Ontario Gardeners’ Secrets to Gardening Success
Gardening brings people together. We learn from one another, get ideas from fellow gardeners and just enjoy sharing our own labours of love with those who will appreciate our efforts. There are so many secrets to gardening success to discover!
Past award-winning gardeners in Ontario share their tips and advice on gardening. They tell us what has worked for them and what their experience has taught them.
Katherine Ferguson recommends using large plantings and visualizing the results. At the back of her gardens, large dramatic clumps of tall grasses contrast with a chance-sown smoke tree, while the front has low-growing perennials, huge boulders and a few annuals for colour.
Noreen Brodie’s rural garden near Owen Sound.
Brenda Neczkar from East York in Toronto recommends not using too much fertilizer. “I fertilize just before blooming, and not in August.” She gave away her phlox and most of her traditional plants and scoured the garden centers for native plants and grasses but she kept her favourite irises and her blanket rose, which blooms almost continuously as long as it is dead headed. She also created a dramatic stream bed landscape feature with garden fabric, buried boulders, and fine gravel, using coarser gravel on the edges. “It fills with water after each rain and wildlife visit it.”
Betty Stanley’s Toronto garden overflows with flowers right into fall.
Another secret to gardening success? Dominique Viau and Bob King believe in teaming up with nature. Their priorities were to protect the environment and reduce labour by planting cornflowers, black-eyed Susans and native plants. “Nature does most of the work.”
