When Meg and I turned the corner into the quiet North Edmonton cul-de-sac we both knew we had found the right place. The home of Gary and Lorraine Friedel is a neighborhood jewel, tucked a half dozen turns away from the main road but instantly recognizable as a labour of love.
We were heading to the Friedels to interview them as the Grand Challenge winners of the Edmonton Horticultural Society’s (EHS) Garden Competition in the category of Large Yard. The competition, designed to promote excellence in gardening, is not easy to win. Every year there are hundreds of entries in numerous categories. Being familiar with some of the other yards exceptional in the “Large Yard” category, I knew that this yard must be something very special and I wasn’t disappointed.
If you’re interested in learning more about the EHS, look them up at edmontonhort.com. You can meet hundreds of Edmonton and area gardeners who love to inspire, challenge, and educate their fellow enthusiasts.
Labour of love
What makes Gary and Lorraine’s accomplishment so remarkable is that in only five years they have transformed a yard of half-dead grass into a complex and multi-faceted garden that delights the visitor at every twist and turn.
The yard proves that all you need is the right blend of enthusiasm and time to make your garden extraordinary. Gary designed, dug, grew, planted, watered, and just willed the garden into existence. He even mixed the concrete for the sidewalks himself. During May and June he spends an astonishing 15 hours a day in the garden, but in the summer he “only” spends about four hours a day outside.
Anyone looking at the immaculately tended beds, 90 container gardens and a centrepiece pond surrounded by tropical foliage, will find it hard to believe that Gary didn’t garden much before he retired. It’s a labour of love that his wife Lorraine, who is smiling as we stroll, says she walks through every morning and always finds something new.
“I don’t do much of the gardening,” she says. “I take care of the gardener.”
The creation
Looking at the before and after pictures of the yard is astonishing. Gary isn’t a believer in the top-down approach of creating a grand garden plan. He put the garden together piece by piece through a combination of necessary changes (eg. raised beds in areas prone to flooding) and trial and error.
Gary spends his winters reading gardening books and magazines and staring out the window at the snowy yard outside, dreaming of spring. In the early spring he constructs a temporary greenhouse on the patio to give a head start to his bulbs and large tropical plants that he overwintered inside.
Tropical heart of the garden
At the centrepiece of the garden, neatly tucked away beside the back patio, is the heart of the Friedel garden. It’s a pool that, at about three feet deep and over 10 feet wide with a babbling creek flowing into it, provides an instant sense of relaxation.
In order to add to the ambience of the scene, and to take advantage of the increased humidity around the pool, Gary has surrounded it with containers of lush tropical plants. Massive Canna lilies, Alocasia and Castor Beans thrive on three sides while marginal grasses grow in the pool itself.
At the heart of the pool are water lilies like I’ve never seen in Alberta. While my mouth was still open at the 10 or so blooms, Lorraine told me that it had 15 blooms recently, a feat unheard of in Edmonton. Gary overwinters the lilies by wrapping them in moist peat moss and cooling them in the fridge’s crisper.
Watering and mildew
From countless hours spent in the garden, Gary has a wealth of practical wisdom for Edmonton and area gardeners. I wrote his tips furiously as he went from one topic to the other.
When I noticed his stunning bed of dahlias growing over three feet against a wall and blooming like crazy, he told me how he keeps powdery mildew off them. He prunes out the bottom leaves (about six inches up) so that they don’t droop into the wet soil and provide a home for fungus. Sure enough, there wasn’t a trace of mildew.
He’s careful not to water any foliage in the garden, especially through wet summers like this one. Wet leaves at night are incubators for powdery mildew.
There’s cedar mulch everywhere, even in the container gardens. Not only does it reduce stress on the roots, Gary says, it also cuts their water consumption by over 50 per cent. The mulch would be especially useful in some of his larger containers, which boast constantly thirsty tropical foliage and petunias. With plants as large as he has, they would otherwise have to be watered daily or more.
Pest control
A gorgeous garden does not have to be sprayed clean of every living thing. Gary understands that every garden has its own internal food chains and he uses that to his advantage.
Gary encourages ladybugs and other beneficial insects to overwinter by leaving the leaves and mulch in the beds until the spring. The ladybugs take care of most of the aphids so that he doesn’t have to use very many chemicals, only spraying as a hesitant last resort.
When I asked about how he keeps dandelions out of his lawn (there wasn’t one to be found), he had a similar approach when it came to using chemicals. He confirmed that a lush, healthy lawn will choke out almost all dandelions. For the stubborn that survive, he spot sprays Killex on individual dandelions and never sprays the entire lawn.
Experimenting
As I mentioned above, Gary created the garden by pouring his time and passion into it piece by piece and year by year. When I asked what advice he’d like to give his fellow gardeners, he said that the garden evolved through good old fashioned trial and error:
“Don’t be afraid to experiment. If you do one or two new things every year you can always hide them away if they don’t work.”
Rob Sproule is the author of Gardening with Colour, Creative Design Ideas for Canadian Gardens (Lone Pine Publishing) and the co-owner of Salisbury Greenhouse in Sherwood Park. For more information, go to salisburygreenhouse.com.
Article Source: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/technology/Hort+society+champions+share+secrets+their+winning+garden/5257355/story.html
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