GARDEN OF SURPRISES
The result of Ancaster couple’s vision and muscle
FRIENDS unwittingly helped Tricia Shulist get started on making the lovely garden that she and husband Gerry have at their Ancaster home.
It was a friend’s gift of some violets, which spread relentlessly into their front lawn, that made them decide to pull out all their grass there and replace it with a mixed landscape of trees, shrubs, hostas and artfully placed rocks.
And it was a friend’s comment about her fledgling garden — “she suggested it would be nicer if I weeded” — that prompted her to dig in (so to speak) and make the garden that she had in her mind’s eye.
“He’s the muscle,” Tricia says of Gerry. “I’m the visionary.”
The result of that vision and muscle is a garden that both delights and surprises. The delight comes out of the nature-friendly plantings (the garden is busy with songbirds, butterflies, bees and “quite a herd of chipmunks” says Tricia), as well as an impromptu design that reveals interesting features of the garden at every turn. The surprise comes in the spaciousness of their pieshaped lot: A fairly conventional frontage to their property belies the space they have behind the house. The garden literally fans out and upwards, ending at the barrier wall that separates them from Highway 403 west of Fiddler’s Green Road.
There’s a large pond with a wooden bridge and an impressive waterfall; a patio sheltered by a gloriously magnificent wisteria (an old variety planted in the early ’90s) whose gnarled and twisted “trunk” is natural garden sculpture; mixed beds and borders of shrubs, roses, climbers and other perennials; raised “holding” and perennial beds; a vegetable garden behind an envy-inducing double-width garden shed that Gerry built; a terraced hillside at the back of the garden; and curved paths (seen also in the front garden) that lead the eye from one part of the garden to the next.
Tricia and Gerry — both of whom retired last year — have been in the house since 1988. When they got it, there were some trees, some grass and a swimming pool in the back. They started on the back garden about four years later, and took out the pool in
2000.
The centrepiece of the garden is the pond and waterfall, which Gerry dug and built. There are 2,722 kilograms of rock in the waterfall alone; thousands more are in the large rocks that make up the pond edge. The water emerges from the hillside as if from a natural source; Gerry added three bubblers to the pond to increase oxygenation and fish health. Bulrushes and iris grow lushly in and around the water.
Tricia describes herself as a “laissez-faire” (let it be) gardener. She’s not one for moving plants regularly to find the “right” spot.
“It lives, it lives. Yay,” she says. She waters, sparingly, from a rain barrel and doesn’t use fertilizers or pesticides in the garden; mushroom compost keeps the soil rich and loose. But she’s happy to see a plant recover from a setback: Their “Phoenix tree” is a Japanese maple that lost a lot of growth in its middle, but now, with the dead branches removed, seems to be recovering. They lost several trees in the winter ice storm of three years ago and Gerry felled one more that was badly damaged. Yet another is prevented from splitting with the assistance of steel bolts.
He’s handy. The retired Hamilton police officer has built virtually all the structures in the garden, and laid stone steps and retaining walls. An arbour he built supports another wisteria, a kiwi vine, a climbing rose and a clematis.
Tricia says the garden has grown naturally. “There’s never been a plan. Just a matter of ‘I think we should do this.’ ”
They opened their garden to visitors for all but one of the 10 days of Open Garden Week. They had between 200 and 250 people go through, and Gerry says it was all good. Their slowest day saw four visitors; their busiest more than 100.
Tricia’s favourite plant? “I have to say the milkweed,” she says, pointing out clumps in both the back and the front gardens. “It’s important to the environment. I give it free range in my garden.”
Her favourite place in the garden? A swing seat, under a canopy, at the back of the garden, looking down on the flowers and the pond and that wisteria. “That’s where I bring a book and pretend I’m going to read,” she says, “and then fall asleep.”