The Gardens I Left Behind

 Before I share my experiences with gardening on Gabriola, let me tell you about the gardens I left behind.
In June of 2016 I headed west with a friend along to share the cross-country adventure. I had sold my home on Dunrobin Shores in rural Ottawa, packed up my truck, and said my goodbyes to friends and family.

My home in Dunrobin

I left behind two very different gardens, the latest being a mainly shade garden on a 3/4 acre, where I created a rock garden and pond, built a gazebo in the back, and had lots of perennial flowers. I introduced permaculture techniques and enjoyed co-creating with nature. It was quite different from gardening on a sprawling five acre hobby farm where I had lived previously.There I had over 15 different garden beds: a big vegetable plot, culinary and medicinal herb gardens, a rose garden, a small apple orchard, raspberry bushes, and lots of perennial beds. It was beautifully sunny with good soil, and lots of manure left behind as it was a small horse farm before we purchased the property. I was fortunate to be given many perennials and bushes from my mother's beautiful garden - some of which I took with me to my next garden.
The property had a big barn with a large swimming pool behind it. It had a stream running through it which we widened and dug out to create several large ponds with two small islands. In the winter we strung lights in the trees and skated on the ponds to Strauss's waltzes. We would have campfires on the bigger island, drinking hot chocolate, and making snobrod (a Danish thing, where you wrap bread dough around sticks, cook it in the fire, and fill with jam). 
We planted over 600 trees, fir and deciduous, on the property. It was idyllic, though a huge amount of work to maintain. We had a few neighbours close by and were surrounded by farmers’ fields. We had bluebirds, baltimore orioles, squirrels, chipmunks, beavers, otters, ducks and geese nesting in the spring, and some deer, as well as a bat colony in our eaves. We created walking trails through the woods, which we cross-country skied on in the winter.
It was a fabulous place to create gardens, and a wonderful place to raise our children, who could run wild and naked and discover nature. When I arrived on Gabriola, I spent the first summer living in a tent, surrounded by a field of daisies. Then I had a deck built and moved the tent to the deck.
One of the first things I did was to visit the two local nurseries, buying plants before I had even started my garden. I also almost immediately put up a fence to create my first small deer-proof garden. 
It included native sword fern (lots on my property), lavender my daughter gave me from the Okanagan Lavender and Herb Farm in Kelowna, and a birdbath from LeeValley that I had gifted to my mother many years ago that made its way back to me.
It was the beginning of a new gardening adventure, where at times I was to feel that the previous thirty years of gardening experience didn't amount to much.