Alice’s Wonderland

Ageless Gardens is a popular documentary series that travels to gardens across Canada and introduces viewers to inspiring people who share the stories of their gardens. Filmed by Gemini Award-winning director and cinematographer Ian Toews, the series is produced by Toews and Mark Bradley, who collaborate through 291 Film Company in association with VisionTV and ZoomerMedia Limited.

The Season 5 première started on May 5. The May 19 episode, Gardening for All Seasons, features Leanne Dowd, a Neepawa gardener whose garden is a story of rediscovery and transformation.

The beginning of the episode takes place in April when plants are beginning to reawaken. Every gardener can relate to the joy of discovering new growth emerging from the ground in spring, but for Dowd, each new discovery brings her closer to learning more about the vast collection of plants that were planted by the garden’s previous owners, Alice and Bill Moger.

Alice died at the age of 87 in 2018, two years after her husband Bill. They were well-known for hybridizing lilies, delphiniums, daylilies and irises. Their once beautiful garden, however, had fallen into neglect in their later years.

Dowd purchased the one-hectare property in spring of 2020. Since then, she has painstakingly uncovered and nurtured hundreds of lilies, peonies, roses, clematis and delphinium that were buried beneath layers of overgrown grape vines, raspberry canes, chest-high weedy growth and a thick carpet of fallen leaves from the many trees on the property.

“It was probably five years before Alice passed away that anything was last done with the garden,” says Dowd. “By the time I bought the property, the garden had been sitting untended for at least seven years.” But the garden’s past was so significant that Dowd set about immediately to uncover its treasures.

“The first two years, I would spend hours tiptoeing around the garden because I knew there could be plants beneath the fallen debris. I carried a fistful of orange flags and every time I came across even just a hint of a plant, I would mark it with a flag. Within months, the garden was an absolute sea of fluttering orange flags. It drove my family crazy because they had no idea where to walk on the property.”

That first year in the garden was also an enormous task.

“Alice wanted something of everything and what resulted was a property that was jam-packed with plants,” says Dowd. “So many old, half-dead trees had to be removed. There were mountains of debris — fallen branches — that had to be removed and rampant growth that had been left unchecked. Every bed needed to be re-dug and every plant had to be transplanted.

“Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) was one of the plants that suddenly showed up and at first I had no idea what it was. It was just a tiny little thread of a thing. I lifted it out of its unfortunate location and planted it in a different spot and last year it just exploded with growth. That has happened so many times after plants were uncovered and exposed to more sunlight.”

In 2023, while on a walkabout during the first filming of the episode which features Dowd, director Toews was intrigued by Northern Nodding Trillium, the most northerly occurring trillium in North America. “It popped up a couple of years ago and is one of the really special plants that Alice left behind,” says Dowd.

Dowd never doubted that the plants would survive and thrive. “The garden took care of itself,” she says.

The organic material that fell on the beds over the years had been left undisturbed and allowed to slowly decompose and feed and enrich the soil. “But it’s also a testament to the bone-cold-hardiness and disease resistance of Alice’s plants,” says Dowd.

The May 19 episode of Ageless Gardens touches on the enormity of the task of plant identification. There are, for example, hundreds of unnamed lilies and peonies, many of which Alice planted from seed decades ago.

While Dowd is an experienced and knowledgeable gardener as well as a lily hybridizer and the author of Canadian Lily Hybridizers and Their Lilies (Pegasus Publications, 2023), identifying the treasure trove of rare plants left by her garden’s previous owner has taken many hours of careful research and networking with horticultural experts in Manitoba and across Canada, including the Canadian Rose Society and the Canadian Peony Society.

Dowd has applied for historical status for the vast collection of Canadian-bred lilies that grow in her garden. “Heritage status would ensure their protection once I am gone,” says Dowd. “Unless we keep a dialogue going about the history of horticulture in Canada, the push for discovery as well as preservation of the plants introduced by hybridizers, past and present will fade away.”

If the application is successful, the garden would be open to the public and allow visitors a chance to see the extraordinary plant collection.

Dowd is also attempting to register some of the Martagon lilies hybridized by Alice Moger with the Royal Horticultural Society Lily Group.

The garden contains plants from some of Canada’s best-known plant breeders — Frank Leith Skinner, A.J. (Bert) Porter and Isabella Preston. The vast collection of roses holds many fascinating stories. One example is the Dr. Merkeley rose, an ultra hardy (Zone 2B) double pink rose which a soldier brought home to Canada after the First World War. He gave a cutting from the rose to Dr. H.J. Merkeley, a dentist in Manitoba, who gave it to Frank Skinner who had a nursery on his Dropmore homestead. Skinner named the rose after Dr. Merkeley.

Dowd cannot resist backstories. “It’s the backstory that intrigues me as much as the plant itself,” she says. She is not only maintaining the numerous plants that Alice originally planted, but she also adds new plant acquisitions every year. “I have an order of roses coming from Cornhill Nursery in New Brunswick. I add eight to 10 new roses a year,” she says.

Dowd has named her garden Alice’s Wonderland. The door to Alice’s Wonderland leads visitors into a garden full of wonder and mystery. Be sure to watch the episode of Ageless Gardens that airs on May 19 on VisionTV at 8 p.m. The episode, Gardening for All Seasons, also travels to a protected woodland and public-cultivated garden on Vancouver Island, as well as to a beautiful private garden in Waterloo, Ont.

The photography is breathtaking and the original score uplifting. The entire series affirms all the reasons why we garden — therapeutic benefits, a sense of community, and above all, a love of plants. For the series trailer and exclusive webisodes, visit www.agelessgardens.ca.

colleenizacharias@gmail.com

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