Earth, Wind and Wildlife: The Challenges of Cottage Gardening

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

In this book, we meet a series of gardeners who have successfully met
the challenges of cottage gardening. The cottages are in Ontario, mainly
at the southern edge of the Precambrian shield, from Georgian Bay
through Muskoka and Haliburton to the Kawarthas.

The challenges of gardening in this region are many, and a chapter is
devoted to each of them, such as soil (sandy, sparse, poor, rocky,
acidic), wind (steady and drying), animals (charming, but sometimes a
destructive force), and the short season (frosts early and late, as well
as limited time at the cottage). Sturdy and indefatigable
gardeners—several of them members of the Garden Club of Toronto, and
one the honorary president of the Canadian Wildflower Society—have
dealt with all the problems, and their gardens are described as well as
handsomely illustrated.

Some of the solutions are elaborate. A garden perched high on an island
in Lake Rosseau is hot and breezy, so it has a “drip irrigation system
set on a timer.” To discourage deer, one determined gardener built an
electric fence five feet tall and two thousand feet long. Other
solutions, such as composting to improve the almost invariably
inadequate soil, are much more feasible for the ordinary cottager to
implement.

A universal problem is time—or rather, the lack of it. In some cases,
this problem is directly related to the size of the garden. One gardener
confesses, “I love puttering and gardening to the point where I have
created a monster. ... One bed led to another.” But there are
solutions even to the problem of time. Elsewhere the author observes
that “[d]aylilies and hosta are the backbone of this garden, colourful
and requiring little or no work.”

Earth, Wind and Wildlife offers not only beautiful gardens beautifully
photographed, but also a good deal of useful information on how to
garden simply yet effectively at the cottage.