Gardens are often a labour of love, but they can have a personality, and be an expression of soul too. That’s the case for Deborah Kelly’s Pineview-area home’s yard and garden, a decades-long project that isn’t just a plot of pretty posies – it tells a story too.
“When I retired after 25 years teaching deaf children, they gave me this engraved rock – they know I have a thing for rocks,” said Kelly, who has that rock and others scattered thoughtfully through her front and back gardens, a mix of floral colours, greenery and whimsical statuary – a goose, pig, bird bath, rustic watering cans and wood bits that she has collected through the years.
Kelly has lived in St. Albert for more than 50 years and remembers riding her bike around the exact property that is now her house, back when it was a red barn in a farm field. After she and her husband raised three daughters and she retired from her busy career, Kelly had more time to tend to what she was growing outdoors – and it does take plenty of tending.
“I spend a couple hours a day outside – watering, weeding, picking up foliage – we don’t go anywhere in the summer. There’s too much to do and it’s not fair to the plants or anyone I ask to check in and do the watering,” she said.
Kelly’s pie-shaped property fans out to about three lots wide in the back – an oasis of trees – mountain ash, aspen, lilac and spruce – with vines, bushes and plants of varying colours, textures and heights scattered about. A few rosebushes and ferns mingle with grape vines that are stretched across an arched trellis, while solar lights dot the landscape, making evenings especially pleasant in the east-facing backyard, Kelly said.
The playfulness is everywhere here – it’s not a formal, English-style garden, but a rustic, well-worn one, with an old window frame nestled beside an inukshuk beside a metal whirlybird. A neighbour brought an old wheelbarrow to Kelly, which she promptly filled with trailing nasturtium and a flower-stuffed pair of child’s rain boots. In fact, boots and footwear seem to be a recurring theme.
“They’re all my husband’s old work boots,” she laughs. “The grandkids come to play – it’s a magical place for them. They’re growing containers of peas and beans here too.”
The front yard features more of the same plots of colour and ground cover – deep purple hollyhocks, red poppies, bursts of lavender, yellow and white.
“My husband (a plumber) sits and watches me. I do all this for me, really – it’s therapy. My mind is always going, but it’s like meditation out here. I don’t think about anything when I’m working outside,” she said.
With such full, lush grounds to tend to, one might think Kelly would have all the latest chemical applications and high tech tools to maintain it. But not so – it’s strictly old school here – with plenty of time and elbow grease.
“I use a bit of Miracle Gro once in a while, but that’s it – no chemicals, no fertilizers, no irrigation system. I just stand out here with the hose,” Kelly said.
And it’s beyond a green thumb for this modest gardener – who has never entered a beautiful yard competition, despite encouragement from friends and neighbours. Inside plants likewise enjoy Kelly’s care, evidenced by the ceiling-height, 40-year-old Norfolk pine, as an example.
“I like roots,” she said. “The garden, the plants – they inspire my heart and soul.”
