The Canadian Cottage Garden, 10 June 2025

An article on the BBC, "Is it better to Neglect Your Garden?”, suggests allowing "nature to take its own course". The whole article is of interest as it suggests the importance of biodiversity, which includes a variety of insects, weeds, and even urban wildlife, and the article goes in some depth on this subject. It even asks, "What if you just do nothing?", and just let one's manicured garden return to nature. This interests me but it would defeat the purpose of my garden; I need to cut the grass, using my push lawn mower, and cut grass allows easy access to the whole garden, especially for seniors, keeps the neighbours and one's family happy, and keeps the gardener busy and getting some exercise. I also need to do some weeding if I want to have as many perennial flowers as I have. To do nothing might reduce the diversity of flowers that I've planted over the years, which is part of a cottage garden; these plants have been cultivated for gardens that are maintained in a traditional way. A return to nature may end up being not having a garden at all; but raking and disposing of leaves in fall can also be limited and even eliminated. The author of the article writes, 

While experts recommend doing a little less mowing and pruning in the spring and summer, it's also recommended to let some things pile up in the autumn, specifically leaves. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, a non-profit organisation focused on the conservation of invertebrates, promotes an initiative called Leave the Leaves that advocates for this to protect insects that overwinter on your property.

I didn't discard the leaves last fall, I raked them onto flower beds, and, for the most part, they are no longer visible except around the hostas at the rear of the garden. They are excellent mulch and allowed my lavender, and other plants, to survive our particularly cold winter. My own approach to gardening is more aesthetic than anything, as it might be for most gardeners. I would like my own small, shady, garden to be as much a part of nature as possible. I welcome weeds, I welcome as many insects as visit the garden, I rejoice seeing birds, and I celebrate any wildlife that passes through the garden; a garden is a simulated return to nature that allows access for people to enter, sit and visit, or just walk through. An enclosed or walled garden is a private space for nature, usually in an urban setting, the more abandoned looking the better but not, in fact, abandoned at all. Gardening is more artifice than authenticity, as poets might say, although in poetry authenticity is better than artifice; living in the city some of us want to return to nature but just to neglect the garden ends up having an unusable and perhaps uninviting garden, and defeats the purpose of the cottage garden. Here are photographs of my garden taken on 10 June 2025; this is early June in Montreal's West End, still waiting for most perennials to bloom.

The following photographs were taken on 11 June 2025. 

                 

Note the decomposing leaves, raked in place last fall, in this hosta bed

The garden on April 4th, 2023

It's April 4th today and the snow is still here, but rain is forecast and perhaps by later this week the snow will have melted. Our gardening season is short here, it's from May to October. Winter is from January to the end of March and then overlaps into April, and then it is still cold but at least the snow is melting. May 1st comes suddenly and people begin installing their window air conditioning units; at last we can open the windows and turn off the furnace. Here, we all listen to daily weather forecasts, and we wait for this cold weather to end. 

In the sun the snow has already melted

Tulips are already coming up

This is a hollyhock coming up

In the sun, where plants are protected and the
snow has melted, tulips are beginning to grow

Hortus Conclusus at Le Grand Seminaire

Years ago, I visited Le Grand Seminaire, it is where my great great uncles, Fr. Martin Callaghan and his brother Fr. James Callaghan are buried. It is also where both men were educated in the late 1800s and I've always felt that attending this school was a great opportunity for both men; they were born into the working class, they became priests, educated men, and they served their community. A few years after this first visit I went on a tour of the seminary; it is located on Sherbrooke Street West near Atwater. From the street you can see the twin towers, built in the late 1600s, they were a place of safety when Indigenous people might attack the compound; it was where they would hide in the towers.

Note the image of Christ at the top left
of this image; this hortus conclusus corresponds
better to the garden at Le Petite Seminaire
in Old Montreal

 

On my first visit to Le Grand Seminaire  I walked around the grounds; there is a kind of enclosed garden or green space; you can see the stone walls that surround the place below. There is a rectangular pool, see below, that had been neglected. I suspect that access to the grounds is now more difficult as the old seminary has become quite a prestigious private high school. 

Le Grand Seminaire from Sherbrooke Street West






These twin towers can be seen from Sherbrooke Street West

Drawing of Le Grand Seminaire from 1600s

Front entrance; these photographs were taken in the 1990s

The grounds and parking lot

Historical photograph from 1905, the pond or basin in better days

Historical photograph from 1913



This is is the man-made pond on the grounds of the Grand Seminaire

Hortus Conclusus at Le Petit Seminaire, Notre-Dame Basilica

Here is a satellite photograph of Old Montreal and, more specifically, of Notre-Dame Basilica and the enclosed garden, the hortus conclusus, behind the Petit Seminaire on the south-west side of Notre-Dame Basilica. The Petit Seminaire adjoins Notre-Dame Basilica and there is an entrance to the basilica from the seminary. The (possibly) better known Grand Seminaire is located on Sherbrooke Street West near Atwater. The enclosed garden at the Petit Seminaire is closed to the public and there don't seem to be many photographs of it. Of course, Montreal is "Ville Marie", the City of Mary, and Mary has a large presence here; the hortus conclusus is closely associated with Mary. Photographs of the exterior of Notre-Dame Basilica and the Petit Seminaire were taken in February 2002.

All of the institutions mentioned here are owned by the Sulpician Order. 

Seminary Gardens, Montreal, QC, about 1870;
photographed by Alexander Henderson (1831-1913). 
You can see the Victoria Bridge, top left of the photo.

Here is an old photograph of the rear of the Petit Seminaire and, coincidentally, 
of the enclosed garden at the seminary; the buildings in the background have been
demolished and new buildings constructed there

The following photographs were taken in February 2002 during a tour of the Petit Seminaire.

On rue Notre Dame, in Old Montreal, the entrance to the Petit Seminaire

Notre-Dame Basilica in Old Montreal

Le Petit Seminaire

Hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden

From the street

From the street

From the street

When my son, who is a Medievalist, saw the fences around my garden he mentioned "hortus conclusus", the concept of the enclosed garden from the Middle Ages; this garden design has its origin and attribution to the Virgin Mary but gardens are also a part of our spiritual history, beginning with the Garden of Eden and the fall of Man. The hortus conclusus is an archetypal garden, it has that special quality of spiritual authenticity that gives the garden a greater significance, as a place that resonates in both our Christian spirituality and the spirituality of other religions. So, this is no happenstance that I have these walls enclosing the garden; this is a way of finding spirituality, or God, in the physical and material world, and it is the reason I find such happiness in having the garden enclosed with these walls. 

And so, the hortus conclusus is a place of peace, and one wants to be there because it is a place of quiet, an entrance to the spiritual, and a place of temenos. All of this is foreign to our contemporary life, but people in the past, especially the Middle Ages, understood the meaning of the enclosed garden.