Fogbound: Inside the Veiled Garden

I had plans to write a post to unveil my new two-year old garden. It was going to be whimsical, poetic yet measured, with a splash of horticultural detail to bring life to the inner story.

Well, scrap all that.

Instead, I woke this morning and walked down to the pond to find that my garden had been transported to another dimension. 

Suspended in a halo of fog, the plants beckoned forth in perfect stillness, and I stood there, spellbound.

All that was close became sharper while the landscape beyond dissolved into silhouette. The sun dimly flickered like a candle wrapped in gauze.

It was time to explore this strange new ghostworld. 

The greater patterns of the garden revealed themselves in ways I did not recognize. The cedar path opened like a portal to a hidden world.

I slowly walked the curve leading to the heart of the garden to look out onto the shrouded pond and near invisible forest. 

I felt a strange euphoria. A transfigured connection to the plants surrounding me.

Once inside the fog, I saw things differently – how the garden was growing into itself in ways I never expected or imagined. 

I found beauty not simply in colour but in structure and textures. I found nobility in the collapse of heavy stems from incessant rain.  I found poignancy in the final burst of spent blossoms now ready to go to seed. 

With barely a glint of fall in the air, I felt the shadow of the final destination. 

In the making

Why do we make gardens? There is no one right answer. A garden can fulfill many purposes but surely it’s for the experience of not only getting closer to nature, but climbing right inside it.

I feel a bit like the sorcerer’s apprentice. After all, it was Piet Oudolf himself who two years ago offered to look at my design plans and imparted some illuminating advice that inspired me to refine and deepen my approach.

His key suggestion was to define my larger groupings and open up the whole middle of the planting to clear a view to the pond. It actually makes the whole space feel bigger by creating such a contrast in scale. 

There are three different matrices running through various sections of the garden – with combinations layered to activate at various points through the seasons. Piet stressed the idea of blending one matrix into another to create flow and blending each matrix into the block plantings as well. 

This is the spring matrix on the upper slope combining Phlox divaricata ‘Blue Moon’, Tiarella wherryi, Chrysogonum virginianum, the fern Adiantum pedatum and finally the dark-stemmed Aster divaricata ‘Eastern Star’ for the late summer into fall. The matrix provides a home for many early woodland ephemerals and bulbs.

The second matrix is Deschampsia ‘Goldtau’ grass with Astilbe chinensis ‘Purpurlanze, Campanula glomerata ‘Joan Elliot’, Selinum carvifolium and Lobelia siphilitica in white and blue. I’ve planted Sanguisorba ‘Tootsee’ this year, which needs to catch up to the rest.  

I’ve also repeated scatter plants like a summer-blooming Japanese anemone dotted at key points throughout the entire planting to create a sense of unity. I’m getting bonus help from self-seeders like Lobelia siphilitica and L. cardinalis that are happy to fill any gaps.

I worked hard to create these interrelationships to link all the various parts of the plantings into a whole. Someone visiting the garden might not even notice these details, but I know it’s an extremely important aspect of the design in situ. 

My original plant list was strongly based on the specific ecology of the pondside habitat on the woodland edge with ideal conditions for moisture-loving perennials like Rodgersia pinnata ‘Die Schöne’, Aruncus ‘Horatio’ and the grass Deschampsia ‘Goldtau’.

I am all for experimenting and Piet inspired me with a couple of great plant selections to try in the mix like our native Penstemon digitalis. It’s all part of the incredible sense of discovery to see how they all grow and interact with their neighbours, like the super-sized umbellifer I associate with Hummelo, Peucedanum verticillare shown below: 

I also had the benefit of mutual friend and prairie whisperer Roy Diblik look over the finalized planting design to help me bridge the transition from paper to ground. Roy told me about making field adjustments at planting time and using pin flags to mark out the positions. 

His other piece of advice was more cryptic: Only you can lay out and plant the garden.

I understand it now. It’s about establishing our intimacy with plants right from the moment of planting and the signature it leaves in the patterns formed.

I feel a kinship with this garden to everything I learned at Hummelo, in my old un-cottage garden, absorbed through my towers of books, and teased out through innumerable conversations.

I’ve worked to create something wild-ish with a Canadian spin befitting our home on the Niagara escarpment – a UNESCO World Biosphere. There are dream plants with a tinge of the exotic drawn from Piet but I’ve opened my palette to include many local species as well not seen enough in gardens (please click images for the botanical names): 

Questions of ecology

There is much talk these days about designing the ecological garden and what that even means.

I’m travelling to Essex in England later this week to attend The Beth Chatto Symposium on Ecological Planting in the 21st Century with this as the central theme. There’s quite an astonishing list of speakers from all over England and Europe and I’m eager to hear their viewpoints, chime in on discussions, and visit the late Beth Chatto’s garden for the very first time.

Noted English garden writer, Noel Kingsbury has kicked things off with a decidedly skeptical view of ecological design on his blog, as it’s so often promised whilst seldom delivered. Rightly suspicious of greenwashing, he envisions a new garden model called NOE’s or Novel Ornamental Ecosystems where the idea is to create and sustain a genuinely complex ecosystem for plants and wildlife. It’s certainly a great starting point for the explorations to come.  

Pond Life

Meanwhile on my side of the pond here in Mono, it’s a different reality than what urban designers face. I’m plugging my garden into a pre-existing ecosystem, which has evolved over decades to support a vast and diverse pool of life.

When we arrived here, the site of my future garden was utterly neglected. My role has been to create a space for the garden to co-exist with and enhance what is already here. 

Here on the edge of wildness, that requires a different balance to sustain and maintain. Given high levels of moisture and organic matter, my now two-year old plantings are growing faster than I would have ever imagined. The greatest challenge has been to adapt to the varying levels of moisture in the subtle shift from nearly dry slopes to bog-like conditions.

The garden itself has become a magnet for life of all kinds and that includes many weeds, some native, others invasive, eager to join the party.

I’ve come to accept that certain local thugs like horsetail (Equisetum arvensis) are not only here to stay but in fact, are forming an inextricable part of the greater plant matrix. I’m less charitable towards a runway European invasive called Coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara), which blankets the roadsides here. 

The key is to find a balance; I’m now more laissez-faire to let things happen in the garden but also to intervene when necessary.

Lost in the moment

Today all my stratagems and careful thinking went out the window.

I’ve spent so much time planning, researching, selecting, designing, laying out, planting, tweaking that it feels like bliss to simply be in the garden I’ve created. 

On this morning, I could simply experience the garden within its greater landscape.

To feel the atmosphere. Yield to the emotion. Surrender to the sublime.

These are the intangibles one seeks to summon by design and yet, like love, they seemingly arrive only of their own accord.

This was such a day.

I can only shiver with delight at the prospect of life in a garden with the power to shock me out of myself.