Visionary Gardens ready to grow and show

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This article was published 04/05/2024 (864 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The second season of Visionary Gardeners airs on VisionTV over five Monday nights beginning Monday, May 6, at 8 p.m. CT. This extraordinary documentary series from filmmakers Ian Toews and Mark Bradley of Victoria, B.C.-based 291 Film Co. is the ultimate garden tour. The timing could not be better.

This documentary captures incredible gardens and spectacular plants but also digs deep into the elements of the creative process that goes into garden making. Season 2 features 10 remarkable Canadian gardeners who share their ideas, experiences, and vision. These are individuals who love growing plants, designing landscapes, and making gardens. They are students of nature, practiced in the art of observation, keen to find innovative solutions, and yes, obsessed with gardening and plants. Their stories are unforgettable. Fortunate to be given the opportunity to preview the series, I’ve already watched the episodes multiple times.

In the first episode of Visionary Gardeners, the filmmakers follow Marjorie Harris, iconic garden writer and gardening legend, as she grapples with the seemingly impossible reality of having to leave her much loved and much visited Toronto garden of over 50 years. This is the hardest endeavour. As she walks through her incredible garden for the last time, the camera guides the viewer’s gaze, capturing the palette of greens, different shapes and textures in Harris’s gorgeous planting scheme.

“If you really think about what plants you are putting together,” says Harris, “they just all work with each other and help each other. And then I can figure out how to get that layered look and when it gets to maturity, I’ve got tons of stuff at eye level. And that became a really important principle about gardens and gardening in my life: where I want to go and how I want to see those plants relating to each other in different seasons.”

Harris may be finished with her former garden, but she is already making another garden. In the episode, Pruning Things Back, Harris contemplates what nature needs on the 12th floor of an apartment building, her new home. Viewers have a chance to see her raw and unadorned new garden space — a narrow, six-metre-long balcony. Harris is undeterred. She is going into the future, determined to figure it out.

“Visionary is a word that gets knocked around a lot these days,” says Ian Toews, Gemini Award-winning creator, writer, producer and director. “But the idea that gardeners are visionary is that they are really looking forward and they are doing things that other people haven’t thought of yet. They are innovating and there is this constant striving for something new or excellent or an improvement and that’s what Visionary Gardeners aims for: those gardeners that truly energize the word visionary.

In the making of this series, Toews and Bradley crisscrossed the country. Filming began in the Eastern Townships in Quebec in the fall of 2022. “It was the best time to capture the glorious fall colour,” says Bradley. Filming during Canada’s 2023 wildfire season, the most destructive ever recorded, proved challenging at times. Rick Durand, featured in the episode Gardening Over Decades, is a well-known prairie tree breeder and tree researcher who lives in West Kelowna. At times during filming, smoke turned the sky yellow-red and road closures were in effect due to the fast-moving wildfire.

No one has tested as many trees for the Prairie region as Rick Durand who has lived most of his life in Manitoba and continues to evaluate trees at a research farm near Selkirk. You have to be in the game for the long term, he says, and indeed, Durand has devoted decades to developing hardy, diverse trees. Communities are losing so many trees to disease, he says. “Someone had to go out there and find trees that are more suitable for this concrete jungle we have created. But it’s not just about hardiness. Is that the leaf colour you want? Is that the tree form you want? Does it grow slowly, does it grow fast?” Durand has introduced many hardy plants over the years, from trees to roses, and shows viewers a pivotal new, one-of-a-kind tree species. But as game changing as a new species may be, you can never be satisfied, says Durand. “There will always be challenges, whether natural or human made.”

Each episode of Visionary Gardeners introduces viewers to two gardeners. Entertaining, meditative, meticulous, even sometimes eccentric, each one invites you into their space where they let their imagination play. Marion Jarvie, who gardens in Thornhill, is instantly relatable. A self-described average gardener, Jarvie learned about gardening from her mother when she was a young child growing up in the south of England during the Second World War. An in-demand public speaker, she teaches what she refers to as straight gardening and what you can do to make a garden better. Well, wait until you see her garden. It is a work of art. Jarvie loves shapes in the garden — shrubs, dwarf conifers, vertical elements. “Then you add the colour and the flowers,” she says. She propagates plants in a lean-to greenhouse built against an exterior wall of her house and shares down-to-earth gardening tips and advice with viewers.

In the episode, Words And History, we meet a poet, Lorna Crozier, who remembers her late husband through the garden they built together in North Saanich, B.C., while Bogs are the realm of Justin Dunning, who also lives in North Saanich, and is an avid collector of carnivorous plants. “We’re going through the golden era of carnivorous plants,” he says in the episode called Symphonies and Sarracenias. His positive energy is contagious. Young, Dunning sees carnivorous plants as a means of attracting and intriguing a younger crowd to gardening. We also meet Mary Gore, a Toronto accountant who created her breathtaking garden from a blank slate.

In the episode, Pruning Things Back, John Thompson makes contemplative gardens and believes in the powers of observation. “Sit quietly and look,” he says. “Find the view. The sense of play is as important as anything.” He has an affinity for rocks and stonework and his beautiful designs are influenced by Japanese garden design principles. In the episode, Communities in Harmony, we meet Harry Burton who grows hundreds of apple varieties from around the world. In other episodes, Patterson Webster creates awe-inspiring sculptural works and Kathy Leishman, a waterfront gardener, crafts wild landscapes with drought-resistant plants.

It’s spring and garden making is taking place across our country. You are going to want a front row seat when Season 2 of Visionary Gardeners premieres on Monday on VisionTV. Gardening brings people together and builds social connections. Once you meet the gardeners in each episode and follow their fascinating journeys, listen to their different perspectives, and see what they have achieved, it will be as if you have made lasting connections. And you will be inspired to create something new and imaginative.

colleenizacharias@gmail.com

For advice, ideas and tips to keep your outdoor and indoor plants growing, sign up to receive Winnipeg Gardener, a free monthly digital newsletter Colleen Zacharias writes for the Free Press at winnipegfreepress.com/newsletter/winnipeg-gardener