Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian Garden Writing

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

This anthology of Canadian writing about gardens ranges widely over time
and place and cultures, with one important exception: French-Canadian
garden writing is omitted entirely—an unfortunate and inexplicable
gap.

Still, there is much to admire. There are fine selections from
Catherine Parr Trail (1833) and Juliana Horatia Ewing (1869), the latter
of whom writes about the challenges of indoor winter gardening in
Fredericton. William Lyon Mackenzie King is characteristically fussy in
getting the location of his balustrade exactly right. Multiculturalism
is well represented: there’s an interesting article on Chinese
gardening, and another on an Italian immigrant who gardens to great
effect in urban Montreal. One of the best sources on recent gardening
is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Harrowsmith.

At times the anthology’s preponderance of very short excerpts is
frustrating. William Claus, a Loyalist who gardened in 1806 in what is
now Niagara-on-the-Lake, presents a clear account of what he is
planting, but the excerpt from his diary goes no further than that. How
did it all turn out, one wonders. What did he learn? Also frustrating is
the plant index, which is set in continuous lines, presumably to save
the publisher the expense of adding extra pages.

But Garden Voices is mainly a pleasurable experience, whether the text
is dealing with the reputed problems of blackcurrants or with the
special requirements of a butterfly garden.