![\"The](\"http:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/untitled-8.jpg\")
<\/a>This old postcard shows the circular wall that was in\u00a0\u00a0front of the hotel. Glen Villa Inn was built in 1902 and burned down in 1909.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
A close-up of the same image shows a young woman in white sitting on the circular wall, while other hotel guests sit in chairs on the lawn or gather nearby.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/a>Was it obligatory for ladies to wear white in those days? The open fields on the hillside in the distance are now covered with trees, part of a forest area conserved in perpetuity.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
How could I reflect the hotel’s history in plants? I tried\u00a0to figure out what was planted in the circle\u00a0originally but the image was too fuzzy to tell. Another postcard\u00a0showing a planter on the lawn suggested an alternate\u00a0approach. But did I really want a structure like that standing over the wall with vines twining up it?<\/p>\n
<\/a>Hotel guests promenade along the drive and up to the waterfall. The building in the background is the club house for the hotel’s 9-hole golf course.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
I went back to sketching and dreaming.<\/p>\n
I’m an (occasionally) organized person. In a file marked Yin\/Yang I came across a\u00a0sketch of possible design ideas and plant possibilities. Since the hotel was a late Victorian construction, I considered using flowers\u00a0that Victorians would have loved. \u00a0Victorian exotica, I called\u00a0them.\u00a0I thought of arranging plants of different colours like slices of pie, or bands of colour set one inside the next like a child’s stacking toy, or some variation on the horticultural clocks that municipalities used to plant. I played around with ideas about\u00a0height and\u00a0colour, wondering how the circle would look if the plants became \u00a0taller as they moved towards the centre or the colour became more intense.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/a>My sketches show several ideas that were far too complicated to execute. \u00a0I shudder to think of the maintenance for any one of them!<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
The lack of reality in my dreaming reflected my level of inexperience: I thought I could plant anything I could imagine, and could keep it looking as orderly as a drawing. I knew far less\u00a0about plants than I thought I did. How otherwise could I have listed Equisetum as a possibility? \u00a0Did I think the\u00a0soil in the circle, often baked dry, would keep it from invading nearby damp ground?<\/p>\n
An asterisk beside one drawing, my rough sketch\u00a0of a yin and yang, indicates that it was the design I chose. More than forty years ago, during the Cultural Revolution, my husband and I lived in China, and using the yin yang symbol was a way to recognize that part of our family\u00a0history. Plus it was a simple\u00a0design, much easier to implement than any of the more complicated ideas I had drawn.<\/p>\n
My friend Myke says he suggested the yin and yang design, and that may be true. He definitely suggested the plants I used the first year, annuals that emphasized the idea of opposition that is intrinsic to the Taoist philosophy\u00a0behind the design.\u00a0\u00a0I followed his advice and for some years used \u00a0taller and shorter plants in hot and cold colours, Celosia ‘New Look Red’ and silvery Dusty Miller.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/a>This photo from 2007 shows the colour contrast along with a crumbling wall held together with self-seeded rock plants.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
A few\u00a0years later, I installed\u00a0a stainless steel strip to separate the two colours and\u00a0clarify the design. To make\u00a0it resemble the Taijitu symbol more completely, I added\u00a0a small steel circle inside each half with\u00a0plants of the opposite colour.\u00a0Standing on top of the nearby\u00a0stone wall, the yin yang shape was clear. But by the end of the summer, the bit of red on the silver side looked very odd indeed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/a>I was standing on top of the foundation wall of the hotel when I took this photo. The straight asphalt path beyond the circular wall\u00a0led from the lake \u00a0to the front door of the hotel.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
After a few years, I got tired of planting the space every year\u00a0and began looking\u00a0for\u00a0perennials that could do the job. I chose blue fescue (Festuca glauca<\/em>) and red brick mulch — an unusual combination that I knew many people would question\u00a0but one that suited my purpose. I liked the additional point of contrast, one side alive and growing, swaying in the breeze, the other side just sitting there, doing nothing. And since the wall was crumbling more every year, I added a bluestone coping to hold it together and to give the circle a cleaner, more contemporary look.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I wanted the plants to be evenly spaced to emphasize order and\u00a0modernity. Creating straight lines inside a circle proved impossible.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Do you know that garden saying, that the first year a plant sleeps, the second year it creeps, the third year it leaps?\u00a0The Festuca<\/em> didn\u2019t wait for year three. It exploded. Early in the second summer it looked bushier than the highbush cranberries had ever been, although considerably shorter.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Overgrown doesn’t begin to describe the fescue.And it got worse as the summer went on!<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n The solution to the exuberant growth\u00a0seemed simple: divide every clump and then\u00a0keep the clumps buzz cut, short front and sides.\u00a0\u00a0Which I did. \u00a0For a year things looked ok. Not great, but not too bad. I thought perhaps I’d cut the fescue back too severely, so I let it grow. But by mid-way through last summer, it became\u00a0obvious. \u00a0Nothing was working. For whatever reasons (surely not because I’d fallen behind on the weeding) the\u00a0grasses weren’t growing. The mulch looked tired and there was no contrast in height from one side to the other.\u00a0The effect I was going for just wasn’t there.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At some point I realized that the small circle of steel was too small so I made it larger. The weeds between the clumps of grass got larger without my help.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n This year I’ve changed things\u00a0yet again. Last\u00a0week I dug up the few remaining clumps of grass and planted Artemisia<\/em> ‘Silver Mound.’ I may\u00a0need to trim the clumps to keep the them\u00a0plump and round, but\u00a0I hope that once a year will be enough. (Can anyone confirm this?) \u00a0The red brick mulch remains — minus the yellow sedum that I will continue to pull out in handfuls — but if it continues to look tired, I will spray paint it a brighter red.<\/p>\n I need to trim the tree branch on the right and add some silvery-grey gravel as mulch around the Silver Mound Artemisia. Then this iteration of the Yin\/Yang will be finished.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n To add more contrast in height I’ve put a tall tree in the ‘dot’ on the silver side. Not a regular tree but the top of a dead one that I’ve painted red.\u00a0It is sharp and spiky and contrasts well with the soft foliage of the Artemesia<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>