The pros of moving into a brand new, fully renovated garden suite in a beautiful old heritage house in one of Vancouver’s greatest neighbourhoods - Mt. Pleasant, or Pleasantville, as we like to call it - are numerous. The place is gorgeous, the location is unbeatable, the RAV line takes you anywhere in minutes, the treasures of Main Street, blocks away, I could go on and on.
After settling in for a few months, my husband and I volunteered to build and maintain the garden for our small strata. We love a project, I love to garden, our neighbours appreciate it, and my husband is in the construction biz so we have easy access to all the tools and resources (and he’s super handy and helpful). So that’s what we have been doing for the last two years – working on building a garden oasis.
But even though there are so many great things going for us at this house, building and growing the surrounding gardens has certainly presented challenges and frustrations.
Challenge One – the soil. The landscape around the house consisted of a scant few plants placed here and there around the property for staging purposes. The property had been fully utilized as a construction zone during the renovation, and prior to that, much of the outdoor space had been driveways. So we really had to start from the ground up. We dug below the surface of nutrient-deprived landscape dirt to quickly find layers of gravel, cement, and all sorts of things that don’t go towards building a healthy garden foundation. We had our work cut out for us bringing in yards of compost and healthy topsoil, to really try to establish perfect beds for our garden to thrive in.
Challenge Two – no bones. As mentioned previously, there were a few plants thrown here and there for staging purposes, nothing that we could really use to work our garden beds around. When I put plants in, I tell them not to get comfortable, because I find myself moving things on a regular basis. I have found it really challenging to not have any large landscape shrubs or fully established trees to form focal points in the beds. We’re trying to create all the focal points throughout the property, and sometimes I think we just go a bit cross-eyed. How to create balance, continuity and flow throughout? I am pretty absorbed by these thoughts on a regular basis.
Challenge Three – no irrigation, poor lighting. I am a believer that the low and slow irrigation system might be one of the keys to a healthy garden. It’s on the gardening agenda to install an irrigation system next spring, and at that same time while everything is dug up, establish electricity throughout so we can put in some landscape lighting.
I go a bit crazy sometimes and obsess about what’s wrong and not working within the garden, but I need to remind myself that we are only on year two, and that Rome wasn’t built in a day.
When we’re sitting outside on a warm summer night after a full day of gardening, drinking a glass of wine, listening to the water feature tinkle away in the distance, we smile with deep satisfaction. We remark about how far we’ve come, but mostly we brainstorm and dream up all the great things we are going to try out next season. I feel so lucky and fortunate to have had this blank landscape to work with, despite the challenges. It’s a true labour of love.
Author: Joanne Lecky, MG, Vancouver Chapter
