Yes, it’s mid January but in late March, as the days start to get longer and the first signs of spring appear, I will be talking at the Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG). Last spring, I had participated in the TBG annual garden tour, which featured the gardens of Riverdale, here in Toronto. It was during this event that I began to reveal to the participants a little more of two other landscapes that I am deeply connected to. These three, very different landscapes, provide a summary of the many ways we all connect to the natural world around us.

This talk is a direct result of the conversations we had about nature and the important role it plays in our daily lives, whether it be a garden we tend every day, a street tree we pass on our way to work, or a landscape we observe on a hike through the wilderness or from a speeding car.

THE PRUNED LANDSCAPE – My garden in Toronto’s Riverdale Neighbourhood

In this section of the talk, I will discuss the creation of my own backyard planting in Toronto. This small backyard garden, that I designed 30 years ago, is pruned to keep its growth in check, and appears much larger than it really is.

It was designed to be seen from my second-floor home office window and was inspired by the drawings of interlocking circles created by architect, Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1950’s.

Seen from above, this garden becomes a layered composition of circles from the larger clumps of trees and shrubs to the smallest of tabletop succulents.

THE TANGLED LANDSCAPE – My parent’s garden on the shores of Rice Lake, Ontario

I’ve witnessed and maintained this cottage garden for fifty years as it has slowly transformed from a large, carefully tended vegetable patch, into a low maintenance perennial garden. Now, as my parents have aged into their eighties, it has transformed again into an overgrown tangle of plants which is a mixture of native and introduced perennial specimens.

This unstructured riot of colour is inspired by one of my favourite Group of Seven paintings entitled, The Tangled Garden by J.E.H. McDonald.

THE WILD LANDSCAPE – A nature preserve I’m creating near Dorset, Ontario.

The last landscape in this talk isn’t really a garden at all but something more complex, exhibiting many features that I’ve borrowed from some of the world’s most famous gardens. Over the last 30 years I’ve assembled this 200-acre tract of forests, lakes and rivers near Dorset, Ontario. And while I have created the trails and sculptural elements to help hikers navigate the property, it is essentially an untended wilderness and changes with the processes of nature.

Beavers manipulate the flow of water throughout the property with their dams. Trees tumble, leaving openings in the tree canopy that fill the landscape with light, bringing new life to the forest floor. Here, nature reigns supreme, and the paths I’m creating merely provide the means to explore this ever-changing wilderness.

The inspiration for this landscape park is nature itself. The drawings I have created to depict the various buildings, sculptures, and earthworks that I have designed for the property have been informed by the land and inspired by my travels to gardens throughout the world.

To introduce the Dorset Project, I will reveal the architectural drawings that I created to describe the overall master plan, with the interpretive center/cottage as the focus of this wilderness park. At this point the project exists, except for the oval clearing and some paths I’ve carved throughout the wilderness, as a “vision” of the place I want to eventually construct.

As I was moving through the design of this project four years ago, I began to realize that the initial drawings that I was creating were merely descriptive. I became aware at that time that they were not revealing the tone of the feelings I had imagined my guests would experience at the property.

Then on March 15th, 2020, I underwent a pandemic shift (as I think we all did), as I began creating drawings which expressed the way I feel emotionally about this landscape.

In these drawings, the objects I’ve designed are revealed under the cover of darkness through naturally occurring and manmade sources of light. In describing the park, the audience will be brought along on a journey through the forest, where I will present my charcoal illustrations, as well as photographs that I’ve taken at the property. Here, the talk is broken down to describe the three distinct realms that were created to help me organize the walks on the property.

Since this talk is directed at an audience interested in gardens, I will reveal throughout the presentation the garden elements that were the inspiration for my designs. These span the history of gardens from the 15th century grottos and waterworks of Villa d’Este in Italy, to the methods that 18th Century designers such as Capability Brown took to recreate English the landscapes of forest and fields in the image of the landscape paintings of Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin.

Each of these references bring the landscape of The Dorset Project into a greater conversation about the human condition and the importance of nature to nurture our spiritual and physical health, whether it be pruned with the intimate scale of a bonsai tree or left alone to fulfill its biological destiny.

I’ve learned from the three landscapes that I’m presenting in the talk, that each fulfills a different role in helping me to connect to the natural world. I’m sure you have your own particular way to engage nature but you may find inspiration in these three, very distinctive landscapes.

I hope you can join me on Thursday March 28th at 7:00pm at the Toronto Botanical Garden for this presentation. Tickets for Pruned, Tangled and Wild can be purchased by following this link to the Toronto Botanical Garden Website.