Reasons to be Cheerful
Selinda White called me to arrange to have the Garden Club tour her garden. I contacted the executive and they were very pleased to have Selinda and Mike’s lovely garden thrown open for the club. A lot of gardeners are doing this. Susan Tait just opened her famous spring garden for the club a few days ago. If you wish to know what it feels like to be royalty, spend an hour in Susan’s garden to find out.
Sadly, these gardens are not open to the public but more and more gardeners are inviting the Garden Club to visit. People who used to be on the Home and Garden show, but now think they are too old (one day you wake up and realize you are not seventy anymore) are letting the Garden Club come instead. Hint: if you wish to be in the enviable position to visit these gardens, you can join the Garden Club for a low annual fee. Contact info is at the bottom of the article.
Also, on June 19, Liz and John Johnston, will be hosting the annual Garden Club Hats and Gloves Party. This is a whimsical event and people come with their garden hats and gloves decorated with flowers, foliage and in one memorable case, a miniature watering can and a tiny trowel. It is a potluck picnic and a social event. Liz, as hostess, will judge the hats and gloves and the winner gets a prize. If you don’t feel like wearing a hat full of flowers, you are welcome to come as you feel comfortable.
Liz has a mighty rose garden and will be selling her home-cultivated and lovely collection of roses at the party. This is also the only chance for most of us to enjoy Liz’s exceptional garden as she is not on the Garden Tour this year.
Let’s get back to Selinda. I couldn’t make it to see her garden as we would be working with a contractor at the times her garden was open. So, being cheeky, I phoned Selinda and asked if my husband and I could come early. We were the first visitors so Selinda made an event out of it and gave us a tour.
What a delightful, lavish, enchanted garden! Selinda and Mike have lived there for twenty years but the gardener who lived there for some twenty years before them was Josephine Hepburn, a Master Gardener from the VanDusen Botanical Garden. She specialized in rare shrubs and a riot of ground cover plants. Selinda built on this foundation with lots of tough plants. Her garden was a sea of bluebells and wild garlic with its frothy white flowers.
I was expecting a lot of nice plants and they are certainly there but I did not know that Selinda was a ceramicist. She has created enchanting sculptures of ceramic cups, tea pots, piggy banks and so on. They dot the garden and give it the flavour of a Mad Hatter’s tea party. She showed me some of the 200 tiles she made, “to keep my grandkids busy while I was babysitting.” The concrete tiles are inlaid with mosaics of china pieces, metal vases, toys and other oddments in full Mad Hatter style.
She showed me the bug tree which is just on the right as you come in the gate. Look for an arbutus and you will see little pieces of colourful plastic toys emerging from the tree bark. She had pinned plastic bugs from the Free Store onto the tree and it ate them up, covering the toys with its bark. Selinda proudly told me her grandkids were terrified of that tree when they were little and always went past it at the gallop. Every childhood should contain a little wholesome terror.
Selinda led me to another part of her garden where two tall Douglas fir trees formed a vee shape. They have circles of barbed wire formed as wreaths between the trunks while the trunks of the trees are decorated with ancient barbie dolls, some without heads and missing limbs. I said that looked like pretty dark magic to me and Selinda explained that she hates Barbie dolls and has been teaching her grandkids that women do not have bodies like that. Her dogs gnaw off heads and limbs.
If you would like to see Selinda’s garden she will be opening it to the Garden Club again in late June to show off her mad poppy collection and her 45 roses, all grown from cuttings.
To join the club, you can come to the next meeting which is at 2 pm, 15 May at the United Church Hall. They will be having a couple of speakers and the fee to join is only $15 for a single or $20 for a family. See you there!
