The illusion of progress and Vincelli`s Garden Centre in late August 2021

Every time I drive passed the former Vincelli`s Garden Centre I expect to see the place leveled and construction of almost three hundred condos begun. When I was young I was always looking for some nature in the city, an empty lot, the lanes in our NDG neighbourhood, the Villa Maria orchards, or riding our bikes along Norman Street and the empty fields there and then continuing on to Dorval Shopping Centre. That is all finished, Norman Street is all construction-trucking-delivery firms, the highway to the shopping centre is now many lanes wide and people drive like devils on it, no place for some kid on his bicycle. This is change, it isn`t progress. Being in nature, even an empty lot in the city, is good for children; every empty lot having a new condo built on it isn`t progress, it`s become uncontrolled development. I think by now we have seen through the illusion of progress, except perhaps in medical science; most progress is change for its own sake. And usually there is the profit motive in this, not that there is anything wrong with people making money--improving their family`s fortune, owning a nice home, improving themselves--but there are always consequences to what people do, and making money for its own sake can become greed. An empty lot, some country-like environment, is good for children, they can escape the relentless presence of modern life which is getting relentlessly omnipresent, it is also bad for our children`s health, and diminishes any vision or spiritual inclination that children may have been born with. Seeing Canada geese flying overhead, Monarch butterflies in the garden, honey bees, earth worms, urban wild life, imagination and creativity, dreams and day dreams, solitude, playing with other children, this is a connection with nature and getting in touch with something greater than ourselves, even with the divine spark in each of us. But the current housing boom is upon us, houses that families could afford just five years ago are now double the price to buy them and are being bought up by banks, foreigners, and entrepreneurs out to renovate and flip the property for profit. So, some children are being deprived of both using their imagination and a decent and safe place in which to live. These condos that will be constructed on the old Vincelli`s Garden Centre site won`t be cheap and they won`t be four bedroom condos for families, they will be built to maximize profit, probably one or two bedrooms for old people who are downsizing from their family home. It is not a positive future ahead of us as we get deeper into this century, some of us see it as dystopian. 

These photographs of Vincelli's Garden Centre taken in late August 2021,

Getting Started on a Canadian Cottage Garden

How did I begin my Canadian cottage garden? How did I get started? I began by removing a lot of small trees--these were barely saplings--that had begun to grow on the edge of the yard. None were more than four feet tall, they were like weeds and had self-seeded; I didn't want them to grow any taller, I like trees and when I lived in the country I never cut down any trees, but these city trees would make a small backyard darker than it already was. Then, I noticed the hydrangeas in the front of the house had gotten out of control, it was a lot of work but I dug some of them up and a few of the hydrangeas I didn't discard were moved to the backyard. I don't like waste but I do like tidy and, despite liking cottage gardens, I also like  a certain homey austerity that favours frugality. While doing this I moved some raspberry canes from one side of the garden where they had been planted many years before, and neglected, when the yard had more sunlight, and I transplanted them to a sunny area near the attached room by the side of the house. I pulled up weeds and then I began planting perennials; this was in 2016 and 2017. This was the beginning of the transformation of a barren backyard, grass with weeds and trees growing on the perimeter, into a cottage garden. 

I used to watch those home improvement shows on HGTV, someone would buy a run-down 1950s bungalow and then the home improvers would arrive, they've become celebrities, and quickly decide to rip out the purple bathroom and old fashioned kitchen, and make the whole place open floor concept, just a huge room. Nowadays, apparently, people want walls since they`re working and staying at home a lot of the time, they want some private space. The renovated old bungalows look better because they`re fixed up, painted, but they all look the same. They look like the places that are staged by real estate agents, nothing is personal, no family photos or anything familiar is allowed, books are in storage, its a soulless environment meant for a potential buyer. After a few years of watching these programmes on television I began seeing some truly ugly renovations. That was when I decided that just about anybody could do this job, but not the physical work involved; go to a big box hardware and buy whatever is the latest in faucets, tiles, paint colours or wall paper, fake fireplaces, appliances and back splash tiles, cabinet and drawer pulls, and you will end up with a contemporary house. But not a home, that requires people. I must add that taking a home built in 1950 and tearing down the walls, or a home from 1870 and making it contemporary, destroys the original ambience of the home; you may as well tear the house down and begin again, you have destroyed the original architecture of the building`s interior and, especially in an older house, you have not restored it, you have destroyed it. I know this because after I sold our 1870 country home someone bought it and destroyed it with their renovations.  

There are two approaches to poetry and gardening, two types of poets and gardeners: classical and romantic, formal and informal. I have known people who buy annuals every spring and lay out perfect gardens, designed with colour and plant in mind, height and appearance, and placed in garden beds along the edge of the garden. These gardens are a lot or work and they look pretty good. These are the classicist middle class gardeners. On the other end of the spectrum are the romantics, these are the cottage gardeners. Of course, most gardeners are somewhere in the middle, neither formal nor informal, they have lovely city or country gardens. I won`t bother with the non-gardeners, the patch of dying grass with no flowers, or one or two flowers, a few impatiens, and so on. 

I was reading someone`s comments on how to plant a cottage garden. Tall spiky flowers go together, similar colours go together, and so on. Some planning is important, in fact I do a lot of planning, usually it`s about where I will expand the garden and if I have the time for maintaining a larger garden. I am fairly slow at this type of thing and it may take a few years to fully implement my plans, it may even take up years I have fewer of. But, otherwise, there is not a lot of planning for country gardens; I favour gardens that are anarchic and show some returning to nature. This is especially true of the cottage garden. 

Over the years I have enjoyed walking by the city farm garden behind the student residence at the Loyola Campus of Concordia University. They grow food for food banks and they used to also sell what they grew at a market. Now, the garden and herb area has been more or less abandoned and it has gone, as they say, wild. But the flowers and other plants are still there, cone flowers, daisies, horse radish, different herbs, fruit berries, lilac bushes, and so on. It all needs a good watering and it is now anarchic and unorganized; it has moved towards the wild category. But in nature what seems unorganized only means it is untouched by people. Order is imposed by the observer, it may not be inherent in the garden. This area of the former city farm garden is now a cottage garden and it is doing its best to survive since no one ever waters or weeds it, but it is still a garden and it is enjoyable as it is. In effect, we might define a cottage garden as controlled wilderness, a contradiction but the best I can do. 

My only rule for my garden, other than the obvious--water your plants, maximize sunlight, buy plants in your hardy zone or they may not last the winter--is that the tall plants are in the back of the flower beds, the shorter plants are in the front of the flower beds, but this is common sense. 

The garden's progress

July 2021

You can transform a backyard into an oasis of flowers, a place of life and beauty. If you plant flowers then insects and birds will visit your garden; you can transform your backyard from barren and empty to full of life. Put out a bird bath and birds will come, the bird bath is their invitation and with them they bring life and love. The birds will thank you with their presence. They are like children, expect nothing in return and make the garden a place they want to visit. This is the gardener's expression of love. This seems a wonderful thing to do, at least that's what I think. Here are some photographs of the garden's progress, it is my Canadian cottage garden, and the year in which the photograph was taken is below the photograph.

July 2021

July 2021

June 2013

June 2013

June 2013

June 2013

June 2013

 

My grandmother's summer cottage

I used to say I'd like my garden to be a place where my grandmother could visit and feel at home. In fact, I don't remember my grandmother walking in any garden or even being interested in gardens, so what I really meant is that I'd like my garden to be as old fashioned as possible, with old fashioned cottage garden plants, and a quality of timelessness throughout. Yes, my grandmother would feel this timeless quality, as would everyone else who walks through such a garden.

I remember my grandmother's summer cottage on 11th Avenue, not far from the water where we used to swim, in St. Eustache. It was a place of summer cottages back then, now it's a bedroom suburb and proof of the truth of Thomas Wolfe's book title, You Can't Go Home Again. My wife and I visited 11th Avenue in 2007 and I regret that I ever returned even for just an hour, it is in the process of gentrification and nothing is left of the way it used to be, nothing is left of what made it a special place. Because of this I am filled with sadness and nostalgia remembering those summers of my youth, they are gone forever, the old people I loved are gone and will never return. This is, of course, common sense--the one constant in life is change--but it is still upsetting. 

Facing my grandmother's cottage there were phlox growing between her house and the adjacent cottage on the right. Remembering those phlox, one of the first plants I wanted in my cottage garden were phlox just like hers; but the way it has turned out is that the phlox in my garden are never as nice as I expected them to be or as nice as everyone else's phlox in this area. Right now my phlox, with both white and purple flowers, are coming to the end of their growing season while my neighbours still have beautiful phlox. 

A cottage lends itself to timelessness. It should be a cosy place and that quality of cosiness is important; it contains a perennial desire, it is the desire to have a safe harbour, a place where one can relax and not worry about the outside world, and a place where one is safe from the vicissitudes of life. Everyone needs a roof over their head, everyone needs both a home and enough food to keep them from being hungry, and most people need family or friends with whom they can talk, laugh, and socialize. And we can all have some of this in a cottage with its cottage garden in the back yard.

I am reminded of Patrick Waddington's short story, "The Street that Got Mislaid", about some people who live on Green Bottle Street, a street that the bureaucrats who run the City of Montreal have somehow forgotten about; it "got mislaid" from the card index of city streets, and because of this the residents pay no taxes, they don't live in our world but they are of our world. These people are dedicated to their hobbies, playing the piano, gardening, talking about the past, and living with the other people on the street. It is just after World War Two and all of them are wounded in some way, life has not been kind to any of them. As well, the street is shaped like a bottle, implying it is isolated from the rest of the city, which it is, but it is also a kind of utopia, a kind of Shangri-La. It is their safe harbour. At the end of the story, the protagonist is invited to join them and live on Green Bottle Street and he happily does this and leaves the noisy and rough outside world behind him. A cottage is also a safe harbour, we say leave your cares at the door, put your feet up, have something to eat, and enjoy yourself. Or just sit and do nothing.

Here is my grandmother outside the cottage in 1946, the year she and my Uncle Alex
purchased the place; doesn't she look happy! 

My grandmother's summer cottage, photo taken in 1946 when she and my Uncle Alex
bought the place.

Here is the cottage around 2009, it had been winterized and renovated. By 2011 the cottage had been demolished, property near Lac des Deux Montagnes has increased in value, and a new large house has been built on the site. 

The garden at the end of July

 

The Cape Cod Cottage

Casa Bella on Belmore Avenue, July 2021

I think of cottages as being cosy places and there is a lot to say in favour of being cosy. For years I've read detective novels and it's the cosy detective novels that are my favourite, this includes Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot novels. There are hard boiled detective novels but, basically, the detective genre lends itself to being cosy; Dorothy L. Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels tend to be long-winded but to some extent they are cosy. Are Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, or Colin Dexter cosy? They may not have cosy content but they are excellent to read on a winter afternoon when you have little to do but stay in-doors and drape a blanket or throw over your legs while lying on the couch. That is cosy.

A cottage is cosy because by definition it's small while a house is a house is a house. We don't speak of an English country house, it's an English country cottage; a house suggests something bigger than a cottage. A house is not cosy but it can have cosy rooms in it, a cottage should be nothing but cosy. Our home, named Casa Bella by my wife when we moved here, is one of many cottages all looking the same and built for returning soldiers after World War Two; it was inexpensive at the time and these cottages were called, euphemistically, five and ten houses, in other words, alluding to the old five and ten cent stores, Kresge's and Woolworth's, and they sold in the 1950s for anywhere between five and ten thousand dollars. A house is meant to house people, a family, so its primary purpose is functional and it isn't necessarily warm and cosy; these post-War cottages were functional and also housed families, they were a way to help veterans get started in life, they were starter houses. We bought our cottage in 1997 just after the second referendum for Quebec's independence or separation from Canada; real estate agents couldn't give houses away in those days because when there is political instability house prices collapse; instability in society threatens the value of people's homes.  

These specific cottages, I am referring to post-war cottages including the one in which my wife and I live, were called Cape Cod cottages although they have nothing to do with Cape Cod, but a Cape Cod cottage refers to certain characteristics of the building; the cottages were meant to house two adults and their two children, they are detached, they have one and a half stories and a basement that one day can be finished, they have maybe 1200 square feet, and they have a backyard. The construction of these cottages was mostly very good as it still was in the old days and builders had possibly better materials than are found in some properties today. These cottages have one important requirement that is lacking in most construction these days, they are quiet, and quiet now costs money; no one buys an estate to have to listen to neighbours talking outside but noise is a part of low income living; there is noise from neighbours, trucks and cars, and people with loud voices playing loud music heard through walls that are paper thin. When we moved here some of the people living in these cottages had lived here since the 1950s and 1960s; they loved their homes.  Now, the area is being gentrified, you see Mercedes and BMWs parked outside these formerly humble houses that are renovated and have lost all of the original floor plan. They are no longer cosy, They aren't even nice.

These Cape Cod cottages are also in demand because there aren't many detached houses in this Montreal neighbourhood, we live in this least stylish area of a stylish neighbourhood. There are mostly four-plexes, duplexes, and semi-detached homes in the stylish areas and most of these homes are very nice, they have hard wood floors and hard wood trim, French doors opening into the living or dining rooms, a working fire place, and they have large bed rooms. I grew up in one of these four-plexes not far from where I now live and it was very pleasant to live there; however, I doubt that a single-woman, or a single parent, raising a family on one income could afford to live there today, which is what my mother did, she kept us living in a nice place after my father died in 1956. Now, here is the ironic thing; I remember my mother saying, many years ago, that she should have moved to a less expensive neighbourhood, perhaps to a little house in Verdun by which she was referring to a Cape Cod cottage in that working class city adjoining Montreal. It was fate that I should end up living in Casa Bella.

Casa Bella, 27 May 2021

Container gardening

The extent of my gardening where we now live used to be flower pots on the patio; that is, container gardening. For the last few years, with the larger cottage garden, I don't have much time for the patio although I still have a few pots of flowers there. One of the problems with container gardening is that I can no longer find clay or ceramic flower pots; my wife used to buy really nice clay and ceramic pots at a local garden centre; now, all they sell are plastic pots and they aren't inexpensive. Although some of these plastic containers are made to look like clay or ceramic pots I still don't like them, they aren't what you want if you are aiming for something natural, not plastic. Plastic garden ornaments, gnomes, Buddha meditating, giant grey squirrels, two foot tall mushrooms, and so on should be avoided. One of my objections to plastic flower pots and plastic garden ornaments is aesthetic, gardening requires some kind of aesthetic sense. Plastic flower pots look cheap and obviously fake even when they are pretending to be clay or ceramic; of course, I also dislike plastic because it is a major pollutant and it doesn't degrade for many years, it's polluting the oceans and landfills are full of plastic that will be there even in 2500 AD.  However, if a few large plastic containers is all you have to bring flowers and gardening into your environment then use them as flower pots. Better to recycle a few plastic containers if you have limited time or space, or physical mobility.  Photos from 2011 and 2013. 

Here is the patio in early spring.

Patio in mid-summer

These are all annuals

My preference is for clay or ceramic pots, not plastic

 

Crow at the bird bath

Photos taken in 2020

 

Crows at the bird bath

Photos from summer 2020

 

"In an English Country Garden"...

 

Here are two flower pots that had hyacinthes in them when they were given to us years ago. I found the metal tray in someone's garbage and the pots fit in it very nicely. 

The cottage garden, the country garden, Percy Grainger's "In an English Country Garden", just writing the title of this piece of music causes me to hear it in my mind and to sing it to myself. 

Most Canadians, most Canadians who garden, plant annuals, these flowers are ready to be planted and produce flowers almost immediately, they also flower most of the season. Personally, I have switched over to an all-perennial garden. It feels more substantial and represents how I feel about gardening, frugality, sustainability, and life in general.

Planting day in Canada is Victoria Day, that is May 24, and where else in the Commonwealth is Victoria Day celebrated but in Canada?  Victoria Day is also when the last frost is supposed to have passed and we can plant our annuals without worrying about a sudden cold spell. Victoria Day, named after Queen Victoria, used to also be fire cracker day.  When I was young we used to ride our bikes to nearby Ville St. Pierre and buy firecrackers there. It was lots of fun setting off firecrackers with a piece of white string that was lit on fire, then with a smouldering glow on the end of the string we could light fire crackers, throw them, and watch them explode. 

Back in the 1950s our upstairs neighbours on Oxford Avenue were Mr. and Mrs. Nuttall; he was an avid gardener who claimed the garden even though it was supposed to be looked after by people in the first floor flat. I remember someone putting fire crackers in his tulips and blowing up the flowers. It wasn't me, really, I would never have done that.

When you set out to plant a cottage garden you will probably say goodbye to annuals; for the most part annuals and a cottage garden are mutually exclusive but there are, of course, exceptions. You will save a bundle by planting perennials and have, in my opinion, a much nicer garden. Begin with cone flowers, move on to other daisies, and then aim to plant all of the other flowers that go into a cottage garden. I will make a list of these flowers but you've probably heard of all of them and you will see how simple it is. This will cost a few hundred dollars the first year but amortized over several years it is not costly and the enjoyment far exceeds the cost. As well, these plants multiply and soon, as I did last fall and this spring, you will be transplanting cone flowers, daisies, and bee balm to other parts of your garden. The cost is free; the return is immense. 

A true cottage garden doesn't have a lawn and that is what I am working towards, when that happens there will be foot paths and much more garden and much less grass. Grass is not a flower although people love their lawns. I, too, like a nice lawn but I like a cottage garden even more. 

Last fall I dug up some grass and moved daisies to the new flower beds. I moved cone flowers, daisies, bee balm, ornamental grass, and holly hocks to the new flower beds; the result has been better than I ever expected. I have a lot of shade in this garden, too much shade, and the new garden plot is in the full sunlit part of the garden. I would like to have a huge bank of daisies as I've seen in other cottage gardens but without a lot of sunlight this seemed a difficult feat to achieve, now it's possible that in a year of two, enlarging the new flower beds, I will have quite a terrific display of daisies, bee balm, cone flowers, and others.