100 Best Plants for the Ontario Garden

Pleasance Crawford, a Canadian landscape and garden-history writer, is
the co-author of The Canadian Landscape and Garden History Directory and
Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian Garden Writing.

In the late 1980s, a few Canadian publishers began responding to a clear
need for books about gardening in specific parts of this vast
country—a need until then filled mainly by French-language books for
Quebec gardeners. The new crop of gardening books included Roger
Vick’s Gardening on the Prairies (1987), Jan Mather’s Designing
Alberta Gardens (1994), Pat Tucker’s Gardening in Toronto (1991), and
Wendy Thomas’s Ontario Gardener’s Resource Guide (1992) and Super
Hints for Ontario Gardeners (1995).

The Tucker work used the same approach as the two books under
review—a generic format that, with title and text changed ever so
slightly, might convince more than one group of gardeners that the
author wrote it exclusively for them. Whysall lives and writes in
British Columbia. True, the tenets of horticulture are the same there as
in Ontario. It’s understanding the differences in their application
that makes gardeners masters of their own growing conditions. Yet the
“Before We Begin” chapters of both books are interchangeable, except
for a one-page subsection entitled “Coastal Gardens” in one and
“Ontario Gardens” in the other.

The lists of “100 Best Plants” for the two widely separated
provinces might be expected to reveal significant differences. With
startlingly few exceptions, however, identical descriptions of the same
perennials and biennials, bulbs, ornamental grasses, vines and climbers,
roses, shrubs, and trees appear in both books. The unavoidable
adaptations are accomplished by substituting one cultivar for another
and inserting, in text boxes, the relevant flowering times and, in the
case of Ontario, hardiness zones.

Ecologists point out that lawns all across the middle of North America
look alike from the air because Kentucky bluegrass is ubiquitous.
Gardeners, by contrast, have many choices. They can grow mainly plants
that thrive everywhere; they can feature native species, local heirloom
varieties, and nearby nursery introductions; or they can strike a happy
medium. These two books lean heavily toward the first option.