Moncton Country Garden: Gerry and Judy Gillcash, New Brunswick

By Shauna Dobbie, photos by David Johnson

“It helps if you have access to a backhoe,” Gerry says, when talking about putting in their pond. No kidding!

The pond area of this Moncton country garden is a delight hidden by a tall hedge of eastern white cedars all the way around an area of about 50 by 100 feet. Gerry and Judy, who’ve been married 55 years, don’t tell visitors anything about what’s behind the hedge when they visit; they’d rather see your face when you come around the corner. “The biggest thrill I get is the first time somebody sees the pond, then you get that ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’,” Gerry smiles self deprecatingly here and adds, “That’s a thrill in itself.”

Planting the hedge

The hedge surrounding the pond is an accomplishment of its own, growing so thick and healthy. He credits an article in Canadian Gardening magazine years ago for telling him how to plant a cedar hedge. He put in about 350 7-inch plugs he bought from a tree farm on Prince Edward Island, following the directions in the magazine exactly. It worked!

On the inside, this section of the garden is like the gardens of your imagination: Eden, Xanadu, Shangri-la. A crushed-gravel pathway snakes around the central pond, surrounded by plants: hostas, daylilies and Gerry’s beloved yuccas. The path leads you over a stone bridge. The pond is still on one side, and on the other is the apparent source: water spills over rocks so artfully placed it seems it must have been done by nature.  Astilbe and yellow loosestrife add colour to a mélange of greens: perennial foliage, trees and damp moss decorate the site.

Along one side of the garden is a white wrought-iron patio set and umbrella. What a beautiful place for a meal! It’s the kind of garden you’d love to sit in with a book throughout the day, listening to water running and birds singing, looking up now and again to see if it truly is real.

More to see

This is only one part of the couple’s country garden. There is plenty of room to grow things. There is a sizeable vegetable garden surrounded by square boulders, just starting to grow in tidy rows when we saw it at the beginning of July. The couple’s artfulness cannot be denied in this utilitarian spot, though. A row of marigolds surrounds the plot for insects, and hostas are well grown-in at the corners. 

At the far side is Gerry’s “petunia tree”. It’s a welded structure he built with three rows of hoops around a pole to support big flowerpots and one on top. Every summer he fills them with petunias; by fall you can’t see the structure at all, the flowers have grown in so well. He included a watering system in the design so the huge planter is good once you have the flowers placed. ‘Wave’ petunias don’t require much deadheading. He only needs to turn on the water for about two minutes and it’s done.

Begonias came first

Gerry came to gardening while out for a Sunday drive many years ago. A house in Cornwall was surrounded by red and white wax begonias that captured his imagination; he fell in love and vowed to create such a scene someday. That was in the mid-80s and they didn’t settle in their current house until 1996, but the inspiration has lasted. (The couple moved around earlier in their marriage because Gerry was in the Air Force.) Now he and Judy start about 2,500 wax begonias indoors during the winter. They get small plugs from a nursery nearby (they didn’t care for growing from seed) and baby them along under lights until it’s time to plant them in the spring.

Gerry spends about 20 hours per week in the garden, weeding, mowing, edging and trimming. It helps that he’s retired, but he doesn’t head out until after dinner most days. He works in the garden on weekends, too. Judy joins him sometimes, weeding and commenting on where things should go.

In addition to gardening, he’s an inveterate volunteer, working these days with the Lutz Mountain Historical Society. His tireless work earned him a Queen’s Jubilee medal for volunteering a few years ago. Judy urges him to stay home more, to take it easy. After all, he’s earned it.