Recently, Richmond Garden Club celebrated a day of touring some of our members’ own private gardens, each uniquely different. It is usually a day of enveloping ourselves in beautiful serene gardens, sharing ideas and even sharing the odd plant cuttings.
Most of the gardens we viewed were really outdoor extensions of the home. All of the gardens included some level of “hardscaping” incorporated into their landscape design.
Hardscaping can include an outdoor dining area, fireplaces, walkways, water elements and even some artistic elements. Adding hardscape design to your yard using natural materials can increase property values and increases the enjoyment of being able to use your yard during the different seasons.
With the high cost of fuel many people are choosing to stay home, so having a beautifully landscaped yard can add to your summer staycation.
One of our members has cleverly added elements into her garden that delighted and surprised our members. With her use of everyday materials and her amazing imagination she has created a sanctuary that removed us all from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
Her healthy lush gardens have become her pallet for creating vignettes. For example, in a shady part of her property she has hung four lamp shade frames from a large coniferous tree to welcome visitors into her shade garden. The shades were found in thrift stores with a couple even free. She removed the fabric and sanded the metal frames to remove any glue. She painted the metal frames with durable outdoor paint in bright blue, green and yellow, then wired the shades together vertically with the largest frame at the top and the smallest one dangling at the bottom of her newly created lampshade chandelier. To protect her valuable trees, she hung the wire for the chandelier from a piece of bicycle tube wrapped around a branch to keep the wire from rubbing against the branch. Simply delightful!
Her brilliant idea to create a “garden bed” in her yard took a few years to complete as she searched for salvaged materials to use in her hardscaping. She was on the hunt for antique iron bed frames for her garden bed. She finally found an old iron headboard and an old rusty iron gate for the footboard. Both of these items cost her almost next to nothing.
She created a raised garden bed to ensure good drainage, covered her lawn with newspaper and topped her creation off with her own home-grown compost. She made sure that her garden bed was pollinator friendly so chose plants accordingly. The adorable little garden bed is filled with colourful perennials that almost makes you want to settle back in amongst the flowers and read a great book.
One of my favourites was her simple creation of a very large sun catcher. She took an assortment of small colourful glass plates and tucked them into the spokes of a bike rim. This stunning light catcher is placed on her sun deck where the morning sun shines through. It even catches the light from the setting sun.
Her clever use of hardscaping in her landscape design provides definition and a sense of organization to the natural areas in her yard. Her designs lead visitors through different areas of her gardens where it is so hard to resist not stopping and just enjoying the hidden message coming from that little section of her garden.
Touring our members’ gardens each year always proves to be richly rewarding and inspiring for us all to try new ideas! Get out and visit some local garden tours for your own inspiration.
Lynda Pasacreta is the current president of the Richmond Garden Club. For more information, visit richmondgardenclub.ca.
