Stonyground: The Making of a Canadian Garden

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and the co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

In 1984, Douglas Chambers began to transform his family farm—150 acres
on the southern border of Bruce County, Ontario—by establishing
gardens of increasing complexity and extent. Transformation was never
his intent. As he points out, “[A] true garden is never apart from its
landscape. It arises from it.” Reflecting this principle, both the
farmhouse (built in 1870) and barn survive, and the fields continue to
be worked. Some of this book’s most attractive illustrations are views
of the surrounding farming landscape from the gardens. Still, his
plainer-living ancestors would probably have been astonished at the
changes he has made.

Of his book, Chambers observes that “[m]any texts are
here—cultural, personal, historical, botanical.” It’s pretty clear
that his gardens have emerged not simply from the landscape, but from
his extremely well-stocked mind, and that he has been influenced not
only by English gardeners like Gertrude Jekyll, but also by English
literature and some of its classical sources. His allusions range from
Virgil to Milton through to Tom Stoppard. The garden itself rings with
allusions. At the entrance to the vegetable garden is a flagstone
bearing the words (from Virgil) “dapes inemptae,” meaning
“unpurchased delicacies.”

All this is not to suggest that Chambers has no experience of the more
common round of gardening miseries: there are weeds, animal pests, and
the great challenges of weather. Still, he prevails and extends, and his
garden grows. He hopes that Stonyground will become “an enterprise of
some kind, and primarily educational: a centre for landscape and garden
study.” This seems a considerable distance from his original
ambition—to attain silence (an “escape from the cybergabble that
eats up most of our lives”) through gardening—but is a realistic
conclusion, and one that his ancestors would have understood.
Stonyground presents an engaging account of the mental and physical
efforts involved in creating a Canadian garden on the grand scale.