Working with nature in your cottage garden

Encouraging the waxwings to visit and increasing your hammock time are two persuasive arguments in favour of the naturalized garden, but there’s another that makes great sense at the cottage: conserving water use and quality.

By Lorraine Johnson

In practical gardening terms, working with nature comes down to a few principles. The most important is that the garden is based on a natural habitat model: forest, meadow, or wetland. Ideally, the plants are likewise ones found in that natural habitat, already adapted to its particular conditions. And where there’s habitat, there’s wildlife. As Bill Dickinson, chair of the Natural Heritage Committee of the Muskoka Heritage Foundation (MHF), a non-profit, charitable organization devoted to protecting Muskoka’s watersheds and landscapes, puts it, “By naturalizing your cottage property, you’re creating habitat that will encourage birds, butterflies, and other wildlife. You’re increasing biodiversity. And at the same time, you’re reducing the amount of maintenance you need to do.” Rebecca Willison, an intern at MHF, concurs: “People come to their cottages to vacation. Who wants to spend their time doing the same things they do in the city, like mowing lawns?”

The naturalistic garden is one that, in effect, sustains itself – if not totally (it is still a garden, after all), then certainly more than the manicured landscapes found in urban areas or, increasingly, along cottage waterfronts. That’s why this kind of gardening makes so much more sense at the cottage – it leaves you time to go for a paddle around the bay, or stretch out on the deck with a paperback, or just sit amid the flowers with a gin and tonic, enjoying the fruits of your labour.

Purple coneflower thrives in drought.

Encouraging the waxwings to visit and upping your hammock time are two persuasive arguments in favour of the naturalized garden, but there’s another that makes great sense at the cottage: conserving water use and quality. Because native species have evolved over thousands of years in a particular place, they’re adapted to the conditions at hand, and you won’t need to do much supplementary watering or use harmful pesticides or fertilizers that inevitably end up in the lake.

Although naturalistic cottage gardens share a conservation ethic, the gardens themselves can vary widely in form. Some people, such as Bill Gray, whose cottage is on Lake Joseph in Muskoka, start out small, adding natives gradually to an established garden bed. In Gray’s case, the garden is very well established – his family began it in the 1890s – and the bed that he’s adapting is the vegetable patch. “I’m including more and more native flowers for the simple reason that, because they’re native, they’re less work,” he says. Some gardeners whose cottage properties consist of bald rock may plant in containers to deal with the no-soil situation. There are those who let seeds rain in from the surrounding wild areas (an approach that requires patience and an eye for spotting weeds at an early stage), and others, like Lake Simcoe cottager Lynne Pringle, who take a more active approach, moving soil and rocks and buying dozens of seedlings from local nurseries. Pringle is gradually replacing the lawn running down to her shore with beds of native wildflowers and “the most beautiful rocks I’ve ever seen,” which she discovered buried beneath the turf.

Whatever gardening method you choose, be forewarned: All is not rosy contemplation from the deck chair. The challenges of gardening at the cottage are the same as those encountered by gardeners everywhere – only more so. Extreme conditions tend to be the norm: water tables close to the soil surface, or the soil itself only a thin layer barely covering rock, or the soil almost pure sand with instant drainage. The extreme dryness of weeks-long droughts has become a regular summer problem across the province, and when rain comes, it’s often a gale-force storm rolling off the lake. Even the wildlife in cottage country seems more extreme, with gardeners having to contend not just with raccoons, rabbits, and groundhogs but also deer, bears, and porcupines.

Such challenges might wilt your garden dreams (along with your plants), but again, your guide is all around you: Look to the wild landscape, where plants survive the challenges nature throws out. How, for example, do forest plants cope with weeks of no rain? Through the protection offered by a thick layer of dead leaves. What does the naturalistic gardener learn from this? The importance of a moisture-conserving layer of mulch. Thin soils? The necessity of planting species with shallow root systems. Water-logged soils? The value of choosing moisture-loving wetland natives. Instant drainage and dry conditions from sandy soils? The need to plant drought-tolerant species. Incursions by creatures? The sense of planting a lot of species so the garden functions as a system that doesn’t “collapse” when animals pluck out their favourite plants.

All those things that seem like challenges are, in fact, crucial information sources that can lead to a better understanding of your habitat’s inclinations, which in turn leads to garden success.

More and more gardeners are embracing that possibility for success. Naturalized gardening, having taken off in cities across the country, now has a toehold in Ontario cottage country – a rare instance of an urban habit actually adding something positive to the cottage experience! “There is definitely a growth in interest in native-plant landscaping at the cottage,” says Rick Wright of Brackenrig Landscaping in Port Carling, Ont. “Maybe it started off as somewhat of a ‘plant-of-the-month’-type thing, but it’s become a movement.”

If all this hasn’t quite sold you on the virtues of the natural cottage garden, there’s one more irrefutable argument: Quite simply, native plants are beautiful. 

Lorraine Johnson is the author of numerous books on native plant gardening, including 100 Easy-to-Grow Native Plants, and The New Ontario Naturalized Garden. Her most recent book is a collection of essays, The Natural Treasures of Carolinian Canada, which she edited. Lorraine lives in Toronto and depends on the kindness of cottage-owning friends for her summer visits to Georgian Bay and the Kawarthas.

Repurposed from the four-part series, The Natural Garden by Lorraine Johnson in the April/May 2003 issue of Cottage Life magazine

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