A HEALING GARDEN
Gardens are repositories of memory.
Ask a gardener whether they have a plant that they took from, or grow because they remember it from their mother’s or father’s garden and they will almost always be able to point it out.
A gardener in Ancaster told me, early in my garden-writing days, that she kept a huge clump of Japanese anemone, so big it threatened to take over part of her garden, because it was in bloom when a child was killed in an accident. The penny dropped for me that day and I have always since been interested in the intersection of gardens and remembrance.
Never has it been so thoroughly made clear to me as when I visited the west Mountain garden of Ken Wilson, who will open it to visitors on the first day of Hamilton Spectator Open Garden Week, which begins next Sunday and runs through to July 5.
Grief and healing are both present in his garden, which Ken has restored in memory of his late wife, Carol. She died of pancreatic cancer last Oct. 2. During the months of treatment, hospitalization and hospice care that preceded her death, the garden they had created together became, understandably, neglected. Weeds flourished while much loved plants did not.
A neighbour cut the grass for them, but there could not be a focus on their garden while together they fought the cancer that would take Carol’s life.
They were married for 46 years and spent 40 years together in the Gemini Drive house. For the first 30 years or so, the backyard was where their boys, Chris and Jim, played in the summer and skated on an ice pad in the winter. It was over the past 10 years that they transformed the garden into a colourful, cheerful and very personal oasis — Ken says it reached its pinnacle in August of 2014.
Carol gave Ken what he calls her “bucket list” before she died: things she wanted him to do. Some of it was practical — replace the dishwasher — some of it very personal.
But one task was to fix up her garden. Early this spring he began the rescue effort, with family helping out with the initial cleanup.
It’s been a lot of work, although a visitor could be forgiven for thinking there was a lot of therapeutic value to it.
The garden is wide and shallow, but appears larger because of the “borrowed landscape” of neighbours’ gardens over the low chain-link fence (which will come out entirely sometime soon, Ken says).
The back of the garden is wooded with conifers; the biggest is a spruce that Ken and Carol planted 35 years ago. It came from a parents’ cottage near Peterborough. Junipers are underplanted with a variety of hostas, hydrangeas, ferns and sweet woodruff as an occasional ground cover. Grasses are focal points.
“My wife loved the ornamental grasses,” Ken says. “Most of the plants are here because she liked them. If she liked it, we bought it.
“She’d say ‘I want that plant’ ... I’d find a place for it.”
In 2007, at one side of the garden, Ken built a water feature with a waterfall. “It’s a little different. I built it so it begins under the spruce.”
At the other side, along the path to the front, a handsome collection of hostas — Ken knows the name of each variety — flourish. In the front garden, a lush crimson Japanese maple is planted beside an old but healthy clump of birches.
Much of the bright colour in the garden comes from pots, window boxes on an elegant shed, and other containers. “I tried to do them the way she did them.”
Hanging baskets are also in her colours. “I did it her way.”
Purple was Carol’s favourite garden colour, Ken says. A Palace Purple heuchera in the front garden “is her original plant when she started gardening.”
A rhododendron flowers each year, also “in her colour.”
The garden is busy with birds — there are several feeders and a bird bath — and, the bane of the window boxes: squirrels.
A few ornaments around the garden represent their grandchildren. But one, a stone angel, has pride of place.
“The neighbours bought it for us when Carol was sick,” Ken says.
He sits on the patio loveseat where they sat for so many years, each day at 5 p.m. with a glass of wine. He wonders what she would think of his efforts.
“The reason I put ‘For Carol’ in the Open Garden Week listing is that it is for Carol,” he says.
A visitor knows what she would think. Somewhere, she’s smiling.