Where on Earth is your Garden?

Article by Harry Hill
Image © Harry Hill

About eight years ago,, not long after we settled into our one-acre wooded lot on the Sunshine Coast, a neighbour brought by a visiting British gardener to view what was then just the basic outline of a garden. Excited about the recent plantings I'd made of currently trendy perennials, I was eager to impress. I proudly pointed out my hellebores and euphorbias and pulmonarias, all of which failed to elicit praise or comment. Not until we came to a wild elder, dangling its clusters of small red berries, was I asked to identify anything.

"Oh, that old thing," I almost said. "Sorry! I haven't got around yet to yanking it out!"

Days later I began to reflect on that foreign gardener's fussing about something as ordinary and inconsequential as a native bush that crowds the roadsides here and never garners a second look by local residents. Isn't it just like the nature of gardeners (and humans in general!) to want what is thought to be uncommon or exotic or coveted by others? It struck me that while gardening in a part of the world where beauty is so common, people here often have difficulty recognizing beauty in the commonplace. I set about to do just that, and to create a garden that knew where on Earth it was located.

We all know of people who move to "Super, Natural British Columbia" because of the beauty they find here, buy a little bit of paradise, and then set about to obliterate everything that is unique about it. Instead of working with the bounties that nature provides, they choose to attempt an English cottage garden in a desert valley or a Japanese garden in the rainforest. By slavishly copying what they have seen in gardening books and magazines, they have created gardens that could be anywhere, and are ultimately nowhere.

Incorporating native plants can do a lot to give our gardens a sense of place. And finding native equivalents for exotic horticultural varieties isn't hard. Out with the Japanese barberry, in with the Oregon grape! Out with the Spanish bluebells, in with the blue camas! Out with the creeping cotoneaster, in with the kinnikinnick! Out with the smothering monoculture of English ivy, in with the rich tapestry of sword fern, violets, bleedingheart and woodland saxifrages!

Including locally native species fosters a connection with the natural world beyond our gardens. When the camas is blooming in my garden, I know it's time to visit the several locations on the Sunshine Coast where I'll find patches of blue on the coastal bluffs. When the branches of Pacific dogwood poke through the shaggy coniferous walls of my garden, holding aloft their gleaming white bracts, I know I'll find a similar sight along nearby hiking trails.

I like to think that if we're not keeping in mind how our plantings will interact with the natural world beyond our property, then we're only gardening in two dimensions. We can add that third dimension by including native species that will feed and shelter birds, insects, and other wildlife - the elements that animate our gardens and make them so much more enjoyable.

When you're growing seed-propagated native plants, rather than mass-produced cultivars, it's fun to watch how plants of the same species develop differently, flowering or ripening fruit at slightly different times - attributes that allow them to meet the needs of wildlife that depend on them and on which they depend for pollination and seed dispersal. If you plant only "garden varieties," what your garden will be lacking is variety.

Having never been a purist about anything, I'm continually re-assessing which non-natives I can't live without, and which natives my garden shouldn't be without. But more and more my little green space is one which reflects where in the world it is. And it's a garden in which the once lowly red elder now has pride of place.

Harry Hill lives and gardens in Roberts Creek. Between 1997 and 2003 he edited Menziesia, the quarterly newsletter of the Native Plant Society of British Columbia.