The Inspired City

It's always nice to get some fresh inspiration. Sometimes it comes from visiting a beautiful garden, or the nursery, or even from a walk in the woods with the kids.

This week, I got a full day of inspiration when I took Julie Moir Messervy's workshop, Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love. Julie's was one of the pre-show workshops at the annual CanWest Hort Show, at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

This particular day was fabulous from beginning to end. It started off with a sunrise run in False Creek. I wanted to check out the progress of the Olympic Village. It is mostly finished, but I did run past a few empty lots and chain-link fences...it seems hard to believe that all of this will be finished on time for the Olympics, but my bet is that they'll get it done. The finished landscape work that I did see, however, is gorgeous. There's a great mix of materials with steel, concrete, pavers, and chunky wooden areas, made to look like piers. There is one section in particular that I really like, where the landscapers have placed large rectangular granite chunks, like benches, in amongst Mexican Feather Grass (Stipa tenuissima). The wispy golden grasses are a perfect foil for the solid, hard edges of granite. I also saw a lot of native plants such as Salal (Gaultheria shallon) and Vine Maple (Acer circinatum). I like the way these informal plantings look against such a dense, urban setting as this.


In order to get from where I was staying in False Creek down to the Convention Centre, I took the new Canada Line Skytrain. It took about ten minutes to get from False Creek down to the Convention Centre in Coal Harbour. Very nice.

As I made my way to the Convention Centre, I walked through another very well-designed landscape. This one sits just outside the food-court below the convention centre, in what would have been a difficult area to design. It is a very steep slope from the streets above, and a relatively small flat area. What the designers did was create a gorgeous waterfall in a tear shape, and next to that, a series of wave-shaped concrete retaining walls planted with grass between them. Gorgeous, I thought, as I saw it in the morning, nearly empty. When I came down at lunch for a burrito, I was even more impressed with this design. Those beautiful retaining walls also act as the perfect bench. The landscape invites you to climb right in, as many people did, to have lunch in this perfect, sunny ocean of stairs. Very impressive.


But, on to the workshop itself. Julie Moir Messervy is a designer that I have long admired. Among others, she wrote a book called Outside the Not So Big House with architect Susan Susanka that I have poured over for years now. This was my introduction to her work.
Julie creates gardens from a place of feeling, of emotion, which of course is the way that we experience the finished garden. All too often as designers we are caught up in the cost of gardens, or the nuts and bolts of building them, coming away from what ultimately matters about the garden, which of course is the way we feel when we are sitting amongst the plants of a finished garden. Julie strives to design and build with what she calls a 'joyful process,' in which the project is a positive journey for everyone involved.

Tuesday's workshop was based on Julie's latest book, Home Outside, Creating the Landscape You Love. Over the course of the day, she took us through the process that she uses with her own clients, beginning with asking her clients to describe to her the landscape that they most loved as a child. This is the place where they loved to sit, daydream, play. Julie believes that by discovering her clients' sacred childhood landscape, she will be much closer to creating the perfect garden for them. This idea really stuck with me. It seems a great way to create a 'home outside' for my own clients, one in which they will be able to daydream again.

We did many exercises throughout the workshop, the most fun and original of which was a group project where we had to design a 'tabletop garden' using whatever we had in our bags, the things that were on our tables already, and a collection of objects that Julie and her husband provided. It was fun to see what everyone came up with, and to work in a group, when many of us designers spend our days working alone.



The workshop was refreshing and inspiring, and the day just flew by. At the end of it all, I took the train back to False Creek, then hopped in the car to make the seven o'clock ferry, back to this beloved little island that is home.

Goodnight Garden

Even though there's no more swimming in the lake, no more camping trips, no reading our books while the kids play on the beach for us till next summer, we really do have it pretty good in the early fall on the island. We have had lovely warm weather and blue blue skies most days this September.

In the garden, the strawberries are producing nicely, as is the lettuce. The tomatoes and squash are still ripening, and our winter crops of kale and rainbow chard are trying their best.

I have a long list of things I'll do better next year, like building a plastic cover to protect our tomatoes from the wind, and to keep them warm for an earlier, better crop. And more. More of everything, especially greens. And next year, I swear it, I will grow a decent crop of carrots.

But, it is time to move on and prepare the garden for the winter. The last thing to go into the ground in our garden this year is garlic. We planted some of what we grew last year (although we've already eaten most of it!), and some that we bought at our local farmers market. We chose soft-neck garlic because it is easy to grow, and will keep in a dry, dark place for longer than the hard-neck varieties.

To prepare the garlic, we pulled whole bulbs apart and separated them into cloves just before planting. We prepared the garlic bed by working in a bag of fish compost, and then digging two trenches side by side, about 3" deep. When the trenches were ready, we placed the garlic cloves into the them, about 5" apart, and then covered them with soil and watered them well. Before long, we should see the greens come up, and they will last through the winter. We will harvest this crop next summer, likely some time in July. Now all we have to do is wait!

The Blackberry Patch

Sometimes even the most invasive of weeds can be forgiven its aggressive ways. For my part, every year at the end of summer I forgive brambles, wholeheartedly. Just now they are heavy with their big, sweet berries that are readily available to anyone who takes the time to pick them.

Many of us have our favourite bramble patches that we swear have the biggest, sweetest, and most abundant berries. I believe the same of our patch. My son Lucas was the first to discover this patch when we first moved to Victoria from Vancouver a couple of years ago. It is on the side of a road in an open field near the ocean, and it provides us with as many berries as we can pick, or in Abby's case, as many berries as she can eat.


This year my mom and sister and I went out with all of our five children. Not counting the three or four pounds of blackberries we ate while we picked, we came back with about eight pounds of blackberries, which was enough to make eight large jars of jam, to freeze a bunch for smoothies over the winter, and for my sister to make a delicious blackberry peach cobbler for dessert that evening.


Blackberry picking is a yearly ritual shared by many of us on the islands and lower mainland, filling our cupboards with jams and jellies enough to last the winter. This of course is a testament to the amount of disturbed open areas that have succumbed to the bramble, which for most of the year is just a mean and thorny vine. But, for its part, it provides us with wonderful berries that we can pick, can, freeze and bake with, all without spending even a penny.