From Weedy to Wonderful?

A Front Garden Renovation in East York

Performing garden makeovers (miracles?) seem to be my specialty as I've done more than a few this season. Although the actual weeding can be tiring, it's very gratifying to see order emerging out of the chaos due to my two hands (and strong back, for now.) 

I recently was invited to renovate a small front garden in the Toronto neighbourhood of East York.  Take a look at this "before" picture of the main central bed in front of the house, looking down from the porch:

East York Toronto Front Garden Renovation Before 

As the saying goes, the space has "a lot of potential" which is a euphemism for "a lot of physical work is involved"  in getting the garden back to a clean slate. Given the amount of weeds which have grown unimpeded all season, this means methodical hand digging in order to remove all the weeds by their roots. (I don't use herbicides so weeding for me involves a long handled shovel.)

Our immediate goals (after discussing with the client) were to make the main front street bed presentable by removing the weeds, planting a few dozen daffodil, grape hyacinth and allium bulbs for next spring and laying down some cedar mulch.

After a long day, both beds next to the path leading to the front door were weed-free and ready to accept the new bulbs and future perennials. Lastly, I spread a layer of mulch in order to reduce weeding and watering requirements. 

Here are more before and after pictures of the small project from various angles around the sidewalk and front porch:

East York Toronto Front Garden Renovation After 

By the way, I left the bulb packaging on the beds so that the client can take some pictures or notes and have an idea what bulbs will emerge in what locations next April.

 Toronto Front Garden Makeover in East York Before 

 Toronto Front Garden Makeover in East York After

 Toronto Front Garden Renovation East York Before 

 Toronto Front Garden Renovation East York After 

 Toronto Front Garden Renovation East York Before 

 Toronto Front Garden Renovation East York After 

East York Toronto Front Garden Renovation Before 

East York Toronto Front Garden Renovation After

East York Toronto Front Garden Makeover Before 

East York Toronto Front Garden Makeover After 

I'll provide the homeowner a plant shopping list so that during next spring, she can get the perennials and fill up this prominently visible garden with lots of colour and form. So, yes, I'm hopeful that we can go from weedy to wonderful in a few seasons, now that the mundane but necessary task of clearing out the gardens of mature weeds is out of the way.

A Front Garden Rescue in the Allenby Neighbourhood of Toronto

I Can Hear the Neighbours Breathe a Sigh of Relief!

Once or twice every work season, I'm asked to weed or clean up a garden that "has gone to seed", that is, the weeds have taken over the beds or the existing shrubs haven't been pruned in over a decade. If things are too extreme and/or the gardens are too large, I often won't accept the project (I work by myself after all.) 

So when I was given the client's address, walked up to the house and saw this, I thought "well, here we go again!"

Allenby Toronto Front Yard Cleanup Before 

Here are some other views from various angles. They don't get any better.

Allenby Toronto Front Yard Cleanup Rescue Before

Toronto Allenby Front Yard Cleanup Before 

Toronto Allenby Front Yard Cleanup Before 

Allenby Toronto Front Yard Cleanup Before

My heart sank a little (well, a lot) lower when I saw the river rocks protruding between the weeds as the odds were very high that the original installer used the classic "river rock on top of landscape fabric" technique. For those who have to weed these areas, you know my pain. Weeds will grow up and through the thin fabric from below or in between the rock crevices. 

This was certainly the case here as the rocks are partially hidden by weeds.

I knew the weeding had to occur over several visits and wasn't looking forward to dealing with the river rocks.

The upper tier had no rocks but infested, for lack of a better word, with grass and creeping bellflower:

Toronto Allenby Front Yard Weeding Before 

Toronto Front Yard Cleanup Before in the Allenby neighbourhood 

Being Sisyphus Again

Remember the Greek legend of Sisyphus? You can research as to why he was punished but his eternal fate was to roll a huge boulder up a hill in the netherworld, seeing it fall back down and forced to roll it back up over and over. In other words, he was destined to repeat a futile, frustrating and backbreaking task.

Sounds familiar?

Just like me and river rocks!

For this cleanup, I had to place all the river rocks on the street (lucky they were near the road), uncover the old and tattered landscape fabric underneath, discard it, remove the weeds growing underneath, roll a new piece of fabric and place the rocks back on top.

Unlike poor Sisyphus though, this is not an eternal punishment for me at this client's front yard in dealing with the rocks but rest assured, I will be doing the same thing at another client's place sooner or later.

Here are some "after" pictures showing the garden being rescued. The clients were thrilled with the "new" area and I'm sure their neighbours were too.

Allenby Toronto Front Yard Cleanup After

Allenby Toronto Front Yard Cleanup After 

Toronto Allenby Front Yard Cleanup After 

Toronto Allenby Front Yard Cleanup After 

Allenby Toronto Front Yard Cleanup Rescue After 

Toronto Allenby Front Yard Weeding After 

Toronto Front Yard Cleanup After in the Allenby neighbourhood 

I guarantee weeds will reappear within a few years in between the river rocks but someone else can be Sisyphus for a day then.

A Toronto Pollinator Garden Creation in Lambton-Baby Point

Renovating an Abandoned Raised Bed to Attract Pollinators

I think the word "renovating" doesn't reflect the work I put into implementing a new pollinator-friendly garden profiled in this post. "Resurrection" is more accurate, as the raised bed was not used as a garden for many years. It was full of wild daylilies (Hemerocallis fulva) and Lamiastrum with a Bridal Wreath spirea that needed pruning about five years ago.

The client wanted a new garden space to admire as she sat nearby and, not surprisingly, didn't want to see this all summer:

Toronto Lambton Baby Point New Pollinator Garden Before 

I came up with a plant list with mainly native species to blend in the naturalistic style in the backyard. The property has many mature trees around but the canopies were so high that some direct sunlight fell to the ground level.

But first, I had to deal with digging out all the "ditch" daylilies and Lamiastrum groundcover and prune back the spirea.

Here are some more before and after pictures of the transformation:

Lambton Baby Point Toronto New Pollinator Garden After 

Toronto Lambton Baby Point New Pollinator Garden Before 

Toronto Lambton Baby Point New Pollinator Garden After 

Toronto Lambton Baby Point New Pollinator Garden Before 

Toronto Lambton Baby Point New Pollinator Garden After 

It feels like I've been saving one garden after another all spring!

A Toronto Garden Makeover in Dufferin Grove

From Messy and Overgrown To....

Heading into October, I usually don't get requests to transplant new perennials and shrubs. Many homeowners are entering "fall cleanup" mode and garden centres and nurseries understandably don't offer a large selection of plants anyway. But recently I was introduced to a new client (I'll call her Joanne) through another Toronto gardening blogger (Helen Battersby, no need to give her an alias!). Joanne wasn't happy with the state of her backyard in central Toronto's Dufferin Grove neighbourhood so she asked for my advice in "renovating" the garden beds. 

Here are some "before" pictures showing the small garden areas flanking the path to and from the back deck to the garage:

Dufferin Grove Toronto new garden renovation before 

Toronto Dufferin Grove New Garden Renovation Before

Toronto Dufferin Grove New Garden Makeover Before 

Dufferin Grove Toronto Garden Makeover Before 

Dufferin Grove Toronto Garden Renovation before 

And on the other side of the yard:

Dufferin Grove Toronto Garden Renovation Before

Toronto Dufferin Grove New Garden Makeover Before

Toronto Dufferin Grove New Garden Makeover Before

I usually encounter the following in many of the garden makeovers I do:

• beds not weeded
• beds not edged or have unattractive plastic edging
• shrubs haven't been pruned in many years
• plants aren't in scale with the size of the yard (as they haven't been pruned or simply too large and are the wrong plants in the wrong site)
• existing perennials are not grouped together, leading to a weak design  

The above pictures should hopefully show that most of these points were in play.

Where to start?

I suppose after many years of thinking and implementing small-scaled garden design, I intuitively think about the functions of the various garden spaces in relation to the site realities, namely, the amount of direct sunlight the garden gets, the presence of large trees, shrubs, hedges, the type and condition of the soil, etc.. In Joanne's case, I considered the low back deck and mature Kentucky Coffee tree as the dominant factors. The tree's shadow does allow for direct sunlight for a few hours around late morning into mid afternoon. The low deck that has no railing means that it was important to have low growing perennials around the seating (and main garden viewing) area. I had the opportunity to introduce shorter plants that flowered for most of summer into fall around the deck.

There are often "prized locations" in many gardens due to favourable sight lines, micro climates, or simply areas which receive more direct sunlight than others. The small area in front of (or immediately below if you prefer) the deck was prime real estate that was wasted due to presence of four old purple leaf sandcherry shrubs previously cut down to the stumps. Of course, such hard pruning doesn't usually kill them so new shoots soon emerged. There were also four small "Emerald Gaiety" Euonymus shrubs growing unchecked. The appearance was very messy looking to be honest. A neighbouring dwarf Korean lilac which hadn't been pruned in years added to the chaos. So with Joanne's blessing, I dug out all the sandcherries and Euonymus and pruned the lilac hard.

Here are some "after" pictures, showing this prominent section of the garden with new perennials. I also planted hundreds of species tulips, alliums and other bulbs to give early spring colour. The new perennials won't add colour until summer so we needed some interest in April and May.

Dufferin Grove Toronto Garden Makeover After

Dufferin Grove Toronto new garden renovation after 

Toronto Dufferin Grove New Garden Renovation After

Toronto Dufferin Grove New Garden Makeover After 

Dufferin Grove Toronto Garden Renovation After 

The bed on the opposite side has mature shrubs like a P.G. hydrangea standard, an "Emperor One" Japanese maple, a Korean dogwood and two large tree peonies. They all need some pruning in order to re-establish the correct scale which should exist in this garden. The hydrangea standard currently doesn't look like a standard, the maple looks like a multi-stem shrub, the tree peonies have many dead stems and the dogwood should not have planted in the tight corner as it will get tall and wide, even for a medium sized tree. But I'll do the corrective pruning next spring. For now, I weeded all the beds, removed the unattractive black plastic edging that was popping up in many places, dug a new "trench" using an edger around the beds, planted more daffodils, tulips and crocuses and placed back the mulch.

Dufferin Grove Toronto Garden Renovation After

Toronto Dufferin Grove New Garden Makeover After

Toronto Dufferin Grove New Garden Makeover After 

 

This small project took about 10 hours from my initial meeting with Joanne to what you see above. I may do 3-5 similar micro garden (re)designs a season which keep the creative juices going in tandem with the more mundane weeding and deadheading. 

Speaking of mundane, the fall cleanups will keep me busy right until the end of November!

 

A Leslieville Front Garden Makeover

Garden Makeover or "Resurrection"? You Decide...

Everyone's busy, that's just a fact of modern life. For many homeowners, looking after the garden is low on the list of priorities. Very low. I'd say, for some, visiting the dentist is likely more enjoyable than getting out there on your knees weeding in the summer heat. In my case, it's easier for them to pay me to have my rear up pulling at unwanted pieces of vegetation.

So I'm guessing that someone would probably be very busy and/or uninterested with garden maintenance or neighbour's opinions to let the front garden to look like this:

Leslieville Toronto Front
Garden Summer Cleanup Before 

(Please note: I'm not criticizing or judging anyone specifically as my own front garden is horrible.)

It's not an uncommon scenario: you'll walk by well-kept (or at least minimally-kept) gardens, one after another, down the street and then stop and notice a front yard that's "gotten away." Based on the "before" pictures in this post, you could say that the weeds have gotten away and out of hand:

Leslieville Toronto Front Garden
Weeding and Makeover Before 

Leslieville Toronto Front Garden
Weeding and Makeover Before 

Leslieville Toronto Front Yard
Summer Cleanup Before

Here's the view from the front porch:

Toronto Leslieville Front Garden
Weeding and Makeover Before 

And from the sidewalk towards the house:

Toronto Leslieville Front Garden
Weeding and Makeover Before 

I was contacted by "Jane", the homeowner's sibling (I'll call the owner "Jack" and his sister "Jane") who has done the weeding for her brother in the past (now that's a good sister!) but had reached a point this summer of no return. I don't blame her, I'd feel a little tired pulling out very mature and deep-rooted weeds like Canada Thistle, Prickly Lettuce and Goosefoot (to name a few) year after year.

Jane wanted the front garden weeded, mulched and planted with new low maintenance perennials. So that's what I did....

A Garden "Resurrected"

Firstly, I wanted to credit my sister-in-law Angela (not a pseudonym) for coming up with her phrase of a "garden resurrection." She has seen many of my garden cleanup and makeover projects over the years through social media and on one occasion after I weeded and "renovated" a garden that needed a little TLC (sarcasm), she remarked "that wasn't a garden cleanup, that was a garden resurrection!"  I don't know if gardens can be brought back from the dead or not and this Leslieville (a trendy east Toronto neighbourhood) front garden is anything but dead given the lush growth of the weeds; therefore, I'll stick with the more commercial and less-religious idea of a garden makeover.

I dug out all the weeds by hand with my trusty and slightly rusty long handled shovel, transplanted many "lower maintenance" perennials like Threadleaf Coreopsis, Purple Coneflower, and "Autumn Joy" Sedum and spread many bags of mulch.

Here are the "after" results:

Leslieville Toronto Front Garden Summer Cleanup After

Toronto Leslieville Front Garden
Weeding and Makeover After 

Toronto Leslieville Front Garden
Weeding and Makeover After 

Leslieville Toronto Front Garden
Weeding and Makeover After 

Leslieville Toronto Front Garden
 Weeding and Makeover After 

Leslieville Toronto Front
Yard Summer Cleanup After 

Yes, it does look like a sea of black dyed mulch (it is) but given Jack's (remember, the homeowner) inability to weed (he's very busy at work), the mulch should reduce but not eliminate the amount of weeds germinating. Lastly, I asked him to water occasionally with the hose since I didn't design an xeriscape.

I fully anticipate that whatever new weeds which manage to emerge will grow unimpeded as Jack will not do anything about them. The silver lining would be that pollinators love thistle flowers so it's not all downside about nature trying to reclaim things again! Like all makeovers in life, the work is never truly over.