
that perfection is overrated."--www.organicgardening
Site of the Month: You
Grow Gir l SEPTEMBER 2003
"Sassy, unconventional and totally
passionate about plants, You Grow Girl
is refreshingly, um, fresh. The work of
Toronto-based Gayla Sanders and a host
of volunteer contributors from around
the world, You Grow Girl re-defines gardening
for a new generation of gardeners. Under
a cheeky veneer of scorn for conventional
gardening wisdom lies a solid base of
horticultural information delivered in
Sex in the City style. From Jane Eaton
Hamilton's Adequate Gardener column (I
admit it, I'm addicted) to the catnip
test-off (which brand does your cat prefer?),
the website is full of chuckles, surprises
and, er, fun. Send a You Grow Girl e-card
to a friend, read a plant journal, post
a question to a forum or submit a gardening
tip, whatever. Get real, get gardening
with You Grow Girl."--Canadian
Gardening online
You Grow Girl:
"Turn off your e-mail, order a meal,
hire a car: 24 timesavers for 2004"
#16: "Stop trying to be a perfect
gardener. Take a tip from Vancouver's
Jane Eaton Hamilton, who writes The Adequate
Gardener's growing tips on the website
<http://www.yougrow-girl.com>www.yougrow-girl.com.
("I was so bloody busy working and
cooking and vacuuming and yelling at the
kids and finding time for Sex and the
City that it was all I could do just to
shove the damn thing in the ground,"
says one typical column.)--Globe
and Mail, Style Section, January 2004
The Adequate Gardener:
Fine
Gardening Comes Calling
"Fine Gardening
commissioned an article on poppies, and
they wanted to fly up to Vancouver to
photograph mine."
Joy and I started gardening with one
proviso: We could garden our little hearts
out, landscaping and tilling every inch
of our 120 foot by 33 foot lot into beds
and paths and even grottos, but we would
never-ever-say yes to being on a garden
tour. Sure, we craved the notice. What
gardener doesn't? This is a big green-eyed
beast, this ego stuff. Almost as soon
as Joy and I had started to dig, we longed
to hear that our garden was beautiful,
timeless, serene. Why, look at your drifts!
Your clumps! Your cascades! We're rabid
for praise. We want to know through others'
eyes that what we wish was true really
is true: There's been no other garden
in history as lovely as ours. (Or at least
as lovely as ours was last week. If only
the visitor had seen it when the roses
were in full bloom, when the blue poppies
were flowering, just after the grass was
cut, before the storm dragged the peonies
to the ground.) If we said yes to a tour,
we'd be big shots. We'd be the Hobhouses
of Hatterly. The Sackville-Wests of Simon
Avenue East. The Hinkleys of Huron. It
could happen. It could happen to us! Why
not? Why not us?
But any notice that came our way, we
suspected, would be bound to swell our
heads. Which in turn would destroy the
purity and pleasure of gardening. Stamping
our feet over newly planted bulbs, we
agreed we would never-ever-assent to having
our garden photographed for a magazine.
We began to garden because we love the
process-the peace, the beauty, the relaxation,
the hard physical workout of it. We wanted
the yard to function as respite from the
rush and noise of the city around us:
a place to rest our weary spirits. Loveliness
for the sake of loveliness, not editors.
But boy hardy, never say never. Fine
Gardening commissioned an article on poppies,
and they wanted to fly up to Vancouver
to photograph mine. I admit that I didn't
even contemplate declining. Writing (and
photography) is what I do for a living,
and if a garden shoot is part of the gig,
well, who am I to say no? Values? Out
the window. The editor and I settled on
the last week of June, the likeliest time
for the biggest variety of annual poppies
to be blooming.
"Joy and I began to chant, like some
funereal dirge: Fine Gardening's coming
Fine Gardening's coming Fine Gardening's
coming." This was in March, when
Joy and I were smack in the middle of
a frenzy of renovation. Idiots that we
are, we had decided to install a hottub,
but the porch needed to be demolished,
and a cement pad poured, and a door cut
into the side of the house, and a change
room built, and a deck laid, and trellis
erected, and then, because our electrical
wasn't upgraded, we had to replace our
stove with one fueled by gas, only when
it arrived, it bumped up against the closet,
so we had to knock it out, but the closet
had a sunken floor and a raised ceiling,
necessitating great swacks of drywalling.
Meantime, due to overhead wires, the hottub
was craned into the backyard from the
street-over the neighbour's house. Everything
got delayed and delayed again. Tempers
flared.
Joy and I began to chant, like some funereal
dirge: Fine Gardening's coming Fine Gardening's
coming Fine Gardening's coming. Threatening
the workmen. Threatening each other. Any
upkeep or improvement that might have
been fun given a leisurely schedule was
now accordioned into two short months,
and included such unlikely tasks as oiling
and sharpening garden tools lest the FG
editor catch a glimpse of them. Have you
ever painted trellis? I did, around the
hottub, triangle by repetitious two-sided
triangle until I wanted to twist the stem
of every poppy that had led me down this
vain garden path. Everything had to be
perfect. Do you hear me, Joy? Perfect!
Perfect, I say!
Most foolish of all, I grew annual poppies
in seed flats instead of sewing them where
they belonged, scattered among the beds
where they'd rise in naturalistic waves.
I was paranoid that FG would need to know
the exact variety of every poppy they
saw (like Papaver rhoeas 'Angel's Choir'),
for labeling purposes, and what if I didn't
know, exactly? What if I hadn't quite
memorized every last one? Ever the zealot,
I had snatched up nearly 30 unique seed
packs from a wide assortment of nurseries.
There's a problem transplanting poppies
because of long tap roots which hate disturbance,
so feeling congratulatory and brilliant,
I sprinkled my oh-so-plentiful seeds on
top of luxuriously deep toilet paper tubes
I could, ostensibly, just transfer to
the ground come April. But the seeds only
reluctantly germinated, no matter how
I stood over them huffing and puffing.
More worrying still, there seemed to be
hardly any back-up poppies coming up in
the garden beds.
"Grow, I pled each morning. Grow,
I whispered each evening, and grow they
did, by leaps and bounds, in nitrogen-rich
handfuls of greenery." Oops! It didn't
quite take until April for the toilet
paper tubes to biodegrade. Within days
the constantly damp cardboard disintegrated
into a moldy mess, taking with them down
the drain much of my damped-off crop.
I murmured sweet nothings to the rest,
and they at least flourished. Eventually,
when I could spare a minute from the ferocious
demands of renovation, I tweezed tangled
tap roots from the undifferentiated mess
of potting soil and black moldy toilet
paper tubes, and lowered them like rescuers
on ropes into pre-dug holes. Grow, I pled
each morning. Grow, I whispered each evening,
and grow they did, by leaps and bounds,
in nitrogen-rich handfuls of greenery.
Oops again. In March, just as soon as
I accepted the assignment, Joy and I had
dumped the finest top soil we could find,
half a foot of it, all over the beds in
a foolhardy attempt to impress the editor
with the lushness of our garden.
It was lush, really lush, but with hardly
any flowers. There was nary a poppy bud
to be seen.
Late June arrived, and with it the editor.
Our garden was beside itself with beauty,
putting on a show to rival New York's
Broadway, except there was-
Well, you can see it coming, in this slapstick
idiocy I call my life, and you're right.
Yup — not a single annual poppy
in bloom. No somniferums, no rhoeas, no
nudicaule, no californicas. The article
had to be entirely illustrated with poppies
from other people's gardens.
Hubris, that's what the whole thing was.
Mine. All around town annual poppies bent
in gentle breezes, letting the editor
from Fine Gardening know the failure wasn't
Vancouver's oddly cold spring, but rather
me, the inadequate gardener, so desperate
to impress that I'd blown the whole experience.
And my poppies? They bloomed as if sniggering
at me, hundreds upon hundreds, exactly
two weeks late, splendidly.
Nurseries
Phoenix Perennials (www.phoenixperennials.com
<http://www.phoenixperennials.com>
) (Richmond) -- One of the best in Greater
Vancouver for selection and cool stuff.
Southlands Nursery (Vancouver) -- A beautiful
nursery with great plants (and an attitude).
Rainforest Nurseries (Langley) -- A really
good nursery.
Select Roses (Langley) -- A rose specialist
and a good friend. Worth a visit in June
to see the rose gardens in bloom.
Fraser Thimble Farms (Saltspring Island)
-- One of the best nurseries in Canada
for rare plants.
Heronswood (Kingston, Washington State)
-- If you're coming to this neck of the
woods you should consider visiting Heronswood.
It's one of the plant meccas of North
America.
Saltspring
Island -- Check out Parkside for water
plants, Fraser Thimble for rare plants,
and Bamboo Ranch for bamboo.
Gardens to Visit
Van Dusen: (Vancouver)A botanical display
garden. Well worth a visit.
UBC Botanical Garden (UBC, Vancouver):
A scientific botanical garden -- not as
much focus on display as Van Dusen but
with more interesting plants -- 400 species
and cultivars of Rhododendrons, one of
the largest alpine gardens in North America.
Nitobe Memorial Garden (UBC, Vancouver):
A classicly designed Japanese garden on
campus. Quite beautiful. If you go out
to campus to the gardens you should check
out the Museum of Anthropology -- both
the building and the collections are world
famous and very much worth a visit.
Butchart Gardens (Near Victoria): Not
my favourite but worth a visit. They grow
millions of annuals a year and plant them
out so this place will blow you away with
colour and display.
The Horticultural Centre of the Pacific
(Victoria) (http://www.hcp.bc.ca/): I
haven't been here yet but some gardening
friends really enjoyed it.
Transportation
Within Vancouver proper (Vancouver itself
is just one of 28 municipalities that
make up Greater Vancouver) the bus system
is very good for getting around to various
tourist sites: UBC, Van Dusen, Stanley
Park, etc. Not as good for getting around
to nurseries within Vancouver and in adjacent
municipalities. You could arrive in Vancouver
and do the sites here on transit for a
few days then rent a car for doing sites
further afield.
Other notes
Tofino and Pacific Rim National Park (Long
Beach) are amazing.
In the other direction the Okanagan Valley
in the Interior is beautiful -- lots of
wineries, some of which are going for
a Napa Valley-type visitor experience
(Mission Hill in particular). Elysium
gardens sounds interesting.
--resource list compiled by Gary Lewis
(owner Phoenix Perennials) and Jane Eaton
Hamilton, Master Gardener
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