The Wedding Planter: Our Big Day in the Country

It was a coming together of people, plants, and pond life in our reimagined log cabin universe. It was an all-outdoor declaration of love and an occasion for my long-time girlfriend Troy and I to seal the deal with a ring.

It was our Big Day in the Country. And we’d been planning a pond-side wedding (and I’d been weeding the plantings) for months.

A week before the Big Day, the weather forecast grimly called for rain.

Good for the garden. Not so much for weddings.

For many of our closest friends and family from overseas, this was their first time to see what we’d been up to for the past five years.

And yes, it was a public debut of sorts for my wildscaped gardens, many still freshly planted, circling around the cabin and cascading down to the pond.

In a late wet spring, I was thrilled that the tall blue Camassia leichtlinii and white Allium (‘Mount Everest’), Phlox divaricata ‘Blue Moon’ and Aquilegia canadensis had lingered long enough to catch our wedding day.

There is something infinitely satisfying and poignant in the moments where one’s garden and life intersect in vivid, indelible ways.

On this morning, my bride-to-be Troy stepped into a boat to be rowed around the pond before making the walk to a wild arbor festooned with birch boughs, Spirea, and Queen Anne’s Lace.

Our rather sublime processional music was Björk, All is Full of Love.

The guests gathered in a shady glade to take in the spectacle and cheer when moved or amused, which appeared to be often.

By some meteorological miracle, the promised rains held off.

Once vows were exchanged and sealed with a kiss we were official. I had the pleasure to walk with a few folks round the garden, notably our guest of honour, my 94-year old mother, Joan, who was thrilled to see and feel the flowers.

This memory is now forever woven into the curve of the garden path.

The Pond Garden Matrix grows up

Now in its third year, the wild-ish pond garden has exploded with growth and is now, as Piet might say, ready to perform.

There has emerged a distinctly Canadian and northern character to the garden and its plantings. It reveals itself through structure, mood, and restraint rather than being a non-stop flower show.

It is also scaled to reflect the quiet majesty of its surroundings.

Three designed matrices weave their way through the garden space, each with its own planting community and time of season to bloom and fade. Wherever two or more converge, they are subtly blended into each other with outliers – creating yet more variations on the planting communities.

Here nature is a force with a life of its own. Far wilder than any city garden, I’ve learned by necessity to adopt a different approach to its care and management.

I do not seek to control so much as influence its evolution, and after a series of fine-tunings each spring, I intervene only when necessary. Local native elements like Horsetail (Equisetum arvense) are now an intrinsic part of the garden matrix. For many gardeners, this would be anathema but I’ve chosen to embrace it.

Native asters and mints have seeded themselves about, and I choose to edit rather than banish them.

There are legions of crickets, grasshoppers and slugs with fortunately a small army of toads and salamanders to keep them in balance.

I’ve come to believe that for gardening on any scale, it’s about knowing how to pick your battles.

You can only do so much on any given day. So give yourself some latitude and find joy in the process.

There are small miracles too.

Late-pluming Astilbe chinensis ‘Purpurlanze’, which I’ve divided and then divided again over 15 years has now self-seeded for the very first time. I didn’t even know that was possible in my zone. The proud parent gets set to bloom below.

There are tall stories as well. 2.7 metres to be exact. A solitary Peucedanum verticillare, of Hummelo fame is shooting for a local record for tallest-ever umbellifer.

After the quiet lull that follows spring, the garden is now revving up for its mid-summer glory.

As I twirl the simple gold ring now on my finger, I happily think of my new bride and greatest friend, newer gardens in the making, shaded pots that need planting out, and all the changes to come.

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Next up

Troy and I are shortly setting off to Chicago for the 2019 PPA (Perennial Plant Association) Conference. It promises to be a supreme convergence for all things New Perennial, with Piet Oudolf and Roy Diblik set to deliver the keynote talks and discussions. There will be much catching up with garden friends along with a chance to revisit their local masterwork, the Lurie Garden in Millennium Park on its 15th Anniversary, designed by Piet and planted in 2004 as his first major public commission in the U.S.

One last note. The New Perennialist recently won a 2019 Silver Media Award for Best Blog Writing from Garden Comm (formerly the Garden Writers Association.) The winning story was about my trip to help plant a Piet project in Delaware, an experience which has deeply influenced every garden I’ve made since.

Apparently, very good things can happen when you leave your own backyard.

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