The Schlosser garden of Calgary Teeming with life, brimming with love

It’s been 27 years in the making, this oasis of colour and calm. It started with a great expanse of gravel, literally. The large pie-shaped yard was an old gravel bed. This, the Schlossers say, provided wonderful drainage, but along with some very average topsoil, presented a challenge when it came to growing. Many rocks had to be raked away and removed. Today, you’d never know this is what faced them back then. The garden has a lushness that only appears in places where the soil is as close to perfect as possible.

They used plenty of peat moss, manure and compost to amend the topsoil that was original to the yard, and more recently added B.C. compost, a magic formula of a fish meal bi-product and waste from the forest industry. Called Sea Soil, you can find it at Green Gates Garden Center.

Neil does all the hard landscaping. He does most of the heavy lifting, hauling and heavy digging. He built the pergola and gazebo, framed the garden with landscaping timber and with Cathy’s help, designed the space, which is made intriguing through the use of grand vistas and rooms – a secret garden here, a hidden gazebo there.

Cathy is a plant lover who enjoys her hours in the garden beds. She enjoys the big plants – the ligularias, monkshood, the large leafed Astilboides, the shade loving Actea rubra, and the tall Filipendula palmata with its striking maple-leaf shaped leaves. But she also adores the little alpine plants, hepaticas, gentians, pretty pink lavatera, the purple, white or pink Canterbury bells, the ornamental grasses and the stunning gaillardias with their brilliant red and yellow petals. The garden is home now to many restful, shade loving plants. She indulges her passion for colour in the 40-plus pots she uses to punctuate the garden, matching magenta with yellow, cooled by the grey leaves of licorice plant and the striking blue of annual lobelia.

Here and there she has placed outstanding displays of succulents, some in little turf pots, others at the edges of beds where, in later summer, they can spill over the wooden restraints placed on their growth. An octagonal planter set as a centre piece on her patio, just in front of a lawn swing, acts as a living coffee table. The pot is highlighted by a vertical piece of lava rock that looks like driftwood. It has little sedums growing from crevices and along its stony margins and all sorts of other alpine wonders that will entertain the viewers for hours on end as the summer progresses.

Although the garden has all the variety displayed by a true plant lover, there is a restraint shown here that is the mark of the skilled gardener who knows how to stay within the boundaries of good garden design so that the plants can show themselves off. Neil makes sure the lawn is a velvety green, which also sets the stage for the plants.

“We began a little at a time,” she says. “I started going to plant exchanges and sales.” She remembers that she got her lovely alpine Clematis ‘Ruby’ from one of the Calgary Horticultural Society’s plant shares. The clematis now covers a good section of fence. A Blueboy clematis sprawls over a tall obelisk providing a stunning colorful accent to one bed all summer. Many varieties of clematis have found homes in her yard, some climbing trees or obelisks and others sprawling over bushes.

That they let their cotoneasters to grow in their natural shape and that the Mayday tree planted itself, just like the potentillas, is a mark of the kind of gardeners the Schlossers are. “Neighbours used to marvel that I let the boys and their friends trample flowers while playing when they were young,” Cathy says, but she knew the plants would grow back and that boys will be boys.

Growing and changing and thriving is what a garden is all about and as Cathy knows, that’s what life is about, too.