![\"The](\"http:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/field-overview-with-buttercups.jpg\")
<\/a>Buttercups turn the upper field at Glen Villa to yellow gold. Barely visible in the background is the top of a large sculpture called Bridge Ascending.<\/p><\/div>\n
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While I am enjoying the garden, I’m also evaluating it, both in light of what I’ve seen in other gardens and in terms of my own intentions and desires. Doing this takes concentrated effort — time to remember what I set out to accomplish and then time\u00a0to examine how well I’ve managed\u00a0it. Walking around the garden with my camera, taking photographs and notes, is one way to\u00a0assess progress. A harder approach is to write\u00a0up what I see, to dig out the old photos and to compare memory with reality through a suspicious\u00a0eye and a truthful pen.<\/p>\n
Over the next few weeks, I plan\u00a0to review different areas of the garden, assessing what I’ve done and what I still need to do. Today I am starting with a long-term project that combines plants, hardscaping and the exasperating\u00a0problem of deer that won’t go away.<\/p>\n
The Shrub Borders\u00a0in The Upper Field<\/h5>\n
Three\u00a0years\u00a0ago I designed fencing to keep deer away from shrub borders in the Asian Meadow and the Upper Field. I first\u00a0planted these borders in 2008\u00a0but nothing grew, thanks to constant nibbling.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>A hungry deer investigates what is behind the fence in the Asian Meadow.<\/p><\/div>\n
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I wanted shrubs in the Upper Field both for the colour they would add and to block the view.\u00a0As part of an old farm, the field\u00a0was wide open to the road and I wanted to\u00a0make\u00a0the space\u00a0feel more private. \u00a0Large sprawling shrubs seemed an obvious\u00a0answer.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Shrubs were not very effective in blocking the view; before the fencing went in, they never had a chance to grow.<\/p><\/div>\n
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Several years of disappointment convinced me that I needed fences. I didn’t want anything elaborate or showy\u00a0yet none of the standard hardware store options fit the bill. \u00a0So I designed something that I hoped would work — a combination of steel posts and ordinary cable. The shape of the fence was important. I didn’t want a square box or a curving edge, rather\u00a0I wanted something with straight lines that felt contemporary. Since the back side of the border faced the road, it had to be straight. To get away from a boxy rectangle, I made\u00a0the front edge zig and zag.<\/p>\n
<\/a>This side view of the fence shows how it zigs and zags down the hill. I didn’t want the fence to slope down the hill so the top bars step down to remain parallel with the ground.<\/p><\/div>\n
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I enlarged the bed significantly — my first effort was much too small for the space.\u00a0\u00a0The fence went\u00a0up and I began to plant intensively. By the end of June\u00a0last year, the borders in the upper field were beginning to look the way I envisioned them.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>A dark-toned barberry and Physocarpus ‘Gold Nugget’ provide a strong colour contrast.<\/p><\/div>\n
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This year they are looking even better. Finally the shrubs are growing and blooming as they should.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>This long distance photo gives some idea of the size of the area I’m working on. From a distance the fence disappears.<\/p><\/div>\n
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A lot goes on in the Upper Field. There’s a collection of nine\u00a0‘grandchildren’ maples, with two more\u00a0to be planted this year. There’s a large pond with ornamental grasses and my art installation that honours the original inhabitants of the land, the Abenaki Indians. In planting the shrub border, I wanted to acknowledge\u00a0the agricultural history of the site\u00a0but I didn’t want to plant corn or some other crop that might once have grow there. Instead, to retain its rural feel, I planted\u00a0varieties of native shrubs and other plants that are typically found in and around farmhouses in this area — lilac, viburnums, mock orange and different types of ninebark. I wanted colour even when shrubs aren’t blooming — and I wanted it to be visible\u00a0from far across the field — so I chose shrubs with\u00a0punchy\u00a0foliage contrasts.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Three colours of foliage appear at one end of the fenced border: the dark green of spruce, the chartreuse of Gold Nugget’ ninebark\u00a0and the coppery-orange\u00a0of \u00a0Coppertina ninebark.<\/p><\/div>\n
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I’m particularly pleased with the varieties of ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolious) <\/em>that I selected. After\u00a0I planted it last year, I thought I’d made a mistake choosing ‘Coppertina’ but this year’s blossom tells me otherwise. Yet I’m puzzled. What I read on line says that the blossom on\u00a0this variety is white; the blossom on my shrub is anything but.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Physocarpus opulifolia ‘Coppertina’ has a stunning red bloom as well as a more subtle tonal variation in the centre of new growth. So is it ‘Coppertina’ or some other mis-labeled variety?<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n At this stage the blossom looks more interesting than the creamy pink of another ninebark variety, Physocarpus opulifolious<\/em> ‘Diablo,’ but time will tell which variety performs better under my conditions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Physocarpus opulifolius ‘Diablo’ has deep wine foliage with pale pink blossoms.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n The cables on the fence are spaced evenly but not close enough to keep the deers’ noses out, so near the front of each border I planted shrubs the critters don’t like — barberry in different tones, and this lovely native shrub, Gillenia trifoliata<\/em>. (Does it have a new name now? Or a common name? I can’t remember.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Gillenia trifoliata is still tiny — I planted it last summer — but it will grow to form a good-sized mass.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Between the two fenced shrub borders in the Upper Field are groups of evergreens and large deer-resistant plants that add colour and interest throughout the growing season.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Giant fleeceflower (Persicaria polymorpha) performs extremely well here. It is a big shrub but the Upper Field is large enough to handle several large groups of it.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n The borders in the Upper Field now provide the colour I was looking for and screen the field from the road. They\u00a0need fine tuning but generally I’m pleased with the way they are developing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Before the shrubs began to grow, the road was far too visible. It used to be dirt. Once it was paved, traffic between the villages of North Hatley and Sainte-Catherine-de-Hatley (or Katevale as it used to be known) \u00a0increased dramatically.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n I am not pleased at all with the fenced areas in the Asian meadow on the hill above the house.<\/p>\n When I first began work on this area some ten or twelve years ago, it was flat and uninteresting. Still, it couldn’t be ignored because we passed it daily, every time we drove in or out of the house. There was some weedy grass with a few scattered lupins, some\u00a0large pine trees full of dead wood, and\u00a0a stream of sorts with no defined bank.<\/p>\n I started work in\u00a0the area by pruning the trees. Once the dead wood was gone, not much was left. In fact I had removed so much wood that some of the pines resembled\u00a0giant bonsai. Since my husband and I\u00a0lived in China many years ago, I decided that this would become the Asian Meadow.<\/p>\n I sculpted the bank of the stream, creating little waterfalls, and added a Chinese stone lantern beside the zig-zag plank bridge as well as Japanese and yellow flag iris.<\/p>\n This view of the Asian meadow is from October 2007. You can see the plank bridge, the stone lantern and some fish swimming in mid air above the stream. (I’ll tell you the story of the fish another time.) Near the fence in the background is\u00a0temporary fencing put up to protect the first shrubs I planted. It didn’t work.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n My husband wanted to add a picnic area, so we built a zig-zagging fence \u00a0inset with\u00a0Chinese tiles to separate the picnic spot\u00a0from the meadow as a whole.<\/p>\n This winter view shows the shape of the fence inset with Chinese tiles. It\u00a0zig-zags along the brow of the hill through masses of ferns that grow there naturally.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n To screen the picnic area from the drive, I added trees and shrubs — and despite choosing plants that were said to be deer resistant, the deer decided otherwise. After trying temporary solutions for several years, I finally concluded that fencing was the only answer. And based on the work done the previous autumn in the Upper Field, choosing materials for\u00a0the fence was easy.<\/p>\n Using the same steel posts and cables, I focused on\u00a0the shape of the fences, making that\u00a0the dominant feature rather than something incidental. The Chinese tiles in the nearby fence suggested squares set on an angle; the squares morphed into diamond-shaped cages.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The tiles follow traditional Chinese designs. Some have good luck symbols in the centre, this one does not. On the left of the photo is a stake, part of \u00a0a temporary fence around a shrub.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n To make maintenance as easy as possible, I connected several cages to form a single unit, adding a door for access.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This photo from last summer shows the shape of the cages, now set amidst a meadow full of wildflowers.There are three sets of cages, each with a single section that is a door. The door for this cage is on the short section on the right.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Inside the cages I planted more Physocarpus<\/em> ‘Diablo’ plus other shrubs that could tolerate deeper shade. I added tulips for spring bloom and planted allium inside and outside the cages, thinking their purple blooms\u00a0would add spots of colour early in the season as well as a touch of humour — the idea of caging a plant that deer don’t\u00a0eat made me chuckle. Goodness knows why.<\/p>\n Last summer the shrubs were still small and looked rather pathetic, but the alliums bloomed well.<\/p>\n The sculpture in the background is called Bridge Ascending. You can read more about it on my website, Site and Insight.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n This year there is nothing. No shrubs worth showing, no alliums at all. Just empty\u00a0cages protecting nothing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>Deer Fencing in the Asian Meadow:<\/h5>\n
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