A GARDEN OF EDEN ON BOWEN ISLAND
The Van Berckel’s edible garden offers bounty of fruit, flowers and vegetables
In the early 1990s, Aubin and David Van Berckel were living in Kitsilano when David suddenly got the idea that he wanted to build an edible garden, and perhaps a vineyard, too.
Not long after this, the Van Berckels bought a 2.5-acre hillside property on Bowen Island and David began madly planting grapevines.
“It didn’t work out the way I planned,” he says. “I discovered very quickly that it’s easy to make bad wine. I planted lots of vines, but they were all the wrong variety.”
Nevertheless, the site was well oriented with a sunny, unobscured, south facing exposure that made it perfect for growing fruit and vegetables.
Today, 22 years later, the Van Berckels have established a highly productive organic food garden with an apple orchard, nut trees, birch grove, orangery, asparagus patch, ponds, hops and apple tunnels, and bountiful rows of vegetables.
“We initially thought of calling this garden Folly Farm,” says Aubin, “but then we thought it sounded much too twee, so we dropped the idea.”
Fruit is a major component of the garden. The Van Berckels grow a diverse range: limes, oranges, grapefruits, pomegranates, tangerines, mulberries, cherries, apricots, peaches, pawpaws, and quinces, even a medlar.
“All our apples came from an orchard on Lasqueti Island,” says Aubin. “But we have no idea which variety they are. Even experts can’t tell us.”
Many of the more tender, heat-loving fruits are grown in an orangery at the top of the hillside property.
These include grapefruit and blood orange, two kinds of limes (Persian/Bearss lime and kaffir lime) as well as pomegranates and tangerines.
Outside the orangery, a belvedere offers panoramic views over the garden and the woods beyond.
“This is my favourite sitting spot,” says David, owner of the chain of Opus Framing & Art Supplies stores in Vancouver.
“I’m not sure where the idea to do all this came from, but I always thought it would be wonderful to have an edible garden.
The garden also contains some beautiful, bucolic social spaces, tucked beneath the leafy canopy of cherry and mulberry trees.
The AA Terrace (named for Artemis and Apollo) is a sundrenched patio with a curving teak bench and a bed of blueblack sliced Chinese slate on which is set a fire cauldron. Surrounded by Mexican orange blossom, bronze fennel, mounds of creeping thyme and mulberry trees, the patio looks over a hedgerow of Camellia sinensis tea bushes. Once a year, the bushes are harvested with the Van Berckels picking two leaves and a bud to get a healthy batch of viable tea.
A set of sturdy iron posts with small spheres welded on top have been dotted alongside rustic stone steps that lead down to lower terraces David has christened, The Fertile Crescent.
“When we came here, this was the only place with decent soil,” says Aubin. “When anyone gave us perennials, this is where we planted them.”
In the dappled shade of Mount Fuji cherry trees, more elegant wooden benches have been placed along with Adirondack chairs and a large flat-topped rock.
“This is our sacrificial altar,” David laughs. “It’s where we sacrifice cucumbers and marrows.”
Flowers here include phlox, crocosmia, roses and buddleia, while upper banks are filled with fruit trees burgeoning with apples, pears and peaches.
As we descend deeper into the garden, David hands me a ripe Italian fig to taste. It is juicy and delicious. Next, he offers me a handful of ripe mulberries. Heavenly.
“I pollard (remove the top) our other mulberry trees. They look great in the winter. But since I prune them so hard, I don’t get fruit, since the fruit is only produced on previous year’s growth,” he says.
From The Fertile Crescent terraces, rows of grapevines are visible as well as the grove of Himalayan birch trees at the foot of the hill. Dotted here and there are stately stands of tall yellow mullein.
Water supply is a big issue on Bowen. To water vegetable patches, the Van Berckels have installed wooden box watering-stations that look a little like beehives.
“We call them ‘teapots’,” says Aubin. “Inside are pails of water into which we put comfrey leaves to make compost tea. We use this to water everything.”
More water is available from large tanks at the top of the hill. Two tanks are fed by a “trickle well”, two by rain run-off from the roof of the house.
The apple orchard produces mountains of fruit. Trees are lightly sprayed with lime sulphur in winter.
No other chemicals are used in the garden.
“People should only plant dwarf apple trees, ” says Aubin. “They are so much easier to manage. I can get all the tent caterpillars by hand before they become a problem. Smaller trees are also a lot easier to prune and harvest.”
At the foot of the garden, there is a small pond beside a tea house that contains antique Chinese windows that David brought back from China.
Aubin built an Irish-style coracle (a small wooden round boat) that she uses to paddle out to a small island in the centre of the pond.
Next to the pond is another intimate sitting spot, an inviting wisteria covered arbour with twin seats facing each another. It is a beautiful, tranquil, secluded spot, ideal for relaxation and con- templation. Katsuras and sweet chestnut trees line the banks of the pond.
A few steps around the corner, there is a small cranberry bog, plus a hedgerow of sloe berry grown from seeds collected in England.
The garden also has various art works, including a dramatic willow sculpture called Con Brio by Vancouver artist Ken Clarke, installed prominently on the green roof of a shed.
Just when I thought I had seen everything, the Van Berckels lead me into another area where there are two tunnels — one made from espaliered apples, the other from golden hops, from which David makes beer. Close by, there is also an amphitheatre with a semicircle of seats made from reclaimed boulders.
David’s pet project at the moment is to establish a beech hedge. It is something he hopes will remind him of his days as a boy when he went to boarding school in England. He is also experimenting with “hugelkultur” — a German gardening technique of creating a small hilllike bed of rotting logs and twigs on which to grow things. He has beans and sunflowers growing at the moment on the hugel he has built.
The Van Berckels’ asparagus patch has been less successful. David doesn’t feel it is producing, as it should.
“We get a good crop, but not enough to share,” says Aubin. “We always like to grow enough so we can give some away. We’ll keep trying.”
But a patch of “popcorn” corn is producing a bumper crop. And David is still searching for a variety of fat, green gooseberries worth growing.
“All I can get are these blue ones. I want the juicy, big green ones I remember from my youth.”
Aubin has already harvested tables full of garlic, and as we walk she gets me to taste different varieties of crunchy peas she is still picking.
In another spot, two beehives have been placed by researchers from the University of B.C. in a bid to develop more reliable colonies with “Bowen queens” that attract only specific drones.
The garden would not have been possible without a lot of help from family and friends, say the Van Berckels.
“Part of the energy of this garden comes from all the people who have worked so hard to build it,” says Aubin. “David would come home with 200 lavenders and I would send out a message that we were having a planting party. We’d have 50, or even 100 people come and I would make a big paella and give everyone beer and pop. That’s how we planted the vineyard, and how we did the pond. I think this way people got to feel a certain ownership in the garden. People still come to visit and work in the garden just for the fun of it.”