Cover up plants, especially those in frost-prone areas.
Temperatures are expected to drop to near the freezing mark overnight into early Saturday morning.
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I started the garden purely for my own pleasure and satisfaction, growing, experimenting, and always messing around with plants, David Hobson writes.
David Hobson reflects on decades of gardening, sharing how a humble backyard plot has brought joy, growth, and inspiration. Hobson’s garden will be featured in “Ageless Gardens” Season 5 on VisionTV, airing May 5.
My first experiences with gardening, other than playing in mud as a child or picking potatoes at an early age, was reluctantly helping my dad build pathways in his garden. But it was a summer job in my teens when I formed a closer relationship with plants. I worked long days weeding flower beds at the home of a person with the exploitative skills of a Dickensian industrialist. Many decades later, I’m still weeding flower beds and not getting paid for it, but I love it.
I’ve not always had a garden to toil in and my current one is my third and by far the oldest. I began it 40 years ago and as I like to say, I didn’t finish it all on the first weekend. I started the garden purely for my own pleasure and satisfaction, growing, experimenting, and always messing around with plants. I didn’t begin with a plan, only a series of ideas as the garden evolved, often relying on serendipity to suggest features. It’s always been a three R garden — reduce, reuse, recycle. I scavenged materials like bricks for pathways, grew plants from seed, revived others from sale racks. Every spring I’d fill my share of carts at garden centres and over the years spent a small fortune on rare plants (lost the receipts in the shed).
The garden has aged and matured as has this gardener, aged but maybe not completely matured, as I’m sometimes told. My garden has given me a lot of pleasure and taught me much, and I’ve had the pleasure of writing about it for the last 25 years. I like to think there may be readers from those early days still with me. Many have visited each summer when I’ve opened the gate for visitors while others visualized how it looks, perhaps thinking it’s a huge estate when in fact it’s a small suburban backyard.
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And yet someone, somewhere suggested that my small plot might be worthy of the big screen — TV, that is, not the movie theatre. I wrote of this back in the summer of 2023 when I related how I was visited by Ian Toews of Ageless Gardens Productions. The company produces a series of short films for VisionTV that feature unique gardens across Canada and introduce the people who create them.
And now, just in time to inspire us, Season 5 of “Ageless Gardens” will premiere on May 5 at 9 p.m. ET. The episodes will be broadcast on cable television on the VisionTV station. For those without cable, VisionTV will stream the shows for free the following day on its website, . Watch them all and see me and my garden in Episode 3 on May 19th. For the series trailer, episode synopses, and gallery photos see all on .
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As I wrote in my , I hope I fulfilled my role, showing that a garden engrosses and inspires, ever-changing as the years and seasons pass while we age together, and hope to continue for many more, preferably without an aching back.
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DH
David Hobson is a Waterloo-based writer and a freelance contributor for the Record.
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