A Lifetime in Twelve Months

Sometime in the fall, ten years ago, I was taking photographs of the tombstones in the Burrard Indian Band (Tsleil-Waututh Nation) cemetery in North Vancouver. It was late in the afternoon and snow was beginning to fall. In the gloom Chief Leonard George told me that he always saw in the coming winter the hope that if he survived it, he would live for another year. It didn't cheer me up then but ten years later I have come to re-interpret Chief Leonard George's words in a more positive light.

The seasons of the year are often used to describe a person's stage in life. At 62 I guess I am in the late fall of my life. It's too late to abandon photography and pursue a career in medicine, law or taxidermy. It's even too late to buy a red Miata, have a fling and divorce Rosemary.

For too long Rosemary and I have tried to keep the summer garden looking its best into the fall. It has been our way of avoiding the inevitability of our garden's decline. We haven't moved plants or done anything, after all, someone might just call us to request a visit to the garden. Rosemary, even more the pessimist, dwells on our garden's failures instead of our successes. But we have come around to the idea that a year in the garden while being much like a person's (somewhat compressed) lifetime, it does offer a startling and most positive difference.

Seven year itch

That difference is that this year's failures can be corrected. A dead tree can be cut down and replaced by a new and even different one. If there is too much shade in the garden we can prune and add light. If we get tired of astilbes we can replace them with ligularias or we just might finally get rid of that last hybrid tea rose that is disease prone. While I don't think that I would want to convince Rosemary to scrap our English style garden and grow palms, gingers and banana trees next year, the option (unlike that red Miata) is there. Our garden can be a lifetime of multiple successes interspersed with interesting failures. Our garden gives us the opportunity to change our minds many times over.

My friend Alex Summers, the founder of the American Hosta Society says that gardens happen in seven-year cycles. It takes a year to plan one and another year to plant it. After three years the garden matures. You then enjoy the garden for two years before many perennials decline and have to be divided and some trees get too big. By then, Summers says, you are bored and ready to start again.

So Rosemary and I now see fall as the season of daring possibility. By spring, except for perennials and some still dormant shrubs that can me moved, the garden is set for the year. In the fall there is much more leeway for decision and planning. Canadian garden centers and garden magazines (with their cyclical schedules of showing spring flowers in spring and so on) have been unable to convince gardeners on the benefits of fall gardening over traditional spring gardening. But there are enough of us out there who take advantage of the cheaper prices of plants in nurseries in the fall. Ornamental grasses and many trees, with lovely fall colours, can best be seen now and that's when I have bought my favourite ones. More gardeners should know that perennials and rose bushes bought and planted in the fall will settle in for the winter and have a head start on any similar plants purchased and planted in the spring.

Rose and fall

I order my roses in early fall through the Vancouver Rose Society for late fall delivery and planting. This technique would not work in BC's interior with their colder winters. There, gardeners should heel-in fall rose purchases by digging a trench and placing the roses at a 45-degree angle and covering the roots with lots of protective mulch and soil. In the spring the roses would be re-planted.

Fall garden planning is practical because we can look at some of our large shrubs or small trees and decide if we want them to remain where they are. Once the leaves have fallen and the trees and shrubs are dormant we can move them with impunity.

Plants, even the so-called long-lived perennials, have their own particular cycles. Some hostas, campanulas, heucheras and phlox decline in vigour and deteriorate unless you divide them. Rosemary divides her Campanula lactifloras every couple of years to keep them from growing too tall while I divide my Hosta 'Sea Octopus' often to keep its leaves narrow and twisted.

Look to spring

One fall, six years ago, I visited my 95-year-old aunt Dorothy in Toronto. She looked lovely with her wavy silver hair. In her delightful Angloargentine accent she confessed to me, "Alexander, I am in constant pain and I don't have much appetite for anything. I don't want to go on." I was speechless. That winter she died.

Had I only known then what I know now, I would have told her, "I will help you plant a garden. We'll look at it and imagine all those plants disappearing into the ground. What are they going to look like next year? How are they going to mature? There is only one way to find out and that is to stay alive until next spring."

Chief Leonard George would have nodded and smiled in agreement.

Alex-Waterhouse Hayward's earlier Fisheye gallery of scanned images of flowers from his garden attracted the largest number of visitors to The Tyee in a single day. He is a much awarded photographer and writer in Vancouver and a sometimes Arts and Opinon writer.