Meet Vern, the eclectic gardener
Vern Fawcett’s gardens resist easy description. For that matter, so does Vern.
“I’m kind of a character,” says the 88year-old.
But both the garden and the gardener are engaging and interesting — and perhaps one of a kind.
He is a polymath — a word I don’t recall using previously to describe a gardener. A polymath is someone with knowledge of many subjects, and Vern is all that. His conversation (like his garden) is sprinkled with references to logarithmic principles and Euclidian geometry and the mathematics of spirals. He’s a cat lover, a collector of cacti, an avid pruner and trainer of trees, and a gardener who knows uncommon plants and their botanical names.
Vern is a retired power systems engineer, who spent most of his career (45 years) with Westinghouse. He’s been in his Aldershot house since 1956 (it was built in ’52), wed his wife Lucille in 1950 and “had a great marriage” until she died last year. He has driven the same Mercedes-Benz since he ordered it from the factory in 1966, and has filled his house with cacti, books and newspaper and magazine clippings. He has a scale drawing of a logarithmic spiral spread out on the living room floor, from which he will transfer the pattern to his garden in the form of Algonquin rocks.
None of the geometry and mathematics that occupy his mind now were part of his engineering training or career; they’re just something in which he became interested and educated himself.
But this is about his gardens; Vern remade the front one over the past year.
“I wanted to get rid of the grass lawn, so I left all the fallen pine needles there and used some newspapers.”
He planted the first of 26 dwarf evergreens, in 19 varieties, in September last year. They’re accompanied by bamboo and Ginkgo biloba saplings. Vern has also planted 32 ornamental grasses including black Mondo grass, Northern sea oats, “Red Baron” Japanese blood grass, “All Gold” Japanese forest grass and several others.
“I put a lot of thought into what plant goes where,” he said. “It’s not helter skelter, it just looks that way.”
No two grasses of the same variety were planted next to each other, except at the apex of the design next to the street. At the same time, there’s a straight line of mixed grasses between street and house, another straight line of evergreens, and “Red Carpet” sedums planted to surround prostrate “Green Carpet” Korean firs.
Then there are the skunk lilies that Vern planted in the shape of an Archimedes spiral, plotted and marked out with rope, around the tree in the centre of the front garden. They don’t smell good, Vern notes, but squirrels leave them alone.
His perennials reflect his interests and eclecticism: he has planted silphium laciniatum, a native plant from the U.S. Midwest that is also called compass plant because its leaves supposedly point north and south.
“I’m not convinced they do that, though,” he says.
Silphium laciniatum grows about 1.1 metres tall. More dramatic is silphium perfoliatum, also a native species and known as cupplant for the way its stems are joined to the leaves. It grows about three metres high. The stems are square, exactly so, Vern says, which of course ties into his interest in geometric shapes.
The silphiums and the other perennials he grows — varieties of coneflower, rattlesnake master, firetail knotweed and rudbeckia — are largely based on two public gardens in Chicago.
The back is where Lucille gardened, and Vern admits it has become a “bit of a jungle” since she died. But he shows a visitor the weeping beech tree that he has been training, with the aid of a very tall stepladder, to form a “second storey” of weeping branches. Also a beautiful weeping pine and an equally lovely weeping cypress he planted “decades ago, as a little guy”; and a weeping Norway spruce that he trained upwards until it hit 29 feet tall in 2000, when he let it start its weeping form. There are two eastern redbuds that Vern wound together when small so that today they are a single, wonderfully contorted tree.
Vern isn’t as steady on his feet as he used to be, but he’s not slowing down much. He’s got rocks to place in a logarithmic scale out past the back door, a garden in front of the house to nurture and one in the back to tame. He insists on crediting his daughter, Eileen, for her help; Jim and Simone Lounsberry of Vineland Nurseries in Beamsville for helping him select (and find) the plants for his new front garden; and his doctor, Shelia Middlebrook, “for keeping me healthy.”
He misses Lucille — “She was a tremendous gardener. She was a conventional gardener.”
The garden he’s made in the past year is not a conventional one.
But then again, as Vern cheerfully points out, “I’m not a conventional sort of guy.”