FOUR SEASON STUNNER
Burlington couple’s 25-year labour of love stays vibrant throughout the year
Dianne Seed, together with husband Mike, has proved her mother wrong.
Her mother was an athletic person, not a gardener, and Dianne had told her she was going to make a garden around their Burlington home.
“Mum was a bowler, a curler, a golfer. When I started gardening, she said ‘Dianne, you don’t know what you’re doing.’ I think she’d be pleased if she could see this today.”
“This” is a lovely city garden on a pie-shaped property not far from the busy intersection of Guelph Line and Upper Middle Road. Dianne and Mike are knowledgeable gardeners who have both taken courses to increase their familiarity with plants and their needs. They put their garden into this year’s Hamilton Spectator Open Garden Week and I was intrigued by their description of it as “all-season.” In this start of autumn, I wanted to see what that meant.
Their garden is yet to reach full fall colour: the main border is anchored by a magnificent oakleaf hydrangea which is just beginning to show the deep crimson that all its handsome leaves will soon display. Splashes of colour all around the space are reminders that the time for appreciating a garden, whether your own or someone else’s, is not yet over.
The Seeds, in their house about 30 years, started making the garden about five years after moving in. There were a couple of maples in the backyard (now both gone) and not much else; they started building the “bones” by planting two tiny trees: a chamaecyparis (false cypress) and a Japanese maple. They’re both big, mature trees now, the false cypress providing year-round interest with its foliage and form, the Japanese maple adding colour in three seasons and structural appeal with its arching trunk and branches through the winter. There’s also a tall pair of paper birches providing a delightful white vertical element in the garden, especially with their characteristic peeling bark. Paper birches are listed as short-lived trees, yet these are still healthy after 20 years. But Mike, it must be said, is ready to replace them with something else.
The main flower bed, opposite the deck, consists of perennials and woody plants around a heptacodium, a tall shrub of Chinese origin with the sometimes-translated name of Seven-Son Flower. Behind that bed is a striking three-panel screen — almost a
small fence — of square lattice with a faintly Asian feel. It’s really attractive, and gives support to climbing plants.
At this time of year, ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum provides a last, vibrant flash of colour in the flower borders; scarlet coleus overflows from pots on the deck. Joe-Pye weed still has its reddish flowers. Baptisia (false blue indigo) long ago lost its early-summer blue flowers, but its distinctive bluishgreen foliage adds charm to the bed even in the fall. One of their favourite woody plants is a Spike winterhazel, a shrub covered with drooping yellow flowers in spring and whose convoluted branches are eye-catching even when bare in winter. Painter’s palette has insignificant little red flowers, but its appeal, even now, is in its blotchy variegated leaves, which mix green and white with squiggly lines of dark brown.
What’s remarkable to a visitor is the wildlife at home in this garden. In the space of an hour, a virtually tame chipmunk darts across the deck several times, a blue jay and a bright red male cardinal land — at different times — in the Japanese maple, and a pair of hummingbirds (an unusual sight for this very territorial species) flit from plant to plant. The Seeds make a concerted effort to include pollinator and seed-bearing plants.
The garden, a quarter-century after it was begun, is not finished and never will be. Neither Dianne nor Mike is ever quite satisfied: plants get moved, shrubs need thinning or pruning, beds and borders are dug up and renovated, new plants come and old plants go.
“It’s always a work in progress. That’s what I like,” Dianne says. “It always stays fresh this way.”