Category Archives: Public Gardens

The Once and Future Toronto Botanical Garden

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I visited the Toronto Botanical Garden this week, my third visit this year. Given the constraints placed on the garden (and I’ll get into those later), it looked pretty good. The three gardeners and volunteers have tackled most of the weeds in the main borders. The beautiful Piet Oudolf-designed Entry Border was its usual boisterous self, the spiky, white rattlesnake master consorting with the blue Russian sage….

….. and the bees were buzzing in the blazing stars (Liatris spicata).

The Entry Border sported new rails to keep out unruly, selfie-snapping visitors….

…. with a few noticeable plant additions that might not have been strictly ‘Oudolfian’, like the brilliant orange daylilies behind the rampaging Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firedance’, below  As I wrote in my 2-part, 2017 blog on the design of the border, Piet Oudolf-Meadow Maker–Part 1 and Part 2, the border was funded by the Garden Club of Toronto and constructed in 2006. Piet Oudolf recommended a full-time gardener as part of the ongoing maintenance of the entry garden. In his work with Chicago’s Lurie Garden (read my blog on the Lurie here), there was a multi-year ongoing relationship between him and the Lurie’s gardeners; that did not happen at the TBG due to financial constraints The complexity of this garden, its self-seeding plants and the ongoing assessment of performance stretches the capacity of a severely underfunded garden (I’ll get to that later, too). 

However, when I rounded the corner from the entry border to the entrance courtyard itself, I was dismayed. Red and blue salvias in Victorian ribbon planting with canna lilies. It felt a little like being in a 1950s municipal park.  

What happened to the creativity that should be the hallmark of a botanical garden, even in the current straitened circumstances?  The little square near the entrance is prime real estate, intended to be the greeting card for all who come to the TBG. In spring, it always hosts a colourful mix of bulbs; later swishing grasses and interesting annuals and biennals. But this?

These urns used to be filled with wonderful annuals and tropicals…

…now they’re filled with dwarf hemlocks. Just plain hemlocks.

Around the corner in the garden flanking the water channel in the Westview Terrace, there were impatiens plants sprinkled throughout the perennials. Given the prevalence of devastating IDM (Impatiens Downy Mildew) over the past decade, it was a shock to see them. But it was also disappointing from a creative point of view to have your grandmother’s impatiens in what should be an inspiring border filled with high performance perennials.    

And my spirits sagged further when I walked into the Edibles Garden – or what used to be the productive, instructive, nutritious Edibles Garden – to find it filled with bedding annuals in a new Trial Garden. The “Wild for Bees” installation would not be seeing a lot of activity with the annuals chosen here.

I know Ball Flora well; I’ve been to their display gardens outside Chicago as part of a bloggers’ tour. They do good work and I’m sure they’re happy to be featured here and make it an attractive partnership, financially speaking, for the TBG. But expanses of annuals are really not showing off what should be cutting edge planting design for a garden like ours.  

Not to mention that the Edibles Garden as it was conceived was a source of hundreds of pounds of annual donations to the North York Food Bank. Here are some of my photos from previous years. This was 2014.

And 2016’s edibles.

A visitor from Victoria looked quizzical. When I asked what he thought, he said “They seem to be growing very common plants here.”  Indeed. Instead of lantanas and petunias, what about a garden of fragrance in front of this hedge, with lilies, nicotiana, dianthus, scented peonies, heliotrope, phlox, dwarf lilac, daphne, hyacinths, clethra, etc?  The TBG is light on small ‘theme gardens’ that help people design their own spaces

A bed in the Beryl Ivey Knot Garden had been planted bizarrely with Scotch thistle (Onopordum acanthium), which is as invasive a self-seeder as it is gawky. Why it would be plunked in this formal space is beyond me.

When I walked towards the perennial borders, I passed the window-box planters adjacent to the Spiral Garden. There must have been left-over red and blue salvia because these looked pedestrian, too.

In 2016, I wrote a blog on the TBG’s planter designs featuring the great creativity of the garden’s previous horticulturist Paul Zammit. The photo below shows three years of designs in these planters.

Sadly, through a lack of funding and administrative support, the TBG lost the creative minds of both the previous chief horticulturists, Paul Zammit and Paul Gellatly. My purpose here is not to retread the institutional woes, exacerbated greatly by Covid, that led to the May 22nd Globe & Mail story. It is to reflect on what made the garden brilliant as an underfunded 4-acre jewel and what looms ahead as a major 35-acre botanical garden (final concept plan below), once the merger with Edwards Gardens is complete.

On that note, I attended all three community engagement meetings with landscape architects and city planners, so I know a little of what went into the planning of the new garden, as spearheaded skilfully by former Executive Director Harry Jongerden with creative input by landscape architect W. Gary Smith, below, pointing out details on the screen. 

I care very much about the garden. As well as being a long-time member of the TBG and the Civic Garden Centre before that, I have written many blogs about it: the spring tulip extravaganza; the Blossom Party; the Woman-to-Woman luncheon; the annual Through the Garden Gate Tour, and more. Since May 2007, I tallied 152 visits to photograph the garden; these provided me with the images for the seasonal photo gallery that was on the TBG’s website for several years….

……as well as for my blogs and images the garden needed from time to time. Below is garden philanthropist Kathy Dembroski at the 2018 luncheon; she and her husband George Dembroski….

….were the lead donors for the award-winning Silver LEED building opened in their name, The George and Kathy Dembroski Centre for Horticulture.

In my 33-year career as a freelance garden writer and photographer, I’ve also visited and written about a vast number of public botanic gardens, from New York, below, to Chicago, Cape Town’s Kirstenbosch, Christchurch, Kew Gardens, Los Angeles, Malaysia, Saigon and Kyoto, as well as favourite Vancouver gardens like VanDusen and UBC Botanical, among many others. I’ve also spent a lot of time in privately-funded public gardens like Chanticleer near Philadelphia and Wave Hill in the Bronx and at the iconic High Line in New York City. So I am very familiar with a broad variety of public gardens, large and small.

My husband Doug and I have been regular TBG donors for many years. As well, I have contributed various articles and donated photos to the Trellis magazine (my cover story on cottage gardening, below).

Our daughter was married at the TBG in October 2012, and we have beautiful memories of that showery autumn day.

I especially loved seeing Meredith and her attendants standing in front of the donor panels featuring my own fern photos. Our rental of the facility nine years ago tallied $5,700 for her wedding, so I know how devastating 16 months of Covid closure has been for TBG rental revenues….

….. not to mention the loss of sales from two consecutive annual plant sales and the summer fundraiser garden tour.

*******

Why am I writing this blog? It’s not to trumpet my work in gardening, but to share a concern I have. Following the TBG’s Annual General Meeting in June – an online meeting that painted everything as rosy and was carefully scripted to exclude any critical commentary from members upset with board decisions – acting Board Chair Gordon Ashworth encouraged members to send in any issues they might have. This is my response.  In a word, it has to do with MONEY. At 35 acres, the expanded TBG will present both a great opportunity and an ongoing challenge to bring ground-breaking horticultural and environmental displays to Greater Toronto’s 6 million people, as well as providing inspired educational programs for children and adults. Ironically, the TBG’s current fiscal challenges have come at the same time as the federal and provincial governments announced a $2.2 million investment in Burlington’s Royal Botanical Gardens, below, as part of its 25-year master plan. Without taking anything away from the RBG and notwithstanding its 300 acres of gardens and 2400 acres of land stewardship, it is not positioned in the centre of the 4th largest metropolis in North America.

In 2012, I attended a city council meeting at City Hall to support the TBG’s then Executive Director, Aldona Satterthwaite as she begged for more financial support than the paltry $25,000 the city has traditionally given the garden in order to overcome a small deficit caused by the lack of potential revenue owing to the protracted parking lot renovation, a lot used mutually by Edwards Gardens and the TBG. I made the photo below in spring 2012; the work went on for months and months. Naturally, facilities rentals declined sharply. Through the efforts of Ward 15 City Councillor Jaye Robinson, bridge funding was secured to keep the garden solvent.

At that City Hall meeting, former Councillor Janet Davis (my doppelgänger) asked me during a scrum if I knew how much other gardens charged for admission. I answered that most had an admission fee except ours. In the case of privately-run, 55-acre Butchart Gardens in Victoria, which receives more than a million visitors annually, it is very steep, reflecting the cost of running a world-class garden (not a botanical garden, but useful for comparison). In 2013 when I photographed the entrance, below, it was $28; it’s now $36.  Well-run, creative gardens cost money. It’s that simple.  

I make this point because one of the major conditions in the expansion plan between the City of Toronto and the TBG is that admission to the expanded 35-acre botanical garden be free. At first glance, this is in keeping with ‘park’ policies; you don’t pay to visit High Park or any of the city’s many excellent parks, and Edwards Gardens is a large ravine park currently accessed via the renovated parking lot whose significant parking fees now thankfully accrue to the TBG. But once the TBG and the park are amalgamated, is free entry really the right financial vision for a botanical garden in the 4th largest city in North America?  Or is it a lack of vision rooted in unreality?  Or just thinking small? Here is a table I made with the admission costs and membership fees of botanical gardens I’ve visited. 

BOTANICAL GARDENAdult EntryAnnual Membership
   
Toronto Botanical GardenFree$45
Royal Botanical Garden$19.50$85
Montreal Botanical Garden$16.50/21.50*$45
VanDusen Botanical Garden$11.70/8.40*$45
UBC Botanical Garden$10$55
Butchart Gardens$36$69 (annual pass)
New York Botanical Garden$28-23$98
Chicago Botanic Garden$24-26*$99-$72*
Missouri Botanical Garden$14-6*$50
Denver Botanic Garden$15$55
San Francisco Botanical Garden$12/9*$70
   
*Variable pricing due to weekend/weekday, seasonal, or geographic parameters.  

The now defeated Rail Deck Park project proposal is a cautionary tale of planning without financing. In a May 13th editorial, the Toronto Star put the blame for the failure of the Rail Deck Park at the feet of the city and Mayor John Tory. “In 2017, the city designated the rail corridor as parkland but still didn’t move to acquire the air rights, through a negotiated purchase or expropriation if necessary. And it didn’t earmark the estimated $1.7 billion the project would cost or even explain how it intended to fund Toronto’s “next great gathering space.”  It would be disastrous if our expanded TBG suffered from the same lack of realistic financial planning. Its needs will be much greater than a municipal park.

In her opening remarks during the June AGM, Councillor Jaye Robinson said that “getting the Master Plan through city council was not for the faint of heart. Very little support, quite frankly, but I got it through by compromising and we’re very excited to see this institution grow to 35 acres.” She also said that she and Ward 25 Councillor Jennifer McKelvie moved a motion to make 2022 The Year of the Garden in Toronto. That will be great — but why so little support?

We can only hope that life will return to some semblance of normal before long, and that activities will resume that require rental facilities like the TBG, thus returning it to a level of financial security. Development personnel will start knocking on doors looking for donors for the exciting expansion. And the lead landscape design firm PMA Landscape Architects will begin rolling out detailed designs for the new garden areas. The relationship between current city park personnel and TBG staff and volunteers, like those below, will hopefully be engineered to co-exist smoothly. But my fervent wish is that the amalgamation comes with a better financial framework from the city, province and federal governments that recognizes the real importance of the botanical garden to Canada’s largest city and its diverse and growing population.

On that note, I leave you with a little musical glimpse at the other population that the Toronto Botanical Garden serves.

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Casa Loma’s Woodland Wildflowers

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Exactly 10 years ago today, I had one of my best spring garden visits anywhere. Except it just happened to be right here in Toronto at one of our biggest ‘tourist attractions’, Casa Loma.  But back on May 12, 2011, I didn’t bother staying inside the castle (which I had toured many times) and instead went right out to the garden. I passed by the Asian-themed garden with its pretty azaleas…..

….. and walked down the slope past the bright-magenta Rhododendron dauricum.   For geology fans, this hillside is actually the ancient shoreline of Lake Ontario’s Ice Age predecessor, Lake Iroquois.

I slowed down completely as I came to the staircase near the bottom, where native Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) were at their very peak.

Virginia bluebells might be one of the northeast’s most splendid springtime sights!  Like many of our native spring wildflowers, they’re ‘ephemeral’, meaning after they flower and set seed, they just die back completely… until next spring.

I had a destination in mind, and it was the Woodland Garden with its beautiful paper birches and a spectacular underplanting of some of the best spring natives, as well as a few delicate Asian groundcovers that added their own charms.  Here we have Virginia bluebells with lots of lovely ostrich ferns (Matteucia struthiopteris).

An ascending path made from grit and flagstone slabs takes you back up the Iroquois shoreline so you can enjoy all the shade-lovers. Here we have the three principal actors:  Virginia bluebell (M. virginica), yellow wood poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) and ostrich ferns.  (Note how much bigger the wood poppy’s flowers are than that confusing, weedy, invasive doppelgänger with the small yellow flowers, greater celandine, Chelidonium majus.)

I love yellow-with-blue in the garden, and this is one of the finest duos!

Ontario’s provincial floral emblem, shimmering-white, showy trilliums (T. grandiflorum) add to the display.

Virginia bluebells are also lovely with yellow merrybells (Uvularia grandiflora).

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I’ve never identified the buckeye seedlings that were popping up in this planting, but given it’s mostly native, perhaps Ohio buckeye (Aesculus glabra)?

There were also epimediums in this garden, like the red-flowered E. x rubrum you can see at the bottom left, below,

… and here, with Virginia bluebells.

Yellow-flowered Epimedium x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’ was featured in the woodland as well……

…. and orange-flowered Epimedium x warleyense ‘Orange Queen’.

Finally, a pure-white trillium with E. x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’.

Whoever said it was terrible to garden in shade?

*****

If you want to read more about spring designs for shade, have a look at my blog on the Montreal Botanical Garden’s fabulous Jardin d’Ombre, A Shade Garden Master Class.

One Steppe at a Time

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Last June, during my visit to Denver with the Garden Bloggers’ Fling, I spent a little extra time in the fascinating Steppe Garden at Denver Botanic Gardens. I had been there once before during a late April visit when wild Tulipa greigii, Fritillaria pallidiflora and Iris bucharica from the Central Asian steppe were in flower. I blogged about my 2018 spring visit at the time.

But a year later, it had filled in nicely and I was fascinated with all the unusual plants. As DBG says on its website, “The Steppe Garden is an ambitiously diverse collection of tough and unique plants from steppe biomes, some of the most rugged habitats on Earth. This quarter-acre garden brings together the North American, South American, Central Asian and Southern African steppes to explore the diversity and similarities of their cold, dry grasslands and shrublands”. Designed by Didier Design Studio and installed in 2016, the garden is still filling in. The photo below (courtesy of Denver Botanic Gardens) shows an aerial view of the Steppe Garden as it was in 2017. I have numbered the individual gardens: 1) Patagonia; 2 and 3) Central Asia; 4) cultivated steppe (hybrids and plants influenced by human hands; 5) Southern Africa; and 6) Intermontane steppe of North America.

Drone aerial of the Steppe Garden – 2017

Let’s take a walk through, below. That’s South Africa on the left and the Central North American steppe of the Great Plains on the right. Denver, of course, is part of that steppe biome and DBG has focused on the unique ecology of steppe plants in this space. 

As the sign says, the plants found in this garden are native to eastern Colorado and grow in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

In June, that means penstemons! Here we see a mix of lavender-purple Rocky Mountain penstemon (P. strictus), pink showy penstemon (P. grandiflorus) and wispy foxtail barley (Hordeum jubatum).

I grow showy penstemon myself at our cottage north of Toronto and I know what a tough hombre it is for dry, stony soil. But it looks so refined in the Steppe Garden, below.

Just outside the Steppe Garden itself is the Laura Smith Porter Plains Garden, featuring plants endemic to what was once native shortgrass prairie, with seeds sourced within 30 miles of Denver. Under the frieze here is soapweed yucca (Yucca glauca) and blue Nuttall’s larkspur.

Walk out the path and you get a feel for the shortgrass steppe or shortgrass prairie of the Great Plains. It’s these wonderful approximations of ‘what used to be’ that make Denver Botanic Gardens so special.

Here is Nuttall’s larkspur (Delphinium nuttallianum), named for Thomas Nuttall, the Yorkshire-born botanist who collected extensively in the United States from the Great Lakes to Kansas, Wyoming and Utah, then to California and Hawaii, followed by time in the Pacific Northwest.

Plains prickly pear cactus (Opuntia polyacantha), another shortgrass native, is in bloom in June.

Let’s go back into the Steppe Garden and enjoy this view over the water to the Central Asian Steppe Garden.  

As the sign states, this is the largest steppe on the planet

Visitors walk through a microcosm of the species that grow in the Central Asian Steppe. I love that the gardens here look more like meadows than botanical garden collections, but each geographic section has been carefully sourced and the plantings designed by the Steppe Collections curator and plant explorer Michael H. Bone (more on Mike later).

The Altai mountains are in the Central Asian Steppe and located where China, Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together. And this is the Altai onion, Allium altaicum.

This is Angelica brevicaulis from the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

I love the Eurasian horned poppies (Glaucium corniculatum) and photographed them growing with roses in the garden of Panayoti Kelaidis, senior curator and director of outreach at Denver Botanic Gardens. (Read my blog on Panayoti’s Denver garden here.)

Most gardeners are very familiar with opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), which has long been naturalized in Central Asia, as well as many other regions of the world..

Phlomoides oreophila is a new plant for me, native from Central Asia to Northwest China.

Leaving the Central Asia Steppe, we come to a part of the garden that is still being developed, the South American Steppe, featuring the plants of Patagonia.

Looking over the water again, we see the main path through the Steppe Garden featuring two beautifully crafted stone sculptures. Behind is the South African Steppe.

Let’s take a closer look at the farthest sculpture, which is actually a beautiful water feature that serves as a special crevice garden for chasmophytes, i.e. plants that make their homes in narrow openings in rocky outcrops in the steppe regions. The open part is a trickling water fountain.

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Look at these little jewels! I photographed the plants below, including the lilac-flowered Iberis simplex (I. taurica), in April 2018. It grows in the Taurus Mountains in Southern Turkey.

Here is the top of the water feature in June 2019….

….. and another view. What exquisite stonework!

The South African Steppe is the star here, in my opnion, given DBG’s long history with plants from the region.. Let’s have a look at some of the plants, such as….

…. the strange-looking caterpillar grass (Harpochloa falx).

Apart from plants growing in the large, rocky structures, there are some beautiful container vignettes that will inspire visitors with restricted space – like this assemblage of species from southern Africa.

I love this border with blue cape forget-me-not (Anchusa capensis)and magenta ice plant (Delosperma cooperi).

And as a confirmed bee photographer, it was fun to capture a honey bee nectaring on the anchusa.

Here’s a long view of this section in the South African Steppe.

South Africa, of course, represents the largest floristic province in the world, and the Steppe Garden divides plants into the Western South African Steppe….

…. and the much more lush Eastern South African Steppe.

There is a lot of fireweed (Senecio macrocephalus) in bloom in the eastern steppe in June.

And kniphofias, of course, are signature South African plants.

Look at this brilliant stone work.

Another grouping of containers highlights plants of the Eastern South African Steppe.

But Denver Botanic Gardens is famous for its ice plants, and they are featured prominently here in the part of the Steppe Garden devoted to garden introductions.

This one is called Delosperma Jewel of Desert Grenade. Isn’t it lovely?

More examples of the delosperma cultivated rainbow of colours, as seen in the South Africa Steppe.

I know I’ve probably missed a lot of detail and might even have mixed up the odd steppe region in my rush through the garden, but I do consider myself fortunate to have met the garden’s curator, Mike Bone, aka #steppesuns, below, this March in Toronto when he spoke to members of the Ontario Rock Garden Society. Mike is an enthusiastic plant propagator, seed collector and explorer who has spent decades working at DBG, acquiring plants from the four great steppe regions of the world and getting them displayed not just at his own garden, but other botanical gardens throughout the world.  I know his mentor, Panayoti Kelaidis is very fond of Mike – or “Ghengis Bone” as he calls him in this blog he wrote about travelling with him in Mongolia.

They even collaborated on a 2015 book called Steppes: The Plants and Ecology of the World’s Semi-Arid Regions,co-authored by Dan Johnson (whose garden I blogged about recently), Mike Kintgen and Larry Vickerman, all of Denver Botanic Gardens.  As the book’s description states, “steppes occupy enormous areas on four continents. Yet these ecosystems are among the least studied on our planet. Given that the birth and evolution of human beings have been so intimately interwoven with steppe regions, it is amazing that so few attempts have been made to compare and quantify the features of these regions.”

I’m so happy to have had the chance to visit DBG’s fascinating Steppe Garden, and look forward to exploring it in other seasons in the future.

The High Plains Environmental Center

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Long ago, in the mid-1990s, I attended a presentation here in Toronto on “new urbanism”. It was focused on a development and planning approach that sees communities built according to principles of diversity of use and population; pedestrian and transit opportunities rather than being centred on automobiles; accessible public spaces and institutions; and a “celebration of local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.” (Source: Congress for The New Urbanism). One of the speakers was a local developer who was keen to build a community featuring many of the tenets of new urbanism. I was fascinated by his dream but secretly felt he would have a tough time competing economically with the treeless subdivisions of cookie-cutter, chock-a-block houses springing up north, east, and west of Toronto’s urban core. My city’s developers had been paving farm fields for years to build residential shrines to sprawl and the automobile. Yes, they were ‘affordable’ suburban homes for the middle-class in a growing metropolis of more than 6-million people, but any vestiges of natural or cultural heritage were erased in a bid to streamline lot servicing and maximize profits.

I was reminded of this a few days ago while reading in the paper about one of Toronto’s most successful subdivision builders. He demolished a $48-million house he’d purchased in seaside Florida a few years back in order to spend perhaps an equal sum to build an “ecomansion” for his family, utilizing net-zero energy but with enough garages for his many cars. And, of course, he flies there via private jet.  I do not begrudge anyone their profits; he took a lot of financial gambles and lost money here and there along the way, especially during the 2009 recession.  He is also a generous philanthropist. But it seems strange and counterintuitive to me that environmental principles are not part of an intelligent development business plan for every economic level of new home ownership.

So I was delighted last June during my annual Garden Bloggers’ Fling to visit the High Plains Environmental Center (HPEC) in Loveland, Colorado in the northeast part of the state. Here, an hour’s drive north of Denver in a 3000-acre mixed use development called Centerra, environmental principles are a major selling feature. Begun in 2001 by McWhinney Enterprises on land homesteaded and farmed by their family from 1866, Centerra includes retail businesses, office buildings, restaurants and residential neighbourhoods. The homes were built by McStain Neighborhoods, co-founded by green building pioneers and architects Tom and Caroline Hoyt. Both the McWhinneys and the Hoyts understood that there is a great cachet to building not just houses, but sustainable environments, in which people can feel connected to the land around them. Part of that initiative was the creation of the High Plains Environmental Center, occupying 100 acres of land surrounding two lakes comprising 175 acres of open water which are reserved for waterfowl. HPEC also manages 135 acres of common space belonging to the landowners in Centerra. Its educational visitor center was opened in 2017, a small building fronted by a lush meadow of native plants…..

…. including delicate blue flax (Linum perenne var. lewisii)……

…. and my favourite of all the penstemons, beautiful pink Palmer’s beardtongue (Penstemon palmeri).

Though we’d been told to make our way through the building, I had to stop for a few moments and enjoy the plantings in the parking lot, especially this border of labelled native perennials and shrubs…..

…. including gorgeous blue Rocky Mountain beardtongue (Penstemon strictus) and golden columbine (Aquilegia chrysantha var. rydbergii).

And as a photographer of bees, including bumble bees, I was delighted to spend a few moments tracking a new species for me, the Nevada bumble bee (Bombus nevadensis), which was busy foraging on the penstemon.

On returning from Colorado last June, the first blog I wrote was called Penstemon Envy. There are simply so many beautiful penstemon (aka beardtongue) species to see in early summer. This is pine-leaf penstemon (P. pinifolius).

Large-flowered beardtongue (Penstemon grandiflorus) with its semi-succulent leaves is one I grow at my cottage north of Toronto. For me, it behaves as a biennial, making its rosette the first year and flowering the second.  Imagine how inspiring these native plants are for the homeowners in the neighbourhood!

Growing amidst rugged Colorado sandstone boulders was beautiful sulphurflower buckwheat  (Eriogonum umbellatum), along with orange California poppies (Eschscholzia californica).

Prince’s plume (Stanleya pinnata) is a spectacular native plant that we would see in other Denver gardens on our fling. As well as being a larval host to two species of butterfly, it was also a traditional medicinal plant for many Native American peoples.

I passed the sign that marks Centerra’s certification as a Wildlife Habitat. And I wonder how many North American suburban planned communities could be brave and generous enough to view homebuilding as an ecological mission. 

We were here to see the center but also to hear from its Executive Director, Jim Tolstrup. Originally from the Boston area, he’s been with HPEC for more than a decade, and we gathered around him in the Medicine Wheel Garden. This part of the center aligns very closely to Jim’s professional background, since he was “a founder and former president of Cankatola Tiospaye, a non-profit that provides material assistance to Native American Elders”. Though his role there, he developed life-long friendships with Native Americans and a perspective that informs much of the emphasis here at the center.

Jim told us about Centerra’s beginnings and its mission and said that the center and the community’s environmental ethos have actually become prime selling features for the development, where there are strict building and landscaping design guidelines. It’s promoted as “Certified Wild”, he said. This video is an excellent introduction to the High Plains Environmental Center.

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This is the HPEC Master Plan from 2016 which gives a good overview of the site.

Courtesy of High Plains Environmental Center

The Medicine Wheel Garden in which we stood was erected on consecutive Earth Days in 2018 and 2019.

It will be used for the local Thompson School District’s annual 3rd grade powwow and to host participants in the 400-mile Lakota ride along Colorado’s front range each summer.

It was freshly planted with species used by various Plains tribes as food, medicine or in ceremonies. The plants are labelled with their traditional Lakota names.  Beyond the new Medicine Wheel Garden is The Wild Zone. Still being developed, it will serve as an outdoor classroom to foster a love of nature through play and self-directed learning. This section is called “The Nest Tree”.

Here is one of the plant labels in the Medicine Wheel Garden….

…. and the plant with its unripe fruit. Chokecherry fruit was traditionally mixed with pounded bison meat and tallow in the making of pemmican patties or wasna.

Here is the label for yellow monkeyflower (whose Latin genus name Mimulus has been changed to Erythranthe). Check out that clay….

And here are the beautiful blossoms. The leaves of this species were cooked by the Lakota for food.

Fishing is allowed from the shore of Houts Reservoir and adjacent Equalizer Lake, with a licence from Colorado Fish & Wildlife. The lakes also support native waterfowl.

We toured the Community Garden…..

….. where members grow tomatoes, herbs and all manner of vegetables in neatly spaced raised planter boxes. In a normal year here, there are workshops on composting, pest management, propagation and other garden practices, as well as produce-swapping potlucks.   

I wish we’d had more time to explore the Heirloom Fruit Orchard.  I was surprised to learn that this part of Colorado has a buoyant fruit industry, and that the first cherry trees were planted here in 1864. Though the trees are young, this will be a wonderful spot. Among the old varieties of apples are Haas, Goodhue, Flower of Kent, Johnny Appleseed, Utter’s Red, Patricia, Gravenstein, Maiden Blush, Pitmaston Pineapple and Duchess of Oldenburg.

The greenhouses are used to raise native plants for plant sales and landscaping. Because of Covid, this year’s sales were held online with curbside pickup. Available plants included native hyssops, sages, columbines, milkweeds, buckwheat, gaillardia, sunflowers, beebalm, tansy aster, evening primrose, penstemons, ratibidas, goldenrods, vervains and Stanley’s plume.

We walked down The Promenade, a beautiful pathway through mixed plantings of Colorado natives. Imagine how inspiring this is for Centerra residents looking for plant design ideas for their landscapes.

Honey bees were all over the apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa).  Not only is this drought-tolerant native shrub beautiful in flower, its fluffy, red seedheads are very decorative as well.

There were plants I’d never encountered before, like desert 4 o’clocks (Mirabilis multiflora).

I loved this beautiful western ninebark (Physocarpus monogyna), with Rocky Mountain penstemon at its base.  It was the perfect pairing, and the perfect way to end an all-too-short visit to the High Plains Environmental Center.

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If you’re interested in First Nations culture, you might wish to read my blog on two days at Wanuskewin Heritage Park in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the city where I was born.

Spring at VanDusen Botanical Garden – Part 2

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Now that we’ve left the Sino-Himalayan Collection I toured you through in Part 1, along with the Rhododendron Walk, let’s wander through the rest of this spectacular Vancouver garden. The map is below, and if you click to enlarge it you can see the details a little better (a large map is on VanDusen Botanical Garden’s website). As I mentioned in my first blog, my photos are from four spring visits in the past decade, dates ranging from May 2nd to June 1st.

We’ll start in the Fern Dell. This is one of the many Taxonomic Collections at VanDusen Botanical Garden, filled with little Pteridophyte treasures from around the world…..

….. like Himalayan maidenhair fern (Adiantum venustum)  …..

….. and arching Japanese holly fern (Cyrtomium fortunei var.clivicolum) …..

….. and the beautiful native British Columbia deer fern (Blechnum spicant).

Walking southwest from the Fern Dell, we come to the Medicine Wheel. As the seasons change in March, June and September, visitors are invited here to participate in a Medicine Wheel Ceremony, celebrating the cycles of nature as marked by people from different backgrounds and spiritual traditions. Medicine wheels, of course, were created by many indigenous people in North America, most featuring a central stone cairn and one or more stone circles and stone lines radiating from the central point. In Saskatchewan, I visited and blogged about Wanuskewin Heritage Park which features a 1,500-year-old medicine wheel.

Nearby are VanDusen’s beehives. Since I’ve spent years photographing honey bees wherever I travel, I always spend a few minutes watching the activity around the hives.

Provided the spring temperatures are warm enough for the honey bees to fly, sharp-eyed visitors will always find them gathering nectar or pollen on the garden’s plants, like pulmonarias or lungworts, which are a particular honey bee favourite. This is Pulmonaria ‘Trevi Fountain’.

At the very southwest corner of the garden adjacent to the wonderful Alma VanDusen Garden I blogged about in April are the Meadow Ponds.  If you come in early May when not much is blooming, you’ll likely see the pink flowers of moisture-loving umbrella plant or Indian rhubarb, Darmera peltata.

But visit several weeks later and the scene has changed to include orange Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’ and yellow flag irises (Iris pseudacorus).

I love this scene adjacent to the Alma VanDusen meadow nearby, featuring red-flowered horse chestnut (Aesculus x carnea) with sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis) and bluebells.

If you’re a kid or an adventurous adult, the Maze is always fun. Me? I prefer to focus on the monkey puzzle tree outside (Araucaria araucana), since they were part of my childhood in Victoria, B.C.

Now we’ll do a slow curve and start to walk northeast behind the Sino Himalayan Dell. In spring, VanDusen’s impressive Mountain Ash (rowan) Collection puts on a fine show. This is Sorbus caloneura, native to mountain forests of China….

….. and this is Sorbus commixta, the Japanese rowan.

The Maple Collection is excellent. I love the way moss clings to the limbs of the trees; it reminds me of my own suburban Vancouver childhood home and the lime my father was always sprinkling to try to get rid of the moss in the lawn. This is the the purple-leaf sycamore maple (Acer pseudoplatanus ‘Atropurpureum’).

And this is the chartreuse foliage of the golden Cappadocian maple (Acer cappodicum ‘Aureum’.)

There are lovely spring plantings under the maples, featuring bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis), blue-flowered Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) and late daffodils.

Japanese maples (Acer palmatum) have a place in the Maple Collection as well.

During my four (mostly May) spring visits in the past decade, I seem to have managed only this one pretty photo of a few of VanDusen’s famous Ceperley hybrid primroses, on the edge of Heron Lake.

So I dug into my vast slide collection and scanned an image from June 2003, to show the impressive colours of the Ceperley hybrid candelabra primroses a little later in the season. According to Douglas Justice of UBC Botanical Garden, these beautiful, moisture-loving primroses (like some of VanDusen’s Asian species rhododendrons) originated in Stanley Park gardener’s Alleyne Cook’s collection in the Ceperley Picnic area of the park. They are a mixture of hybrids (he called it a “hybrid swarm”) involving at least four Chinese candelabra primrose species: gold-flowered P. bulleyana, deep-pink P. pulverulenta, yellow  P. helodoxa  and magenta P. beesiana (some sources call this a subspecies of P. bulleyana).  When these species hybridize, they produce a spectacular mixture of orange, yellow, salmon, pink and mauve-flowered primroses.

Butterbur (Petasites hybridus) is an unusual Chinese perennial found near the Maple Collection.

There’s a good collection of lindens or limes. This is Korean linden (Tilia insularis).

Vancouver is famous for its Japanese cherries and on May 2, 2017, I enjoy standing under a white cloud of Prunus ‘Shirotae’, or the Mount Fuji cherry.

VanDusen displays Canadian-bred cultivars of plants, celebrating the heritage of botanists like Frank Skinner (Hyacithiflora lilacs, roses, honeysuckles), Isabella Preston (Preston lilacs), Felicitas Svejda (Explorer roses, weigela, forsythia), Percy Wright (crabapples, roses) and the UBC Botanical Garden Plant Introduction Program (‘Mandarin’ honeysuckle).

One special introduction is ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’ dogwood, a hybrid of Eastern flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) and the western native Nuttall’s dogwood (Cornus nuttallii).  This is a branch from the oldest living specimen of the cultivar, bred by British Columbia nurseryman Henry Matheson Eddie (1881-1953) in 1945. Eddie made crosses in the 30s and 40s, his aim to develop a shrub combining the large flowers of the western dogwood with the rich fall colour of the eastern species. But when the Fraser River flooded its banks in 1947, the wholesale division of his family business, the Eddie Nursery Company, lost all its stock of the hybrids except for one shrub that had been moved to their farm in Richmond, from which all the ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’ dogwoods in the world have been propagated. Henry Eddie’s family donated the specimen below to VanDusen in the 1990s.

This is Weigela florida ‘Minuet’, one of Felicitas Svejda’s Dance Series introductions from 1981.

If you read Part 1 of my blog, you’ll know that R. Roy Forster was a beloved first Director of VanDusen, so we’ll take a walk past the Cypress Pond named for him. Check out the knobby knees of the cypress trees (Taxodium distichum). And look, there are little ducklings swimming in the water.

Nearby is the Eastern North America Section…..

….. with its native trees (including a beautiful and rare butternut) and understorey plants, such as these young red buckeyes (Aesculus pavia)…..
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…. and familiar to me, a Torontonian, are showy trilliums (Trillium grandiflorum) and Solomon’s seals (Polygonatum biflorum).

We’ll head southwest again via the Woodland Garden. I believe it’s in this area where there are some wonderful magnolias, including New Zealand-bred ‘Star Wars’, below.

I love seeing all these western mayflowers (Maianthemum dilatatum) or “false lily-of-the-valley” carpeting the ground under conifers.

From this area, we can reach the Southern Hemisphere Garden which contains an amazing collection of plants native to South America, Australia and New Zealand, below.

Lolog’s barberry (Berberis x lologensis) is a lovely hybrid between two Chilean species, Berberis darwinii and Berberis linearifolia.

Gunnera manicata is called Brazilian giant rhubarb and gradually becomes an immense plant here on the edge of Heron Pond.

We’ll leave the Southern Hemisphere Garden via the zigzag bridge……

….. and make our way down the path through the Ornamental Grass collection. VanDusen does a beautiful job of integrating the grasses into the garden with other plants, such as the crown imperial fritillaries under the goldenrain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata), below. At this time of spring, you can barely see the Bowles’ golden grass (Milium effusum ‘Aureum’) popping up….

… but a few weeks later, it makes a stunning contrast to the dusky cranebill (Geranium phaeum ‘Samobor’) here.

Another chartreuse leaved plant, Bowles’ golden sedge, Carex elata ‘Aurea’, shown below with Lychnis viscaria ‘Feuer’, causes understandable confusion, given the common name. Both were introduced by British horticulturist and garden writer Edward Augustus Bowles (1865-1954), who was also an important collector of crocuses, colchicums, snowdrops and snowflakes.

Not all the grasses in the garden are arranged in little vignettes, but it is fun to see the details of some, like tufted sedge (Carex elata).

Now we’ll circle back on the path through VanDusen’s renowned Black Garden. Though it’s at its best later in the season, it is still stunning in springtime, with its wine-red tulips, barberries and heucheras, black mondo grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’) and chartreuse highlights.

On my visit in May 2014, one of VanDusen’s volunteers named Hughie greets me and she is so perfectly colour-coordinated, I ask her to stroll through for my camera.

I adore this combination of ‘Gold Heart’ bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis) with dark ‘Queen of Night’ tulips.

Let’s make our way west to take a quick peek at the Perennial Border. It isn’t quite as grand in May as later in the season, but there are still lovely plants……

….. like these ‘Sky Wing’ Siberian iris….

….. and attractive vignettes such as Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ and white Trollius x cultorum ‘Cheddar’ in front of the dark foliage of Ligularia ‘Britt-Marie Crawford’.

Visitors can find lots of spring design inspiration in the garden, like this Pulmonaria ‘Trevi Fountain’ with Epimedium x perellchicum ‘Frohnleiten’.

There are old-fashioned perennial favourites, too, such as pink gas plant (Dictamnus albus var. roseus).

The formal rose garden takes summer temperatures to begin to bloom, but in May, the perennial border flanking it starts out with a few narcissus….

…. before exploding in mid-late June with a purple profusion of bellflowers (Campanula latifolia var. macrantha), cranesbills (Geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue’) and catmint (Nepeta sp.)

Near the Loderi rhododendrons which launched our tour in my previous blog, hundreds of colourful tulips carpet the ground in front of British sculptor Sophie Ryder’s ‘Minotaur and Hare’, created for the Vancouver Biennale in 2009-11.  Sadly, the little blue hare that the minotaur once cradled was stolen, not once, but twice.

Tulips, of course, are a big part of spring at VanDusen, but my favourite way to use them is in combination with spring perennials, as here with pink Bergenia ‘Eroica’. If I had to guess at the tulip, which was not labelled, I’d say the single late ‘Dordogne’.

Now we come to the finale of our tour, a beautiful spectacle you’re most likely to encounter between mid-May and early June: the gorgeous Laburnum Walk.  Planted in 1975 under Director R. Roy Forster, the walk was modelled on the famous Laburnum Arch at Bodnant Garden in Wales. The long, yellow, pea-flowered trusses of golden chain tree (Laburnum x watereri ‘Vossii’) cascade over the walk, flanked by Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’, pink bistort (Persicaria bistorta ‘Superba’), forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica) and bluebells (Hyacinthoides x massartiana).

Isn’t this perfect?

So our tour is over, but I’d like to pay tribute to my late mother Mary Healy, who accompanied me to VanDusen Botanical Garden over the years on many occasions. The photo below is from 1988. My mom taught me about gardening, was proud of me for choosing to make it my career, and loved nothing better than to walk with me for a while; then, as she got older, to settle on a bench with her newspaper as I happily roamed the garden with my cameras. I dedicate this blog to her.

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If you’d like to read about another exceptional Vancouver garden, visit the blog I wrote on UBC’s David Lam Asian Garden.

Other public garden blogs I’ve blogged about include Toronto Botanical Garden; Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton ON; Montreal Botanical Garden; New York Botanical Garden; Wave Hill, Bronx NY; New York’s Conservatory Garden in Central Park; New York’s High Line in May and in June; fabulous Chanticleer in Wayne, PA; the Ripley Garden in Washington DC; Chicago Botanic Garden; The Lurie Garden, Chicago; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Austin TX; Denver Botanic Gardens; the Japanese Garden in Portland OR; the Bellevue Botanical Garden, Bellevue, WA; the Los Angeles County Arboretum; RBG Kew in London; Kirstenbosch, Cape Town; the Harold Porter National Botanical Gardens, South Africa; Durban Botanic Gardens; Otari-Wilton’s Bush, Wellington NZ; Dunedin Botanic Garden, NZ; Christchurch Botanic Gardens, NZ.