Siria Szkurhan’s lovely Ancaster garden
This is a story about a mentor and her pupil (slightly ironic since the pupil was, until retirement, an award-winning teacher). This is about how the love of gardening - and the knowledge and skills to garden successfully - all get passed on.
More than 20 years ago, a mom named Siria Szkurhan took her children - three daughters - for piano lessons. The teacher, who gave the lessons in her own home, is named Kay Suzuki. Siria paid for 30-minute lessons, which invariably became one-hour lessons. While she waited, Siria studied Kay's garden. Between and after lessons, Kay would encourage, explain and educate.
Kay is something of a legend in local gardening circles. The garden she and husband Tad have made is fabulous: It's been a part of Open Garden Week and I've written about it. But more than that, Kay is wildly enthusiastic about every single plant she has in it. She adores gardens and gardeners.
Siria has her own claims to fame. She was a teacher at St. Mary Catholic high school in Hamilton, won a Prime Minister's Award for teaching, and put the prize into a biblical garden (all the plants in it are mentioned in the Bible) that her students designed and created. I wrote about it more than 25 years ago. Siria retired in 2010.
When Siria bought a house in 2002 in Ancaster, out by Jerseyville Road beyond Ancaster high school, it was new, one of a dozen or so connected by cookie-cutter backyards consisting of grass and wire-link fence. She started making a garden almost before the sold sign came down.
I planted my first trees before I got lawn furniture," she says. She started cutting beds and borders into the grass, adding topsoil, and planting the garden that she imagined then and enjoys today. She has photos of those days, and there are Kay and Tad with her: cutting turf, turning soil, hands in the dirt putting plants and shrubs and grasses in place. It was Kay who called me a few weeks ago and encouraged me to visit Siria's garden. You have to see what she has done," Kay said, without saying anything about her own involvement.
So that, in very condensed form, is the back story. What really matters today is the garden that came out of it. And what a lovely garden it is.
The houses there are set back from the street, Siria's front garden is at least as large as the back. It is centred around a mature shademaster locust tree. They're popular for a delicate, fernlike foliage and a pleasant dappled shade underneath. There's also a bloodgood Japanese maple among other woody plants. A mix of shade-tolerant perennials (hostas dominate) and annuals (white impatiens reflect light back out of the shadows) give the front a look that seems designed yet casual. A big, colourful Russian sage plant masks an ugly utility box next to the driveway.
The back garden is mostly shade (more on that in a moment). So Siria uses the wide path beside the house to link front and back and take advantage of its orientation to the sun: It gets full sun all day. Siria has several dozen pots, containers and boxes along what she calls her Sunny Lane, growing tomatoes (so many tomato plants they spill out onto the driveway), parsley, dill, basil, cucumbers, arugula, bush beans ... You could pick and eat a lunch in the 30 or so feet from the front of Siria's house to the back.
The back garden is cosy without being crowded, generously planted without being packed. There's a lovely sitting area outside the back door beside a strong trellis that supports a substantial wisteria. The trees that Siria planted along the back property line are all mature now, giving shade to the garden. It originally was a perennial garden with lots of sun," Siria says. But the garden became more shady every year."
Siria says she added six cubic yards of topsoil to the beds there and yet more to the front. None of this happened without a lot of effort. The garden - including one sunny corner - gets enough sun that phlox, sea holly, dwarf gingko, hydrangea, hosta, hellebore and heuchera all thrive, along with acanthus (bear's breeches), one of my favourite odd perennials. There are six Japanese maples in the back. Ferns and dusty miller, trailing vines in pots and dwarf conifers do well in the deeper shade.
My Dad was a gardener," says Siria, who came here from Italy in 1967 with her family. He grew vegetables and some lovely flowers." So the bug was there: It was Kay Suzuki's garden and encouragement that scratched the itch.
Sitting on her sun-dappled patio, bees buzzing around the flowers, a robin squawking madly in the trees behind, it might seem life doesn't get much better.
A lovely garden does that for you.
Rob Howard lives and gardens in Hamilton. He's a garden writer, speaker and garden coach. You can reach him at gardenwriterrob@gmail.com or on Facebook at Rob Howard: Garden Writer.