Talk & Tour: Gardening on a Slope 🌲 Tour a Vancouver Garden in Spring!

Hello everyone. We're in the garden today of Nadine and Ted Staunton. We're in the suburb of Vancouver. Thank you for having us visit your garden. Oh, it's a pleasure. It's gorgeous. Late April, but there's a lot going on right now at this time of year and there's so much color and the way I understand this partnership is you've been here over 30 years. 1989. Yeah. You, Ted, are responsible for the hardscaping. That's correct. And Nadine, you're the plant lady. Mostly, yes. Although, Ted falls in love with plants periodically that we have to find a spot for. Yeah, because I asked him about a couple and he knew what they were. Oh, there we go. Yeah. This is a unique property. It's L-shaped, but it's got quite an elevation change. Yes, that's right. Yes, it does. So, you built the house. You bought the property and you built the house. So, what was here before that? There was mostly, there was some very gnarled up old plum trees, quite diseased, a lot of aspen, a lot of very rough areas, some bigger trees. It was just very undeveloped and it had been in the past strawberries, chickens, farming. Yes. So, you saw some of that stuff left over. Yeah. Okay. And then there's a ravine that runs on the side of the property too, right? And along the back as well. Yes. Okay. So, there were a few surprises in the ravine? There have been many surprises in the ravine. Iron bathtubs and car chassis. Car chassis. Wow. Yeah. People used to just kind of tip things over the edge rather than take them to the dump. Yeah. Right. Yeah. A lot of bottles and tins. Bottles and yeah, all sorts of things. Old license plates. Yeah. Yeah. So, we're on this boulder path here, right? Okay. And now, Ted, how did these boulders get here? I pulled them all out of the ravines on both sides there and placed them. But you hauled these up there by yourself? I did. Yes. No mechanical means whatsoever. Well, you used the come along jack. Yes, I did use a come along jack. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But these walls that you developed, because there was no terracing here before, correct? No, that's right. And you've sort of built these levels and you have this grass path going here that looks like a river. He created these beds for you to put your plant material in? Yes. And it's been an experiment over the years to find out which plants will do well because they are north facing here. Yeah. North facing slope. So, some plants do very well and other plants not so much. So, I move things around quite a bit. Okay. And just until they find a spot where they're happy. They seem happy. Yeah. Right now. Yes. This time of year. Yeah. So, there's a lot of color. The rhododendrons are all blooming. Yeah. You have some cherry trees that are blooming. Right. Yes. Yes. And so, once this sort of changes seasons and it goes into spring and summer, are there other things that take over? Oh, yeah. I've tried to plant things so that I have color in the springtime and succession color all year long. I also plant dahlias. I haven't put them in the ground yet, but they provide a lot of fall color. Okay. And some rudbeckia and coreopsis and things that bloom sort of later on. Yeah. So, yeah. We have a fair amount of color right up until frost. Yeah. And sometimes we don't get frost until December. Yeah. We also have some things that bloom in the winter, which because of the zone that we're in, that's possible. Like, we have a winter blooming viburnum, and it started last year. It started blooming in November and it finished around the end of March. Wow. That's nice to have that in the garden. Oh, the scent is awesome. And it's beautifully scented and hummingbirds love it. Yeah. And they stay all winter. Yeah. Yeah. As far as planning went, things just sort of developed. I didn't have any plan laid out on the paper or anything. It just sort of... But you started at the top. Yes. By the house, and then you worked your way down. Yeah. This slope here was the first thing that I modified because I used to... It was all grass at one time, and I was driving my tractor and sort of almost falling off. So that's what made me think of terracing. Well, it flows very well from the top of the property when you walk down the side and it comes around. There's some nice vistas. And you said in the winter when the leaves fall, you do have views of the mountains back there. Yes, the mountains and the river. So there's planes that take off. There's river traffic. Yeah. And of course, we've got trains and a highway. So yeah. Do you have any deer pressure or any pests or anything that caused problems? Raccoons. Raccoons. Squirrels. Skunks. Yeah. Not too bad. Not too bad though. Yeah. Ted, you told me you built a lot of these structures or most of the structures that are on the property. But you got to tell me about this church here. It's very unique. Oh, yeah. It actually started out in a semicircle of trees. And I wanted a sort of a different building in there. I originally had planned on building a kind of a folly with an outside walkway. But because of the constriction of the trees, it turned out to be more of a gothic church. So when I came to Canada, I didn't know one end of a hammer from the other. And we bought a little house up the street and we lived there for 20 years. And it was a fixer upper. And I learned a lot about building and constructing things, kind of got over my fear of it. And Nadine's father was a carpenter. So he helped me a lot. But actually, I built this on my own. The siding is made out of old telephone poles that have been stripped down and cut down. And the roof I made out of from a cedar tree that had fallen on our property. It was about a 60-foot tree that fell down. And I cut it up into pieces and made the shakes out of the cedar. And yeah, it's kind of a small congregation. You can only get about six people in there, but it's got a little choir loft in there. Well, I bet your grandkids love playing it. Yes, they do. They do. Nadine, I see a lot of repetition in the garden. You have a lot of plants here, the same plants down there. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Well, mostly that happens on its own, because I have a lot of plants that seed themselves and I'll find seedlings or small plants that have sprung up where I didn't put them. But I tend to leave most of them unless they're really in the way or impeding something else. Because for some reason, plants like to grow inside other plants. So I have to move things around quite a bit. But because it's such a large garden, I don't have time to manicure every spot. And I get a lot of things that just seed themselves, like this one down here is a Campanula. And it looks lovely. It gets a spray of blue flowers on it in the summertime. But it, again, it seeds itself everywhere. So I find myself weeding a lot of it out. And the forget-me-nots, I never plant them. They just come up in the springtime. I leave them because I love the looks of them. But I have to caution people, do not make the same mistake I did one year, put them on your compost pile. Because when you use your compost, you will have so many forget-me-nots. Ted, you talked about moving rocks, but I can't imagine you moved that one very far. Not too far, no. I did actually move it. There's a whole pile of this size of rocks spread all around here. When they did the foundation for the house that we built, the excavator piled all these rocks up, one pile on this side of the yard and one on the other far side. And I didn't like the effect. So I moved them around so that I could plant in front of them and so on. So another interesting thing you mentioned to me was about, you actually counted the number of rocks you moved? Yes, I have a little hand clicker and I counted the number of rocks that were about this size and larger that I moved. And there's over 3,000 of them. So that's apart from all the smaller ones. The work never stops in this garden. No, never, never. Like the cupola on that building. What was that? Ted did that last year? Yes. Yes, we had a lovely little stained glass window, which you can see on this side. And he got the idea that it would look nice if it was in a cupola on top of what used to be a shed with a roof like this. So he built it and then he and our son muscled it up there and he fastened it in place. Had to reinforce the roof too. Yeah, I'm sure. So what's your next project? Do you have any more projects coming up? Oh, well, my next project is to level this lawn, but I haven't got permission yet. There's some resistance there. Everybody says there's too much work, but I like work. Yeah, so you can play some croquet or something. Yeah, playing croquet. We have a croquet set, but the balls tend to always go downhill, so it can be a bit of a challenge. Yeah, right. Well, I want to thank you two for letting Garden Gate and myself come in and tour your garden and see everything you've done here. It's just a really amazing property and you guys should be very proud. Oh, thank you very much. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Appreciate you coming. Yeah.