by Christine Edmonds
The boulevard garden is located on a busy corner which was torn up when infrastructure upgrades happened 6 years ago. The soil is sandy loam (read: low water holding capacity, low nutrient holding capacity) and the post-construction backfill was little more than a sand and gravel mix. Turf would not grow there.
Having just read Doug Tallamy’s Nature’s Best Hope, I saw an opportunity to try to make a garden that would support more creatures. I was new to natives at that point and the learning curve was steep, but there is no better way to learn than to plant, observe and experiment.
Many of the original plants were grown on site from winter-sown seed. I had also recently been introduced to Pete Oudolf’s work at the Lurie gardens in Chicago, and took a deep dive into various streams of naturalistic garden design in hopes of finding a design language that would keep the garden legible to passersby. The design intent is for it to read as a meadow which drifts in and out of dry shade/savannah. Design elements such as the repetition of a colour across the landscape, and the proportion of more structural plants are carefully considered. As are ecological considerations, such as covering bare ground with ground layer plants as much as possible to fill niches and benefit the soil biome.
The garden was planted over two summers in 2020 and 2021. Disturbance, due to human traffic (dogs especially) and snow removal practices (sometimes below soil level) is a constant, so the plant community needs to be resilient to these stressors. There is a mixture of interplanted grasses and forbs, many chosen from Ontario native dry meadow and dry shade plants.
The planting is not exclusively native; some plants are included because of their visual interest in seasonal vignettes, some are from eastern North America but not our ecoregion (for example, wild quinine and Monarda bradburiana), and others simply already existed on the site. There are underplantings of spring blooming bulbs – mostly alliums. There are also a smaller number of native plants which I wanted to learn to grow, but which are better suited to sites with more productive or moisture-retentive soil (Joe Pye weed and sneezeweed are examples). I am learning how to keep a balance of grass and forbs, as well as adjudicating the heavy self-seeders who would outcompete others if not edited by the gardener’s hand.
Note: Christine, who is a garden designer (Tapestry Garden Designs), has very kindly agreed to host a WPP garden tour on 21 June 2025. Watch for a list of our garden tours in the events section of our web site and on Facebook.