Part I The Rhododendron that ate Foxpoint

 

Fourteen years ago I came to Nova Scotia from Ontario to live, January 3rd 2008.
I had spent many a summer here but was ill prepared to live here.
The bloom was off the rose so to speak after my first spring.

My Nova Scotia gardening has been a trial-and-error adventure. Armed only with three less than exulted previous gardens, the memory of my Grandmother's beauteous successes, and very little experience especially in this northern zone. Ontario is the magic land of gardens, where if you keep half an eye on the watering sumptuous results magically appeared for esoteric pleasure and grumbly tummies.

I grew up in a family that always had gardens. My first 13 years the vegetable garden took up most of the back yard with hand poured concrete paths and every edible imaginable. The upper half of our tiered yard had manicured beds of flowers, water features, and a lovely patio that was used more for my play then anything else as work seemed to overtake the enjoyment of that garden.

My grandmother’s vegetable patch was smaller and at the end of her yard as well but behind a white picket fence with a gated arbour covered in clematis vine. The first half of her temple was lined with perennial beds and a wondrous fruiting tree that attracted birds and butterflies, the center bed devoted to roses of every name and colour and perfume. The small wooden garage almost completely invisible under the largest climbing rose of story book red and a variety that I doubt I could every find again. It was here that my spirit soared and I truly wished that I had inherited her skills. It turns out not completely, at least not as of yet, she had many more decades of trial, error, and practice under her belt.

The generations before had gardens too and small animals. I am first generation Canadian but my Maltese and British ancestors would have starved to death in WWII and prior wars with their resulting rationing and enforced abject poverty of the masses, had it not been for gardens. I would like to venture into small animals to complete my paradise some day but for now the guilt associated with an accidental death of a favoured plant is easier to assuage when I can salvage a seed or cutting from its last gasping breath and its offspring come to life after it has gone. This is not the same proposition when you have a chicken die of pneumonia, as my mother will tell you. Her function was to care for the chicks and rabbits that provided meat and eggs and as all small girls love to play with fuzzy cute little critters washing off the mud too hide her forbidden activities once resulted in a nearly drowned and then very ill little chick and a scolding she never forgot.

I did not have a garden of my own for a very long time so I began with houseplants in my apartments and lots of visits to my Grandmother. Once when asked what church she attended my Grandmother, whom I called Nanny for future reference gentle reader, replied, “Go into my garden and if you cannot find your God there you are sadly lacking. It is the place I always find mine.” Every visit and emergency phone call for resuscitation advice brought me closer to a greener thumb. Sadly my Nanny died before I had an outdoor garden and my education is now sadly lacking. I truly wish she could offer advice now the climate of England especially Wales and the North both places she gardened are so similar to here I have taken to getting my resources from British gardening books.

Balcony gardening is an adventure in itself. My mother had a small water feature on hers with a lily and fish in a tin washbasin. The cement wall hidden by morning glories and sweet peas all the way from floor to ceiling are the backdrop for some of my early graduation pictures. They supplied food for the soul alone until I discovered not only edible flowers but also bucket veggies. I grew broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, tomatoes, and romaine lettuce, in round plastic buckets scavenged from bulk food stores. I had long window boxes on the floor with delicate greens and radishes. Arbours of climbing beans and peas clung to the walls; after all there is little difference between a sweet pea and a green pea. The flower boxes had marigolds. The petals are a wondrous substitute for saffron. Nasturtiums, beautiful peppery salad leaves and glorious brightness along side the pansies in a salad or on top a cake. My landlady had a garden below mine with raspberry vines and an endless supply of violets for candying. My miniature roses did not fair so well but they are not for beginners so I am told but I ventured forth anyway for how am I to learn without a casualty or two.

 

I finally bought my first house and it was owned by an older couple and to my delight an Englishman with the inherent love of gardens that all the English once possessed. It is practically a royal mandate that to be truly English you must love gardening. I had clematis vines that rivaled my Nanny’s and a rose of pink stolen from a perfect sunrise, manicured beds lined the perfect postage stamp lawn in the front accompanied by a rather phallic cedar that would be evicted as soon as I figured out how to fell a tree without removing my eaves or the neighbour’s windscreen. In the back from my raised deck off the kitchen I could sit and enjoy another perfect lawn lined by more manicured beds and a row of the tallest and most fragrant lilacs leading to a small shed at the end to keep my accumulated pots and tools. I had plans to remove the end bit of lawn and put in a vegetable garden at the back end (it is tradition) separated by a white picket fence and with an arbour of flowering edible beans, space being a precious commodity in my little piece of heaven.

Alas the best laid plans of mice and men, I moved in too late in the season to make any progress with my plans and by fall was making plans to start the adventure of becoming a Navy wife in Nova Scotia and so that garden will only be finished in my summer dreams.

 

The garden I discovered here that cold grey January I moved in was not what I expected when the snow left and sun warmed the earth. The bushes were misshapen; the lawn nonexistent for moss and weeds, and the only flowerbed had the plastic pots buried underneath the plants. Its edges were so overgrown with wild strawberries that I was not sure where it ended and the only place where the ground was not either spongy from enormous biting ants nests or the colour of rust from the iron in the water overflowing the well. All my winter dreams of an English garden dashed in one quick walk about and the shear volume of work to recover anything pressing down hard enough that I am surely an inch shorter.

First things first I decided and bought new gardening tools, a shopping trip to the nursery should brighten up my spirit. I picked a corner and dug in literally. In the back corner of my property was a sugar maple backed by birches and on the edge of a section of woods just thick enough to screen the back neighbours from us. I thought what a great place for a woodland garden with its giant rocks and tree stumps providing textures and places for the moss to grow in an acceptable format. Already dotted with buttercups growing up from the woods I started thinking of shade plants and fairy statuettes and a perfect little bench to sit and read. 

The previous owners had thought this part of the property perfect too, for burn barrels and dumping trash especially the kitty litter. I stepped in a grey vaseline like sludge and poked around to find some of it still in grocery bags, the neighbourhood cats thought the drier surface was their own outdoor loo.  I walked back to the house scrapping my favorite ruined gardening shoe and considering the creeping charlie now blooming in the lawn reminding myself I come from tougher stock than most and this challenge could be met but not today.

The opposite corner of the property was at the end of driveway and after all I see this spot far more often so I really should start there. Pruning shears and small rake in hand I headed for what turned out to be a lilac bush. This was a good sign until I spent an entire day pruning and raking and taking out the overgrown mass of shoots and bindweed choking it to death. Once the grass and weeds and old leaves were gone, I harvested enough rocks to ring the base and hoped it wouldn’t take more then two seasons to reshape it into something less eclectic. The good news it bloomed that spring which apparently was a renewed thing the bad news is my fourth season and I am still trying to encourage its shape into something more reasonable.

 

It was the right time of year for pruning so I continued around the yard going from bush to bush with the same unkempt issues of a garden not tended for five years or so and kept at it. Along the front of the house were two ornamental quinces, a red and an orange one side by each with what I think was a butterfly bush but never truly identified close by and what I thought to be a climbing rose without an arbour. The entire front corner of the property was a giant white pine. A Giant bonsai that Mother Nature hand tended and shaped as any elderly Japanese master would into a perfect model for Tom Thompson. Inspiring as that would be for a painter the years of long brown acid filled pine needles made a thick soft wondrous bed for bugs and soil that had a Ph I can only imagine. I worked away until the three shrubs were pruned and cleaned up, the rose cut back and the pine needles raked away, ground loosened and some bone meal and few banana peels dug in. 

My thoughts strayed around ornaments for this area and I headed for the remains of a forsythia that my dear husband mowed over twice but it kept coming. He thought it was ugly as he does any plant or tree that cannot feed you or be found commonly on a golf course. He would have ignored it I suppose if it hadn’t been in a spot awkward to mow around but his visions of the property involved putting greens and winter skating rinks not flower beds and ornamentation. In my reverie and feeling pleased with the work to date, blazoned with scratches and bug bites I headed around the house only to be greeted by what appeared to be the unholy offspring of the union between an octopus and possibly a rhododendron. Although it had buds galore it never bloomed and I only found it was a rhododendron for sure from the leaves and my dear husband telling me it had flowers once like the bushes on the base; they were tended by gardeners and prolific, ours was a nightmare from a B rated sci-fi horror movie. 

To salvage or not to salvage that was my newest question. Even with skilled hands could that monstrosity ever be a bush? Currently it was a tangle of creeping branches crawling and squiggling like a handful of bait worms covered in foliage and buds and making we wonder if it uprooted itself and wandered the neighbourhood eating small animals at night. I never had a rhododendron before and I certainly wasn’t that skilled my thumb being a pale green at best out here in a new climate zone. My dear husband stepped in and did what he does best in the garden. He dug it up. It did attempt to come back like all horror movie monsters but never made it to a trilogy being finally destroyed in the sequel. 

I also made a disastrous attempt at a water feature early on but that is a story for another day

and so on that note I leave you gentle reader
Happy Mother's Day