You never really retire from gardening
Just ask the busy members of this club at Sherwood Place
Hardly anyone starts gardening when they come to live at Sherwood Place. Rather, they continue gardening there.
The gardens seemed mostly dead or dying when I visited recently. Winter had visited the hostas and hydrangeas, herbs and tomatoes, and zucchini. Nonetheless, a visit to the gardens — ornamental and edible — around the Dundas retirement home was one of my most interesting of the season.
There were about a dozen of us: ladies of a certain age and me walking around Sherwood Heights, a distinctive semi-circle-shaped seniors’ apartment building on Lynden Avenue. There are 40 units and about 50 residents; from among them, a thriving garden group who had asked me to come out for an hour or two of talk and coaching.
Even in November, the efforts by the members to beautify the grounds — and provide themselves and other residents with fresh produce — were still in evidence. Flower borders around the building were deep and generously planted — and the large, fenced vegetable garden, although mostly stripped of its
bounty now, showed obvious traces of the effort and passion that went into it through the spring, summer and early fall. The vegetable garden is divided into plots, each assigned to a different gardener, and their personalities and tastes show through the plantings of produce, cutting flowers, roses and even lilacs.
Sherwood Place is in otherwise wide-open space just north of the Hamilton-Brantford Rail Trail. In fact, many residents walk the trail to University Plaza and the Metro grocery store there. But the bucolic setting means deer are frequent visitors. Hence the fence.
Around the building, yarrow still flashes its magenta-red flowers again a dusting of snow. Hydrangea blooms, faded to brown now, hold their shape. Vines and ground covers stand up against
the cold. Hostas show their lovely gold colour before the hard frost knocks them down.
Marie Dynes has lived there for seven years. She’s one of about 15 residents in the unofficial gardening club. “There are four of us who do most of the organizing,” she says.
Marie arranges meetings when needed and does some of the computer business to connect with the building’s owner, CityHousing Hamilton. The group meets with CityHousing’s garden co-ordinator and are allocated $400 each year for compost, plant food and other supplies for the ornamental beds and the vegetable plots. The members grow, swap or buy their own plants and they have a shed stocked with an accumulation of garden tools.
When residents move into Sherwood Place, they’ve left their old neighbourhood and
usually don’t know any of the other residents. The gardening group is a way to get to know people there and continue their gardening interest.
“Most of the people who do this did it before in their own homes,” Marie says. “They got older and they came here. It’s a great opportunity for the people who live here to keep gardening.”
“As soon as they can get outside in the gardens, they’re out there in the spring,” Marie says.
They have a “proper meeting” each spring to discuss who will be responsible for what tasks and which beds; other “garden business” often comes up when residents gather in the comfortable common room in the evenings. That’s where Marie, along with Connie De Angelis, Lynn Macintyre, Liz Wagner and Suzanne Jones chat with me about their gardens.
Connie is from Italy originally and grew up on a farm. She grows most of her plants from seed, filling her apartment windows with seedlings as each winter wanes. Liz and Lynn talk about their favourite plants and the successes, and inevitable fails, they’ve had with them. Suzanne likes — and plants — her annual cosmos.
The gardeners’ efforts have not gone unnoticed. Last year, Sherwood Place won silver — second prize — from among all the CityHousing gardens. (They missed the deadline for this year’s competition. That won’t happen again, they vow.)
“A huge amount of vegetables comes out of the garden,” Marie says. “A lot of it gets shared with other people in the building. The gardeners leave it on a table and it all goes.”
“The main thing for us,” she says, “is that this building is our home. It’s not just a place.”
•••
This is my last column for the season and I have to close by thanking everyone who opened their gardens and told me their stories, as well as everyone who opened or visited gardens during Open Garden Week. Even after 26 years, visiting, writing and talking about the vibrant gardens and generous gardeners in this area remains a thrill and a privilege.
See you in the spring — or sooner, if you happen to come out for a meeting of the Mount Hamilton or Flamborough horticultural societies. Yes, that’s a plug.
And that’s a wrap.