“All gardening is landscape painting.”
Alexander Pope
My mother grew a huge vegetable garden in which we four children had to put in a certain number of hours of planting, weeding and picking. My favourite memories of the garden concerned peas. I loved planting the peas. They looked like soft green buttons sewn on the umber-coloured shirt of a sleeping giant, and I was the seamstress as I dropped each pea- button, one to two inches apart, into the trough. When they grew into plump pods, I’d eat them raw, cramming whole fistfuls into my mouth. No snack can compare to those freshly shelled garden peas. Even the pods were delicious, once you peeled off the inner membrane.
It took me many years to have a vegetable garden of my own. But now I have one and it is a miracle. Two years ago, my husband and I purchased the land on which my husband’s business sits (Portico Timber Frames). The soil itself is mostly sand and rock – fill that had been dumped into a swamp. But the site has sunshine and it is flat, both rare features in Muskoka and the Haliburton Highlands and I began to dream of the possiblility of growing a garden there. Since the soil grew scruffy weeds, I wondered if it might just grow vegetables, too. I could just see that desert bloom.
After reading Patricia Lanza’s Lasagna Gardening, I went to work trying out her no dig, no till, no weeding system of gardening. After mowing down the weeds and grass, my husband and I built long rectangular boxes with wood from Portico’s scrap pile. I lined the bottom with 4 sheets of wet, overlapping newspapers to kill the growth. On top, I dumped layers of manure, coffee grounds from Tim Horton’s, peat moss, chopped leaves, straw, top soil, compost, anything I could think off that might make a good soil. Then, I sowed my seeds, flowers and veggies all mixed in together.
Today, it is a verdant, bountiful garden that feeds my family all summer long and provides a quiet and refreshing place where people can stroll and rest in. Much more has grown up in this garden. My daughter opened a wood-fired pizzeria in my garden (mypizzaonearth.com). My new studio opens out onto the garden. My husband and nephew built an English-style brick pathway and patio in the garden. My little garden developed further to include a burgeoning Dorset community garden where members meet to garden, trade plants and gardening tips and to socialize. Birds love to visit the garden, too. Miracles do happen. Deserts really can bloom.
As I dropped the peas into the soil this afternoon and was transported back to my mother’s garden, I looked up at my own beautiful garden with is tall spires of garlic, its deep blue irises, its bright yellow-green lettuce, and fragrant herbs. I realized that, while I paint for a living, I now live in a painting. My surroundings are also my canvas. Gardening is just another form of landscape painting. No wonder I am totally absorbed by it.
Elizabeth Johnson 