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"I wanted our garden to be part of our living space - to provide food for the body and the soul, to offer sunny spots to sit on a cool day and shady spots for dinner on a hot afternoon, places for entertaining but informal enough to still be rough around the edges," Carol Martin explains.
"We will always have a garden too big to maintain tidily with our busy schedules and all the higher-priority nursery work - and all of this with no chemicals (as our food crops were interplanted with the roses) and with as little grass left to mow as possible.
"Feeding the family is a necessity but to make a garden part of our living space, to create a space filled with rich textures and colours is a joy. I want our garden to be beautiful and functional year-round."
Annuals reseed everywhere in Carol's garden; dill, kale and redleaved spinach poke up through the lettuce while scarlet runner beans bedeck the outhouse. "I found spots for 'heritage plants' rustled or borrowed from old homestead gardens around the island, including a number of old Hornby roses," Carol explains. "Our collection grew; many started from cuttings from friends' roses. Rambling roses now cover most of our extensive deer fence and gateways."
Knowing it takes years to build up a good soil base and have fruit-producing trees, the first thing Carol Martin and Tony Quin did when they bought five acres on Hornby Island in the early '70s was to surround a large area with tall cedar rail and fish net deer fence.
They turned the soil over in the fall, covered it with a deep layer of seaweed, planted twenty-odd old varieties of fruit trees along the north side and voila - a huge garden even before the house was built.
The Martin/Quin garden has grown and evolved from a pasture, which not too many years earlier was carved out of the forest. Level but uneven, this garden was fertile even before being built up with yards of local seaweed and manure. In those days blackberries surrounded the cleared area, ready to move in after the sheep left, and rushes escaping from the nearby wetland sprung up in low spots. Fir and alder trees constantly tried to return the forest. The worst to contend with was bracken fern with its travelling root system. But the garden has evolved.
Carol and Tony's goal is to let the garden complete its evolution into an informal, carefree place filled with roses needed for their propagation nursery and display garden.
"We would like to keep the 'cottage garden' character, with hundreds of bush and rambling roses interspersed with perennials and large fruit trees," Carol says.
"Tony and I grow roses, roses and more roses, nearly 500 different varieties. And we also grow sheep - on the outside of the garden fence - to keep the ever-invading West Coast BC 'jungle' from creeping back in. A few ducks are on slug duty in the surrounding pasture but never seem able to keep ahead of the parade from the forest into the garden."
Since becoming licensed propagators of David Austin English roses, Carol and Tony must find increasingly more room for roses, replacing vegetables and cut flowers, pushing even the sheep (and hopefully the slugs) further into the forest - or onto the neighbour's abandoned pastures (with their blessing, of course). Enough room must be found for nearly 200 more roses.
Interesting spaces around this garden include rambler-covered deer fences and garden gates draped with clematis, grapes that cover arbours before climbing up onto the older cedar house, remnants of old pasture rail fences now defining the backs of rose beds, year-round textures and colours and a new "garden kitchen" with a huge skylight reaching right out into the garden even on stormy or frosty days.
One problem this couple has had to contend with is low spots and a high water table in the rainy season (roses prefer not to sit long with wet feet). Building up the soil level with raised beds or boxes built from old cedar planks provided the solution.
"As we live and work in the space surrounding our home, we, like sheep and deer, make paths all over, from the house to the front gate, to the garden, to the woodshed, the barn, the forest and the neighbours. In the spaces between these paths, or alongside, we plant - we make beds for plants. Lines curve, following the natural flow of the paths, around obstacles and disappear into different 'rooms'of the garden. Arbours divide one use from another and create special spaces beyond."
This winter Martin and Quin plan to start work on an outdoor sitting and eating area just outside of the sliding doors of their roomy, bright, new farm kitchen.
"As Tony and I love found, old or recycled materials, we plan to use a mixture of large flagstones from the beach, old bricks, cobblestone-like pebbles, cedar boards and sand," explains Carol. "Also, Tony would really like to build a natural-looking pond for fish nearby - surrounded by roses, of course.
"I used to worry about planting only flowers which fit a particular colour scheme, pulling out 'volunteer' calendulas or poppies where their colours clashed with my 'designer' roses. Then I remembered what my grandmother said about her flower choices. 'If the posies bloom together, they go together.' Mind you, this was before so many brilliant but clashing shades of hybridized flowers came into being!
"I love picking huge bouquets of flowers in myriad colours - whatever happens to be blooming at same time in the garden."
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