Giving a garden back to nature

Native-plants garden is one of eight on Carnegie tour

On a recent rainy Sunday, Sheelah Dunn Dooley shows a visitor a native perennial in her garden, chewed down to the nubs by caterpillars and covered by sticky webs. They are caterpillars that will become American (or black) swallowtail butterflies.

When she looks at some other plants, she sometimes sees three, four, even five different insects there on a single plant, feeding or laying eggs. She tells a visitor that rabbits regularly eat the tops off her plants.

“That’s not something I complain about. That’s exciting,” she says. “That’s the paradigm shift. When you can say ‘That’s terrific. Something is eating this.’ ”

The garden around the Dundas home she shares with husband Martin has been planned and planted for those insects and caterpillars and rabbits — and salamanders and chipmunks and birds. This is not just a garden but a wildlife habitat and an effort to return the property to a semblance of what it was like before settlers arrived and began to transform the land.

The garden is one of eight on this year’s 30th anniversary Carnegie Gallery Secret Gardens tour, which happens Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets are available at the gallery on King Street West in Dundas, the Keeping Room and Holland Park Garden Gallery, also in Dundas, and Mixed Media on King Street West in Westdale.

Sheelah and Martin have been in the 1869 house, which sits on a third of an acre (about a 10th of a hectare), since 1982; when they moved in, the front garden consisted of lawn, a large yucca, a Norway maple and not a lot else. Over the next three decades, Sheelah made it into a lovely English-country-style garden.

Then that “paradigm shift” happened. Sheelah took a course offered by local gardener Joanne Tunnicliffe, in which she learned about biodiversity — about the critical importance of fostering a wide range of native plants to attract and host an equally wide range of insects, animals and birds.

Sheelah took to heart the idea of making a garden that was not so much good for people to look at, but for biodiversity, for the climate, for pollinators.

She learned about the value of native plants to threatened and pressured wildlife — more specifically, genetically local plants that had, over generations, adapted to local climate and conditions to become hosts to hungry, egg-laying or overwintering butterflies and bees and hundreds of other species of necessary wildlife.

Most of the columns I write about local gardens are about the “what” of the garden and some of the “how” it came to be. But the Dunn Dooley garden raises questions of “why.” Why make a garden, at considerable effort and cost, with such a focus on native plants, pollinators and biodiversity?

Sheelah lists several answers, but they boil down to the idea that “creating or enhancing pollinator habitat by planting native trees, shrubs and wildflowers goes a long way to enhance biodiversity in urban areas … something that all of us can help with and benefit from.”

She and Martin decided to go all in. Five years ago, they worked with Environmental Design in Carlisle and botanist and landscape designer Paul O’Hara of Blue Oak Native Landscapes to create an almost entirely new front garden that, Sheelah says, is “reminiscent of the preEuropean Dundas Valley.”

The garden naturally separates into a sunny mini prairie, a fullshade woodland, woodland forest edges, a moist woodland pawpaw grove, and a moist shade garden. Paths link the various areas of the garden and also wind into and through some of the larger planting area.

First to catch a visitor’s eye are boulders — not just big stones, but rocks the size of a small car, some with moss, others with small plants or tree seedlings growing out of the cracks and crevices. These boulders — there are 13 of them, with 11 in the front — are there because before European settlement, the Dundas Valley would have been littered with the giant rocks, called erratics, left by retreating glaciers. Over centuries, they were broken up for house foundations and other building uses.

The variety of plants in the garden — a total of more than 400 plants — is astonishing. Almost everything is labelled (one label per variety). There are 10 types of trees, 19 varieties of shrubs, two vines, 12 kinds of grasses and sedges, seven different ferns, 25 species of spring wildflowers, 44 of summer wildflowers and nine of fall wildflowers. (A full plant list, including plant locations, will be available to garden-tour visitors).

It’s hard to know where to begin to describe it all.

The plants are lush and full, the trees are tall, the shrubs and wildflowers look as if they have been there forever. There’s a tall white pine that towers over the rest of the garden; there’s a lovely grouping of white oak, ironwood, sassafras and chokecherry. One of Sheelah’s favourite spots in the garden has a view of the house through the branches of an eastern hemlock.

Nearer to the house, she points out a maidenhair fern that is thriving amid neighbouring wood poppy, Virginia waterleaf and an oak leaf hydrangea.

Sheelah’s original plan was to open her front garden only for the Carnegie Gallery tour, but construction of the back garden has proceeded apace, so visitors will get to see the remaking of that, which

has been created with Environmental design and botanist Kevin Kavanaugh of South Coast Gardens.

Native shrubs and trees circle a “lawn” of walkable native plants; near the house, water burbles up and splashes down over a large boulder; another “sitting rock” is covered with a low-growing sedum. A population of eastern red salamanders has been settled into the lowest corner of the property, which used to flood regularly but now has proper drainage and rocks and forest litter for salamander habitat.

Sheelah notes that she and Martin used professionals to design and “kick-start” the garden but she maintains it, with the help of friends, and is very much a “handsin-the-dirt gardener.” While there’s no thought of this being a lowmaintenance garden, Sheelah says they don’t rake up leaves in the fall, they don’t cut plants back in the spring, and she uses no chemicals in her garden — and hasn’t since 1985.

“It wasn’t hard for me to switch to native plants,” she says. She won’t claim (for publication, anyway) to be a good gardener, but says, “If you can garden with non-natives, native-plant gardening is a piece of cake.”

There’s so much more than can be, and probably should be, said about a garden with this sort of scope and ambition. There are more stories to tell.

Luckily, visitors can see for themselves on Sunday. Tickets are $30. For more information, call the Carnegie Gallery at 905-627-4265.