by Mark and Ben Cullen

If your garden brought you joy and serenity in 2020, this could be the year that you decide to rock out. That is, install a rock garden.

Despite the name, rock-gardening does not involve growing rocks but rather building a garden around them.

We love rock gardens for a host of reasons. They provide year-round interest and are permanent, as rock never dies. Rock gardens provide habitat for insects and beneficial bacteria between crevices, increasing the overall biodiversity in your yard. Hot, windy, and arid environments are perfect for alpine rock gardens when populated with drought-tolerant plants. Cool, shady, and damp environments work well too, where a woodland rock garden can be populated with moss and ferns.

Rocks are abundant in Canada. Whether you buy them, or you know a farmer who is happy to let you pick them out of their fields and windrows (with permission of course) – rocks are not hard to come by.

Here are our top seven tips for building a great rock garden:

1. Stretch your muscles, lift with your legs. We both have enough experience with an aching back to advise on this with some authority. Moving rocks around is not a typical activity for most gardeners, so pay attention to your body as you move them, rent a machine, or call on some help to avoid injury.
   
2. Source your rocks. If you do not have a source of rocks, look in your area for a stone supplier where you are likely to find ethically sourced rocks. Look for “landscape supplies” as a start in your search.
   
3. Start big, go small. Your enthusiasm for moving big rocks is likely to wane quickly, so get the big rocks in place before you start to burn out. If they are really big, rent a machine or hire a professional to move them. Bigger rocks provide overall structure to your rock garden while smaller rocks give texture and finer shape. Consider moving smaller rocks as your plants mature.
   
4. Make use of layering. Height is one of the most underused design elements in garden design as it can be difficult to alter elevations on a property. Not so with rock gardens. It only takes a few large rocks dropped into place to add layers of visual interest, so use them to your advantage.

When laying out your rocks, use the natural strata lines in them to guide your arrangement.  Most rocks possess striations that look most natural when lined up in the same direction.

• Use the right soil.  Rock gardening is an opportunity to improve soil conditions.   A rock garden in a sunny position will heat up naturally early in the season, giving you a jump on spring. 

If you plan to build an alpine style rock garden, backfill with plenty of well drained sandy soil. For a woodland rock garden, add plenty of organic material, i.e., compost, to mimic a fertile deciduous forest floor.

• Plant selection. Imagine your rock garden as if it were a natural environment. What would be growing there? Alpine rock gardens do well with drought tolerant sedums, sempervivums, hens and chicks, and a backdrop of perennial grasses or pine trees. For a shady rock garden consider native woodland plants such as Wood fern (Dryopteris marginalis) or Lady fern (Athyrium felix-femina) and Irish moss. (Sagina subulata).
  
• Get inspired! There are infinite opportunities and design ideas for incorporating rocks into the garden. Spend some time checking out famous rock gardens online, such as the Ryōan-ji temple in Kyoto (http://www.ryoanji.jp/smph/eng/), or our one of our favourite public gardens close to home – the Rock Garden at the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, which underwent massive rejuvenation in 2016 (currently closed due to COVID-19, check online). https://www.rbg.ca/gardens-trails/by-attraction/rock-garden/

Think, visualize, and build your rock-star garden this spring.

Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and Member of the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourth-generation urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen.com, @markcullengardening, and on Facebook.

by Mark and Ben Cullen

Most Canadians are not very motivated to go to a retail garden centre this time of year.  We are good at arriving at our favourite garden store when the sun is shining, the earth is beckoning us, and all of our neighbours are shopping on the same day.

However, if you mosey into any full-service garden retailer now or go online to review their current offering, you will likely find a wide selection of summer flowering bulbs.  Many are a mystery to the average gardener: why are they for sale now?  How will they perform in my garden come spring/summer? What will I do with them if I buy them now?
Here are our top 7 tips for great summer flowering bulbs.

1. Do not confuse them. Summer flowering bulbs, like dahlias and canna lilies, are not spring flowering bulbs, as in daffodils, tulips and crocus. The former is frost tender and cannot be left in the ground all winter where they will rot. The latter are planted in the fall or you plant the potted, forced version in the garden come spring, which is expensive and inconvenient.
   
2. Start now. We are planting up our dahlia roots/tubers in one-gallon size pots and placing them in the sunniest window in the house in early March. We have a sliding glass door that faces south and west for best exposure. Stepping over these pots to open the door is a minor nuisance and overcome with the odd swear word. Nothing serious. Tuberous begonias can be started any time now. They require special treatment, by giving them a “half screw” into pure, damp, peat moss or seed starting mix in a seed starting tray. We start ours on the top of the refrigerator where there is even, ambient heat: they are a warm season crop. After about four to six weeks, remove them from the tray, hairy roots and all, and plant into four-inch pots. Finish them in a sunny window or under grow lights until planting time in late May.
   
3. Start later. Summer flowering canna lilies (which are not lilies but members of the Zingiberales family, along with bananas and bird of paradise) are best started in late March or early April. Start them earlier and you might have giant, top heavy plants taking over your kitchen before you are able to plant them in the garden in late May. We use a loose premixed potting soil and large, two-gallon pots.
   
4. Start directly in the garden. Gladiolas are best saved until early May when they are planted directly in the garden. They have a rather deliberate, upright look so we keep them in the background of our sunny borders or lined out like soldiers in the veggie garden. Great as cut flowers which are edible (the flower petals), so plan on livening up summer salads with excess flowers from your glads.
   
5. Buy now. Recently, we advised readers to buy garden seeds early this year to avoid disappointment. Last year at this time, many Canadian gardeners stormed the seed racks and online retailers and cleaned them out of inventory early. The same might happen with summer flowering bulbs. When you bring them home, store them out of direct sunshine and in a cool room. The basement or a refrigerator is a good location until you plant them.
   
6. Store them. Want to save money? Come late fall, around Thanksgiving, use a garden fork to remove the mature roots of your summer flowering bulbs. Cut the tops off, leaving a stem about 15 cm long. Allow them to dry in the sun for a couple of days and store in a paper bag filled with dry peat moss or dry potting soil until you are ready to plant the following winter/spring. Many bulbs, tubers and rhizomes grow so large that you can divide them and share with friends, family, and neighbours. Give them a copy of this article too.
   
7. Enjoy them. Take pictures when in bloom, enjoy the pollinators they attract, cut them and bring indoors for the table. They will fill a room with joy.

Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and Member of the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourth-generation urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen.com, @markcullengardening, and on Facebook.

by Mark and Ben Cullen

Front yard gardens form the most visible patchwork of a vibrant community.

Your front yard garden is where passers-by stop to admire a blooming rose. It is where you lean on your shovel to chat with a neighbour.

Which brings us to a great new Canadian book we recently enjoyed, “Gardening Your Front Yard: Projects and Ideas for Big & Small Spaces” by Tara Nolan (Cool Springs Press, 2020).

Ideas big and small. This book is big on inspiration. As Nolan puts it in her opening chapter, “I feel like the inspiration I’ve gathered is an unlimited scrapbook of ideas that can forever be expanded upon”. She adds, “Let the Brainstorming Begin”.

Gardening Your Front Yard excels at taking the creative planning process, the brainstorming of randomly saved webpages, pictures, newspaper clippings, or Instagram photos, and channeling them into thoughtful, cohesive designs and plans.

If you are coming up short on creative ideas for your own front yard, you will enjoy the rich illustration and photographs of “Gardening Your Front Yard”. Many photos provide practical, how-to lessons on creating your front yard oasis while others are pure inspiration.

During the pandemic, we have the perfect opportunity to walk around our own neighbourhood and observe what others have done with their front yard. In addition, Nolan recommends finding inspiration in the wild. A walk through a Toronto area ravine, for example, provides clues for a flowering meadow garden. Attending a garden tour or visiting a public garden will make your brainstorming experience richer.

The second half of the book focuses on practical advice, which Nolan brings together like a skilled knitter who uses various colours of yarn to create a beautiful sweater. Challenges, such as planting around your home’s foundation or eliminating lawn to make way for bigger gardens, are dealt with in detail.

In the chapter “Front Yard Living: A Return to Being Social in the Front Yard” Nolan distinguishes the front yard experience from any other. For us, being social is the whole point of the front yard and the reason why we do not put an 8’ fence around it. Nolan makes the argument for a front-yard patio, which reverses the trend of the last few decades and puts the residents out front where we can be social. During the isolation of the pandemic just waving hello to neighbours has a certain appeal.

Having a place to sit which is both visually appealing and comfortable is uniquely challenging in the front yard where appearances are everything. The book includes plans for an attractive live-edge bench and tips for remodelling your patio set.

Where flowers, foliage and groundcovers are concerned, Nolan knows her stuff and as a writer based in Dundas, Ontario she understands Canadian gardening. The book is geared towards what works in our growing zone. We both appreciated the section about lawns, or, more to the point, what to replace a lawn with. Fescue grasses and clover mixes are reviewed in detail, as are meadows which are not a case of simply ignoring your front garden, but carefully planning, planting, and nurturing. The reader discovers that there is no short cut to fulfilling your dream front yard.

As a Canadian garden writer, Nolan does an excellent job of weaving expertise and knowledge from her network of fellow Canadian garden writers. Perennial plant expert Tony Spencer from Mono, Ontario is called upon for his knowledge of new-perennialism – the ingenious method of landscape planning inspired by famed Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf. Sean James of Milton, Ontario, is referenced for how to create a groundcover-quilt. Toronto Botanical Garden Director of Horticulture Paul Gellatly is introduced as a passionate front yard breeder of exotic lilies, and Father-Daughter food gardeners Steven and Emma Biggs make an appearance in the book for innovative techniques to incorporate food gardening into the front yard.

“Gardening Your Front Yard” is a garden party in a book, with ideas and inspiration shared between passionate gardeners. Right about now a garden party sounds quite appealing to us.

Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and Member of the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourth-generation urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen.com, @markcullengardening, and on Facebook.

by Mark and Ben Cullen

When we think of precious commodities, we think of gold, silver, and garden seeds.

Forgive us for taking liberty with a product category that is near and dear, seeing as one of the great growth industries during the pandemic has been flower and vegetable seeds. Especially seeds for food plants.

The growth of this category was aggressive pre-pandemic, but now demand has advanced by 10 years in one year. Recently, Mark placed his order online for seeds only to find that some of his favourite varieties were sold out. Hello, Swiss Chard, Bright Lights Mix, where are you?

If there is a piece of ground or an empty planter in your life that is begging for a tomato plant or some fresh carrots to be grown in them, now is the best time to acquire the seeds that you will need to be successful.

Here are our favourite online seed companies:

Hawthorne Farm Organic Selected Seeds. Mark orders about $200 worth of seeds from this family owned, Ontario business. They pride themselves in non-GMO product. The website is easy to navigate with each category neatly segregated. Your order is tallied as you go: no surprises. www.hawthornefarm.ca

Floribunda Seeds. Non-GMO, non hybrid, untreated, heirloom seeds. If one of your gardening goals is to be a sustainable gardener, Floribunda is a good place to start. Ontario based. www.florabundaseeds.com

Ontario Seed Company. OSC supplies many of the seed racks that you find at garden retailers.  They are a large volume, quality supplier. If you are having trouble finding a specific veggie or flower variety, go to their site and have a look. www.oscseeds.com

William Dam Seeds in Dundas Ontario. Often seeds are chemically treated to preserve them and maximize germination rates, not so at Dam Seeds. Dam Seeds provides a colourful, easy to navigate website and easy payment options. They also trial many of their seeds to prove their performance before they offer them for sale. A favourite. www.damseeds.com

Veseys. Our #1 pick outside of Ontario. This Prince Edward Island family-run business features a long list of offerings including many hard-to-find varieties of vegetables. We can recommend that you visit their trial gardens if you visit P.E.I. in the summer. We have been incredibly happy with the quality of their fruit plants, including raspberries, strawberries and apple trees, in addition to their seed offering. www.veseys.com

Annapolis Seeds. We recommend that you go online and check them out just for the stories if nothing else. Their seeds are organic, non-GMO and “grown with love”. When you visit their website homepage, there is a popup story that goes like this, “Regular customers may have noticed; we raised our prices this season, from 3.00 to 3.50. Seeds had been 3.00 since we began back in 2008. Hope you don’t mind our updated price (gotta keep up with the times).”

We think that anyone who apologizes for a modest price increase, after 13 years of holding prices, deserves a second look. They have an extensive selection of Maritime sourced food plant seeds and ornamentals. Plus, they offer tutorials on how to grow a long list of plants including some that you may not have considered for your own garden, including peanuts. Mark has his order in. www.annopolisseeds.com

Kids and seeds. We think that there is a miracle at work within every garden seed. A life that is ready to burst out of its shell and be set free. It is you, the gardener who holds the key to its life as a plant.

The people who run the not-for-profit Plant a Seed and See What Grows Foundation must agree with us as they provide a great source of educational resources for children ages 5 to 10. They offer books, produced in-house for educational purposes, seeds, instructional guides and workbooks for at home and at-school students. Low or no cost.

Check them out at www.seewhatgrows.org for details. Mark has accessed their resources and is now sharing them with his 4- and 5-year-old grand kids.

Garden seeds: the new gold and silver.

Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and Member of the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourth-generation urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen.com, @markcullengardening, and on Facebook.

by Mark and Ben Cullen

During a recent snowfall, the garden shrouded in a blanket of pure white snow, Mark’s wife Mary exclaimed, “The cardinals illuminate the yard!”

During the long dark days of winter, every Canadian looks for illumination. The temptation to find it might be turning on your TV or iPad. But there is another way to shorten winter, and that is by turning to nature.

The native birds that stay over winter in our climate provide a window into something extraordinary. When, in our history, has there been a better time to slow down, and observe avian activity than during the pandemic?

The Great Backyard Bird Count is on and now is your chance to get in on the action.

There is indeed “action”. According to Steven Price, President of Birds Canada, the hosting organization of this volunteer activity. This annual four-day event attracted over 250,000 participants last year worldwide, 40,000 in Canada. Together, they counted over 27 million birds almost 7,000 species.

Participation is simple. Log on to the Birds Canada website at birdscanada.org and click on the Great-Backyard-Bird-Count link (https://www.birdscanada.org/bird-science/great-backyard-bird-count/). Sign up and you are in. Now all you have to do is count birds and if possible, name them and record the results on the website.

There is an excellent section on the Birds Canada website that helps you identify birds, if you are unsure. https://www.birdscanada.org/

Between us, we have 16 bird feeders and we feed birds a mixture of quality, corn-free seed, pure black oil sunflower, nyjer seed for the little songlets like nuthatches, suet for chickadees and woodpeckers and bird quality peanuts for even more woodpeckers (always salt free).

Here are our favourite birds this time of year and how best to attract them:
Blue Jays. No need to wait for the season opener (baseball joke) as the Jays are lurking in your nearest cedar hedge waiting for peanuts. In the shell or out of the shell, bird peanuts are like candy to Blue Jays. Black oil sunflower seeds also work well. Members of the crow family, they are smart, noisy, and bossy. When they are around most other birds step aside.

Chickadees. Cute, friendly (you can train them to take seed from your open hand) and chirpy. Chickadees get their name from their song which is unmistakable from quite a distance. Black oil sunflower seeds are best.

Nuthatches. One of the few birds that travel on a tree trunk head-first. They are the kid on the monkey bars that has no fear. Entertaining. Nyjer seed and black oil sunflower seeds.

Downy and Hairy woodpeckers. Downy, the smaller of the two, and Hairy’s look alike but have different stature. Suet is a sure attractant as are raw, peanuts out of the shell. Again, salt free as salt is not good for birds. Look for the distinct red flash on the back of the head of the males and the black and white markings on feathers that look like a black and white TV on the fritz.

Red Bellied Woodpecker. Known best for their brilliantly colour red head. Their red belly is hard to see but it is there. Feed same as Downy and Hairy woodpeckers.

Cardinal. You must love the outstanding colour of the male cardinal contrasted against the snow. A true winter wonder worth watching. Feed same as Blue Jays.

Mr. Price reminds us, “You can count birds from the comfort of your own home, go outside and count them or walk the trails of a park or conservation area. The point is not where you see the birds but how many and the species.”

He adds, “The information is used is used to help scientists around the world understand the range of birds, threats like climate change and habit loss and it helps Birds Canada demonstrate where conservation action is working to conserve nature.”

The Backyard Bird Count starts February 12 and concludes February 15.  Engage friends and family in the activity and challenge them to see who can identify the most birds and species in the four days.

Winter will never seem shorter. www.birdscanada.org/bird-science/great-backyard-bird-count/

Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and Member of the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourth-generation urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen.com, @markcullengardening, and on Facebook.

by Mark and Ben Cullen

On Valentines day, February 14, what are you giving to the one(s) you love to express how you feel about them? 

We have a recommendation that will blow your romantic socks off: flowers. 

Fragrant flowers. Old news? Do not turn the page just yet. When you give roses or hyacinths in bloom you are not just endowing the recipient with one more thing, you are expressing a scent-iment (see how we did that?).

The sweet scent of a living plant, or a bouquet of cut flowers, can fill a room with something that you will never get from artificial, silk-like substitutes. Life and breath. A reminder to the olfactory in your brain that there is life after winter. Our sense of smell can move us in ways that other stimuli can not. We may see beautiful flowers and enjoy what they add to a room. But to smell them? That is something else. 

Here is our list of favourite fragrant flowers, appropriate for Valentines gift giving. We recommend that you consider buying some for your sweetheart, your kid or grandkids:

Gardenia (Gardenia jasminoides) Purchase this as a potted plant. The creamy white blossoms are “rose like” in appearance but the sweet smell of Gardenia is more powerful than most roses. In fact, you would likely only want to have one in a room, or the odor may be overwhelming. Buy this plant in flower bud to prolong your enjoyment of the flowers once they open. Keep in a cool room, out of direct sunlight, while in bloom then move into brighter light until May, when you can plant it outdoors in an east location or under the shade of a tree. Gardenia likes an acid soil, treat with garden sulphur. 

Hyacinth. Just one hyacinth bulb in bloom will enhance a bedroom with a soft smell reminiscent of early spring.  Look for purple, pink, or white blooms. Perfect for kids as they can watch it change daily. First producing the bloom and leaves, then in April, they can plant it outside or on the condo balcony and watch it bloom again next spring.

Lavender. Buy while in blossom and enjoy the plant until fall. The blooms smell like lavender (go figure) and after the bloom is finished you can activate the essential oils of the plant by running your fingers through it. Lavender enjoys being petted. Same for the herb rosemary, which, when you smell it, stimulates your appetite. Lavender and rosemary plants are widely available this time of year at garden retailers. Do not over water either plant. Place in a sunny position in your garden come May. 

Roses. Not all roses are scented. When you shop for cut roses be sure to give them the smell-test if scent is important to you. In any case, a bouquet of fresh cut roses smells like a florist shop and there is nothing wrong with that. To extend their life, keep them out of direct sun and place them in a refrigerator or cool basement over night. Change the water each day and use the preservative that comes in a small envelope when you buy cut flowers. There are likely more of these in your junk drawer in your kitchen.  Use them up, one sachet per day for a week or so.

You might be wondering why we make such a fuss on Valentines day about giving fresh flowers and living plants to express our affection. If you are one of those people, we suspect that the romance gene is not dominant. We can help.

It is the nature of a fresh cut flower, a bouquet or a flowering plant that endears itself to you, the giver. Your love transcends time and space, it endures in the mind of the recipient long after the lingering sweetness of the scent and vision has disappeared into the compost (which, if it is properly balanced has its own spring-like odor). Your sweetheart will not have the thing forever, like a diamond, to remind them of you. They have the sweet memory of your gift. In that respect, diamonds and flowers are opposites.

Which is why they are both so appealing.

Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and Member of the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourth-generation urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen.com, @markcullengardening, and on Facebook.

by Mark and Ben Cullen

Winter is nature’s gift to Canadian gardeners.

It is not her only gift as our list includes warm rain, sunshine, and all the ancillary gifts that nature showers on us throughout the year. There is nothing like a long, cold Canadian winter to set us up for success each season.

Here is how Mother Nature blesses us this time of year and how you can take full advantage:

Compost. Mark has a three-minute walk to his six cubic yard compost bin each day. This is what it is to live in the country. He looks forward to it. While there, he looks for animal activity and sometimes, he is surprised to find that a coyote has rummaged through the produce section. Providing them with a little sustenance is the least he can do this time of year. Winter provides a deep freeze that penetrates most of our compost, expanding the moisture-rich contents as temperatures drop.

As the thaw occurs come spring, the tissue of the same kitchen and yard scraps is ripped and torn apart as the cells of the organic material flops into a helpless heap of goo. Otherwise known as pre-mature compost, it still needs a few months to rot down before it is useful as a soil amendment, but the frost accelerates the process. Our southern neighbours, who do not experience frost, do not get this benefit of winter.

Bugs.  There is nothing like a long cold spell to kill off many of the problem bugs that attack our garden plants. Japanese beetles have descended on Canadian gardens in recent years, moving up from the American south due to climate change. Warmer winters created an environment that encouraged them to overwinter without a problem so that in summer they can defoliate your Virginia creeper. Pray for mean winter temperatures below -9.4 degrees Celsius. OMAFRA (Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs) advises that colder temperatures over an extended period will kill off Japanese beetles. Bring it on! Unlike the Japanese beetle, we can just put on another sweater.

Think. Winter is a time of reflection. Soon enough, the ground will warm with longer days and stronger sunshine. The crocus will wake up and trumpet hello, reminding us that we have a lot of work to do. Before you are busy with spring garden tasks, take time to reflect on the garden that you want this year. If you grow food, remember that many veggie seeds sold out early last year. It is not too early to look over the online offerings of seeds and get your orders in.

If you want to plant a new landscape or garden, now is the time to explore the possibilities and sketch a design – it does not have to be fancy. This is the best time of year to reach out and acquire the services of a professional.

Explore. Stir your mind with information and inspiration. There are plenty of great podcasts (we have a fresh one every two weeks at https://feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/greenfile.xml, as well as books including new ones from our friends Tara Nolan (Gardening Your Front Yard) and Niki Jabbour (Gardening Under Cover). https://savvygardening.com/buy-our-books/

Garden indoors. Most obvious of all is to grow plants indoors this time of year. Buy a tropical plant, name it, nurture and make it your own. It will produce oxygen and clean the air for you indoors. Bring home some flowers, especially ones that do not last exceptionally long like roses or freesias. Carnations and mums look okay but they seem never to give up. When a flower dies after 5 to 10 days it reminds us that life is fragile and worth savouring. And besides, a vase of spent flowers is a reminder to go get some more, to brighten up our season off.

Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and Member of the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourth-generation urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen.com, @markcullengardening, and on Facebook.

by Mark and Ben Cullen

Hope is growing in 2021. What a refreshing theme after a difficult year last year. Canadians are ready to start looking up and so are gardeners.

That is why Communities in Bloom has embraced Hope is Growing as the banner for their 2021 campaign.

What is Communities in Bloom? It is a celebration of urban environmental sustainability across Canada. CiB is a volunteer driven not-for-profit organization that partners with municipalities to enhance residential and public spaces.

Since their humble beginnings in 1995, the goal has been “to enhance the quality of life and the environment through people and plants in order to create community pride”.

We are delighted that our professional trade association Canadian Nursery Landscape Association (CNLA) acquired control of Communities in Bloom just over a year ago. This provides an opportunity for new ideas, growth, and vision.

The first endeavour of the “new” Communities in Bloom is the Hope is Growing campaign, which encourages Canadians to plant a garden of hope for 2021, featuring the colour yellow. From coast to coast, the goal is to create front yards, boulevards and playgrounds brimming with yellow flowers, foliage, and vegetables.

As always, friendly competition is at the heart of Communities in Bloom. If your community participates in the broader Communities in Bloom program, planting a bright yellow Hope Garden can enhance your odds for this year’s awards.

How to Design your Hope Garden

Here are our top suggestions for a yellow themed garden this season:

Forsythia (forsythia) one of our favourite flowering shrubs which is enrobed in a coat of yellow flowers in early spring – perfect timing for the heralding of new hope. If you have not already planted forsythia, you can enjoy its colour with cuttings placed in a tall vase. Forsythia cuttings tend to root easily by pushing the bottom third of each cutting into damp ground as soon as the ground has thawed.

Sunflower (helianthus) for sunny days ahead – there could be no more obvious choice for a Hope Garden. Shop now for a wide variety of sunflower varieties from seed catalogues or go online and check out the seeds that are available from a myriad of suppliers. Plant directly from seed in early spring, enjoy throughout late summer and fall as the birds show up to enjoy a feast on big yellow sunflower heads.

Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) a native perennial that produces bright yellow flowers from late summer into autumn and attracts pollinators to beat the band.

Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) another great native plant that is a relative to the sunflower. This one is different, though, as it features an abundance of yellow pollinator-attracting flowers and produces an edible tuber that can be cooked like a potato. Note: Jerusalem artichoke can be overly aggressive, almost invasive. Keep it in a confined part of your garden.

Marigolds (Tagetes erecta) a fun annual with edible flowers. All marigolds are technically edible, but in our opinion the best tasting species are French marigold (Tagetes patula). Big Duck Gold marigold is one of our favourite varieties. As a bonus, many vegetable gardeners inter-plant marigolds with their veggie crops to keep insects, especially aphids, at bay.

Speaking of vegetables, one of our favourite yellow vegetables is the Golden Delight summer squash, or simply yellow zucchini. Easy to grow and prolific. One of Mark’s favourite tricks is carving the grandkids’ names in zucchinis while the fruit with a knife when they are young and giving them as gifts from the “zucchini fairy” after they have matured for a few days. Why not carve a hopeful message in your zucchini?

Canadians took up gardening in record numbers last year: we hope to see a yellow-washed repeat in 2021 – after all, Hope is Growing in the garden.

Hope is Growing!

Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and Member of the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourth-generation urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen.com, @markcullengardening, and on Facebook.

by Mark and Ben Cullen

Do you think of gardening as outdoor housework? We all know someone who approaches gardening this way.

Then there are the rest of us. We see the experience in our garden or on our condo balcony as an opportunity to engage with nature without accessing the wild of a ravine or forest. We are gardeners, and the garden is a place between a full-on experience with nature and our sanitized home or office.

This idea is explored in detail in the new book “The Well-Gardened Mind, The Restorative Power of Nature” by Sue Stuart-Smith. A deep dive into the meaning of gardens, both in an active sense of gardening, and the passive experience we have while sitting on a bench surveying a view of the garden.

Early in the book, Stuart-Smith explores how the physical actions of gardening: digging, planting and nurturing connects with our head. She calls this “freeing of your mind by engaging your hands”, though the activity of using your hands in the garden is different from other hand activities like painting art or sculpting as we connect with the soil and plants. “Caring for the garden is nurturing, calming and invigorating” she says. Not only do plants grow, but so do we.

She points out that gardening “allows our inner world and our outer world to coexist”, for our minds to connect to the natural world in which we live, rather than the one indoors which is dominated by electronics.

Gardening can only happen with a gardener. That is anyone who shapes space by investing in plants and their ancillary supports including pots, soil, and water. We are not controlling nature so much as partnering with her to create a place of beauty and productivity. By planting many flowering specimens in our garden, we attract pollinators, bees and birds that have a symbiotic relationship with plants, the pollinator giving fertility to the plant and the flower giving sustenance to the pollinator. The gardener is an enabler.

There was a time, after the Second World War, when gardeners attempted to control nature with chemicals. That is changing. Stuart-Smith draws a helpful comparison between child rearing and gardening. In neither case are we in control of growth but we do foster a certain direction that the child and garden take over time. We contribute our efforts and hope for the best.

Hope is a classic theme in “The Well-Gardened Mind”. A chapter is devoted to the lessons that we have learned from war as it relates to gardening. Before we knew about PTSD, or post traumatic stress disorder, it was generally understood that the more time a convalescing soldier spent in a garden or greenhouse, the faster their recovery, both physical and mental. The author reminds us that there are horticultural metaphors for war. Think of the meaning behind the Flanders poppy (the cost of war) and the olive branch (the value of peace). Horticulture touches us in so many ways.

According to Stuart-Smith, in penitentiaries where inmates are given access to a garden, there has been no recorded escape attempts. The point is that all humans, no matter how hopeless their situation, can relate to the life-giving inspiration of a garden. Stuart-Smith, “When we plant a seed, we sow a narrative of hope”. For those of us who devote our livelihood to gardening and landscaping, this could become our mantra.

This is a textbook that explores the effects of gardening on the human psyche. Frankly, it may not be for everyone. But if you have ever wondered how gardening effects us as humans, it may be for you.

It is loaded with lessons about our work as enablers of natural beauty and stewards of the environment. “Tending a garden can become an attitude toward life. In a world that is increasingly dominated by technology and consumption, gardening puts us in a direct relationship with the reality of how life is generated and sustained and how fragile and fleeting it can be. Now, more than ever, we need to remind ourselves that first and foremost, we are creatures of the earth.” A hopeful message.

The Well-Gardened Mind
The restorative power of nature.
By Sue Stuart-Smith
Scribner ISNB 978-1-4767-9446-4
https://www.suestuartsmith.com/book

Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and Member of the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourth-generation urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen.com, @markcullengardening, and on Facebook.