Garden of Happiness for Kevin Napora and Rob Pelletier

“I’m just so happy right now,” says Kevin Napora the day after the big Edmonton Garden Tour this July. He sat back with a slow smile of contentment. Around him, the garden glowed in the late afternoon sun, seeming to bask in all the appreciation shown by its recent guests.

Rob Pelletier, Kevin’s partner, had just left to deal with a work issue but his presence lingered. Lying beside Kevin on the deck, their well-mannered, half golden, half Burmese dog, Nelson, smiled a doggy smile. Everything around them seemed alive to the splendour of the day and the garden. Here was a space permeated with warmth and beauty.

This was no accident.

When Kevin and Rob bought this former show home, they already had a plan in mind for the garden. The day after they moved in, on September 30, 2009, a bobcat arrived to begin moving the four tandem-loads of soil they had ordered onto the site. You cannot have a master gardener’s certificate like Rob does and take half measures for your plants. Nor would Kevin, a landscape designer, after 20 years of owning his own landscaping business, allow a slip-shod job.

They needed it done right and they needed it done right now so they could transfer all the treasures from their former home to the new garden. It was all special stuff – plants handed down from family or from friends, some of the plants over 50 years old, kept young through division and care – so much of it had a story and the story was waiting to be told in the new garden.

They worked like demons for the next six weeks, putting down the last of the grass on November 16. On November 17, it snowed. But that was only the beginning of the story. They had so much they wanted to tell with this garden. They wanted a garden you could get into, one that required a leisurely stroll, coffee cup in hand, to appreciate and discover its unfolding glory each day. “We wanted social and lounging areas, sun and shade. We wanted to use the garden all year round, not just in summer,” said Rob before he left that afternoon. They installed an outdoor fireplace and placed it so that they could run it in winter and see it glowing outside their living room window. (It’s beautiful at Christmas,” says Kevin.) They added a couple of overhead heaters to help extend the season. When the heaters are turned on with the fireplace, it really takes away most of the chill.

“The whole purpose of a garden,”

says Kevin, “is using it.” The daily stroll allows them to see what’s blooming today – all the plants have been chosen so that there is something new blooming every two weeks.

Kevin instituted the garden “drift” idea in his own way. “I take a colour all the way through the garden in a pattern of one-one-one instead of a group of three like we are often told to do here,” he says. He will have blue delphiniums showing up in three different places compelling the eye to notice the cohesion throughout the garden. Or he’ll take three clumps of red dianthus and repeat them some distance apart. “I like trying new things,” he says.

He also loves the way the garden changes colour from season to season. In spring the colours are yellow and orange. In July it’s a “parade of colour”.In August, it’s yellow and white, and so on. He and Rob have planted Amur maples for their fall showing of scarlet, but so far they’ve been disappointed. The trees are in too much shade and they need full sunlight to develop that crimson hue.

At night, the garden is luminous with low voltage lights. They have up-lit the grasses and the waterfall and other major features. “It’s quite a show,” says Kevin.

They love that every week is different, every year is different. It doesn’t come without labour. “People think that gardening is about meditating and therapy,” Kevin laughs, “but it’s also about hard work.” Kevin and Rob are wise gardeners. They understand the power of anticipation. “When we mentioned that the lilies will all be in bloom next week, our visitors were even more excited as they began imagining the potential,” he said, after he and Rob had discussed how their 700 visitors reacted to the garden. “I don’t think a gardener would ever ask the question, ‘What are you going to do now that the garden is all done?’ They know that it is the excitement of all the future possibilities that is often what brings more enjoyment than the flowers of today.”

Realizing this, perhaps subconsciously, they deliberately set out to create that sense of anticipation for their tour guests. The entrance to the garden was filled with drama: Scarlet crocosmia impaled the eye at the entrance. Their brilliant flowers were positioned against the scalloped leaves of plume poppy, which set the stage for the bust of a Balinese water maiden they call Kathy, placed at eye level. (Kevin says he and Rob often catch her with her “eyes closed, head raised to the evening sun” as they lounge on the patio.) On the left, big globes of white hydrangea reached out for attention, but their impact was almost immediately lost in the surprise created by the huge, red leaves of a banana plant. Then beyond this, the fireplace came into view and beyond that, one could glimpse the possibilities of the garden itself. Every vista set up excitement and a need to see more. Nelson greeted everyone with dignity and reserve.

Two enormous planters, dramatically planted with castor beans and ivy, stood sentinel at the entrance to the garden, which was divided from the patio by a low stone fence. A gravel pathway curved through the lawn towards the back of the lot where you could see an intriguing line of trees outside the yard. Back there, beyond the gate, there is a bicycle path, but the garden path curves around inside the fence taking you on a floral journey filled with both common and unusual plants.

A very prolific coral bells, a heritage variety called ‘Brandon Pinks’ (their Latin name of Heuchera just isn’t descriptive enough), sent up spires off airy bells to chest height, past the last of the tulips. Nepeta subsessillis offered up its bell-shaped blue flowers at intervals along with the more common Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’, the 2007 Plant of the Year. A healthy fleece flower towered four feet in the air, its creamy plumes lending luxurious contrast to the spikes of and Iris pseudacorus next to it. Ladies’ mantle, still clinging to the morning dew, sported spires of chartreuse-yellow flowers. A variegated Jacob’s ladder defiantly showed off its silver and green foliage. Here and there, echinacea were rushing into bloom. Poppies, some spent, thrust out bulging seed pods, while others were still in golden bloom; a ‘Summer Wine’ ninebark showed strongly against false sunflower.

It went on and on. During the tour, there were whispers of “plants on steroids’ because every plant had realized its full potential thanks to all that good soil and the care lavished on them Garden lighting turns the space into night time magic. An outdoor fireplace extends their living space into the outdoors for three seasons and sometimes even four.by the gardeners. At the end of this journey, a canvas gazebo offered that promised shade. People left with shining eyes.

Now, sitting back and thinking about it, Kevin has time to philosophize a bit. He notes that gardens are very much like their owners, whether they started the garden from scratch or took it over from a professional – the garden is a mirror of who the gardener is.

That is very true and it is the essence of garden stories, which are much more about the gardener than about the garden alone. In this instance, there is no doubt that the beauty, warmth and friendliness of this garden is a mirror of the two fellows who created it. And if you doubt that, just ask their mannerly and appreciative dog, Nelson.

(Was originally published in Beautiful Homes & Gardens 2013 Fall)