Making space and finding serenity
Couple scales back mass plantings with carefully chosen small trees and shrubs
Couple scales back mass plantings with carefully chosen small trees and shrubs
Claire and Stephen Kostyshyn exchanged their lush perennial garden for ... well, for space.
Space, serenity and peacefulness — and a lot less work.
I visited their east Hamilton garden in August 2010; it had been a part, even a highlight, of Hamilton Spectator Open Garden Week for six years by then. It was a plant collectors’ garden: more than 200 varieties of plants, perhaps twothirds of them perennials.
Shortly after that, the Kostyshyns decided to change their garden, not in an evolving, gradual way, but dramatically. They removed many, many perennials and over roughly five years replaced them with carefully chosen small trees and shrubs, many of them unusual conifers, as well as ornamental grasses.
There’s space between plants now: space that’s as carefully planned as the mass plantings that were there before. Room for a breeze to stir plants, room for the eye to consider the distinctive colours and textures and foliage shapes of the woody plants.
“It’s peaceful out here,” Claire says. “And it’s one-third of the work of a perennial garden.”
“It just got to be too much,” Stephen says, adding that when their garden became more work than pleasure, it was time to make a change. “We took out the vegetable garden (they grow tomatoes in
containers in the driveway area now) and only kept a few perennials.”
Their garden had great “architecture” before they made the changes and the less dense plantings and more open design shows off the lines of their trees — a lovely magnolia bought from a supermarket almost 20 years ago and a standard (tree form) burning bush — to even greater advantage. Those older trees, along with a Japanese white pine close to their patio, frame the views of the garden.
Shrubs and smaller trees include a Daphne that’s about to burst into fragrant bloom, a Canadian hemlock notable for a contorted shape, a dwarf golden Korean fir that seems to reflect sunlight even on a cloudy day, small oriental pines, Hinoki false cypress (among other varieties of chamaecyparis), Mugo pine, Japanese holly, a dawn redwood, dwarf euonymus and dwarf elm, a yew hedge ...
In a bed of woody plants of various sizes — regular, dwarf, miniature and micro-mini — the Kostyshyns have used carefully chosen rock and small pieces of slate to complement and contrast the shapes and textures of the plants.
Stephen’s plant knowledge and research has not resulted in a “dumbed down” garden. There’s as much variety and interest here as in a densely planted perennial garden — but in a more restrained presentation.
When you plant one shrub rather than three or five or seven perennials, you want to make sure it’s in the right place — including the space between it and other plants nearby.
“I like the challenge of mixing colours and textures together,” Stephen says.
“You have to be strict about what you put in and where,” Claire says.
She doesn’t use the word discipline, but the garden gives a sense of that: a kind of gardening self-discipline. “It’s a way of looking at foliage instead of flowers.”
“This garden calms me. It calms the eye,” Stephen says. “That’s what we wanted in this garden. We didn’t want a Japanese garden. We wanted the feeling of a Japanese garden.”
Claire says it was a very conscious decision to get rid of the labour-intensive perennial garden. “Stephen likes to golf. I like to draw. I wanted to be able to sit and enjoy the garden.”