This is the most impressive, most beautiful garden in Ontario
I'm tempted to start a GoFundMe page with which to send Monica Brecht-Yendt to England. Not just as a reward for making an absolutely stunning, fabulous, magnificent garden in the crossroads community of Copetown, but as a confirmation, for her, that she got it right.
She and husband Mark Yendt have, over 37 years, made a garden - a collection of garden rooms" that is breathtaking in its ambition, in its scale, in its extraordinary beauty - around The Old Parsonage," a 19th-century Methodist church manse on Governor's Road that is their home.
I've never been to England but I've been trying to create the feel of an English garden that would be around an old English parsonage," Monica said to me. Yes. She has done that. Their garden is one of nine on this year's Carnegie Secret Gardens Tour to be held tomorrow, Sunday, June 11, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., rain or shine. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at the Carnegie Gallery, 10 King St. W., Dundas. The ticket gives you entrance to eight gardens in Dundas and this one in Copetown.
I have been awestruck in Claude Monet's garden in Giverny, France. I have sat in the sun in Vita Sackville-West's Sissinghurst garden in Kent, England. I have visited what is arguably the most beautiful private garden in Canada: Frank Cabot's Jardin de Quatre-Vents, in La Malbaie, Quebec.
Monica and Mark's garden is in that league. It is the most impressive, most beautiful garden I have ever seen in Ontario. It is jaw-dropping.
The garden begins right at the Governor's Road entrance to the property, where a naturalized pond attracts a variety of country wildlife. Monica dug out the horribly invasive and thick-rooted phragmites (the big, feathery-topped reed grass endemic to Ontario's rural roadsides).
I got the phragmites out and the bulrushes came back," Monica says. Then the muskrat went for the bulrushes." But, she adds later, she loves her resident muskrat.
Further up the driveway, look for a grove of three beauty bushes, in gorgeous mauve flower now. Just across from them is Monica's topiary: a larger-than-a-car cat chasing a mouse. These, and a sprawling bed of hostas, bloodroot, lungwort (pulmonaria) and other shade-loving plants, are under a high canopy created by four tall, ancient sugar maples.
As the path curves around the side of the house, a shallow slope leads into a woodland garden. Two lovely viburnums, now in snow white flower, pull the eye down into the light shade. A mulched path leads through this garden, which Monica has planted with pollinators and native plants. Wild ginger and bloodroot, jack-in-the-pulpit and veratrum (for its foliage) all thrive here.
The back garden - more accurately, the garden rooms" behind the house - are surrounded and divided by magnificent clipped yew hedges, four metres high, that are instantly evocative of England's Hidcote Manor gardens, near Bristol. A visitor enters through a gate, also modelled on one at Hidcote Manor.
This is where my jaw, quite literally, dropped open. Here is a sea of colour, a mob of texture, a flock of foliage and flower. To say it is glorious and brilliant and splendid doesn't begin to do it justice.
This main garden is very much in the English style - mass plantings in a hundred hues in deep borders surrounding a tightly clipped square of lawn, all contained within classic paver pathways and those magnificent yew hedges started a quarter-century ago as ankle-height seedlings.
The flowers seem endless. In bloom now, there are irises and baptisia (blue false indigo), gas plant and columbine, alliums and phlomis (Jerusalem sage) and poppies and hundreds more perennials waiting for their time to flower. The lupines are also in bloom, as is the Jacob's ladder (polemonium). The blue star flowers of amsonia are as dainty as the peonies are big and blowsy.
I'm a bit of a collector rather than a designer," Monica says. But she has an artist's natural eye: The shapes and colours of this garden complement and contrast like a painter's masterwork.
Walk through a doorway" in the hedge and you are in a potager-style herb garden, each variety contained in its own square. A knot garden combines the initials M and M (Mark, of course, and Monica).
Across the perennial garden another gap in the hedges: Here is a pool and summer house, then a kitchen garden and potting shed." Both structures, equally lovely in style and detail, were built by woodworker son Christopher. Younger son Rory, now in Winnipeg, leaves his mark in the gardens on every visit.
In the kitchen garden, raspberry canes are suspended on frames; next to them, haskap berries attract hordes of cedar waxwings. Around the summer house and pool, Monica has planted her hot border" of shimmering colour: poppies and bloodgrass and yucca among others.
The sheer amount of work involved in creating this garden is astonishing. Every yew, every paver, every stone in every wall, every plant, is their work, with some significant help from Monica's sister Claudia and brother-in-law. Maintaining the garden (Claudia was there this week to help with the pre-tour weeding) is almost as overwhelming. In season, Monica spends almost all her time in the garden.
You must really love gardening," a visitor says lamely.
I'm past the love," she says. You can say the word. It's obsession."
Is every great garden a product of obsession? That, perhaps, and vision and hard, hard work.
What a garden this is. You must see it.
In last Saturday's column on Rose Janson's forest garden, I misidentified a flower in the caption to one of the photographs. What I said was lily-of-the-valley is in fact Solomon's seal.
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.
Open Garden Week 2023
Open Garden Week is back and will run from Sunday, June 25 to Tuesday, July 4.
Waterdown Garden Walk, which has been tied into Open Garden Week for several years, will begin on Saturday, June 24.
Open Garden Week is a simple concept: Hosts" open their garden to any and all visitors on one or more of the Open Garden Week days, during hours they pick. Visitors show up and make admiring noises about the garden. Everyone goes away happy.
All you have to do to have your garden part of the event is send me information on your garden and when you will have it open. I compile it all into chronological listings, they appear in the Spectator, with the Waterdown Garden Walk details, and another Open Garden Week is underway. No charge, no tickets, no tour schedule to stick to. We hope to see Open Gardens in Hamilton and all its communities, Burlington and Oakville, Haldimand, Norfolk, Brant and Niagara.
It can be intimidating opening your garden to visitors for the first time. But this is the year to take the plunge. Here's why:
- Your garden IS good enough. We keep this a completely free, and therefore no-expectations, event. If you have a garden that you think of as a work-in-progress, well, welcome to the club.
- You will meet some terrific people - and your neighbours. Gardeners share stories, ideas, designs and plants. The people who live around you will likely take the opportunity to meet you and your garden.
- Becoming part of Open Garden Week is dead easy. Send me the information we need (see box below) and we will publish listings of all the Open Gardens a couple of days before the event. You decide what days and hours you want to open your garden.
Send me the following information, in this order:
1. Address (with neighbourhood inside the urban areas or directions if outside).
2. Date and hours
3. Name(s) of gardeners, followed by a brief (40 words maximum) description of your garden.
4. Phone number for confirmation of listing. It will NOT be published.
Deadline for entries is Friday June 16. Send all information to gardenwriterrob@gmail.com
You will receive a phone call before June 24 confirming your listings.
Rob Howard has co-ordinated Hamilton Spectator Open Garden Week since 1993. He remains delighted by the generosity and hospitality of gardeners.