Home & Garden 2025: Stephenson traces his love of gardening back to his mother
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
No matter what the occasion, whenever my wife, Chelsea, and I visit my parents in Collingwood, we always try to bring my mother, Kim, some flowers from our garden. It’s not about trying to recreate the sort of professional bouquet you’d find at a florist, but a straightforward way of showing appreciation for her heaping helpings of hospitality by gathering up a little of whatever we’ve got on the go.
The flowers for my mother are also a running report on what’s currently going on in our garden.
At the height of summer, Chelsea rinses out our biggest pickle jar and stuffs it full of a little bit of everything our garden has to offer: yellow yarrow stalks, hot pink azalea branches, towering lily stalks, mint, roses, zinnias, cosmos, geraniums, horseradish blossoms - as many varieties as can possibly fit! In the late fall, it’s a funky bunch of lavender and lunaria, with bolted mustard flowers in lieu of baby’s breath to spice things up.
But a few weeks ago, as Chelsea and I were preparing to head to Collingwood so we could celebrate my mother’s birthday, we were worried that we’d be arriving empty-handed - it was a little too early for our multitudinous bulbs to bloom - even that gloriously symmetrical mainstay of mother bulbs, the tulip, were a few days away from opening. It seemed, for a moment, that the best we’d be able to do on such an auspicious occasion was going to be a thimble full of wild violets.
But as they say, the yard provides. That morning, the first daffodil of the season reared its head, and the dusky buds of the hellebores we picked up at last year’s town-wide yard sale were just beginning to open. Odd bedfellows for sure, but sometimes contrast creates the best arrangements.
While searching for flowers for my mother, I realized that so many of the plants and features in my own garden are inspired by her own gardens, past and present. And so, I decided to explore my horticultural heritage by interviewing my mother, Kim Stephenson, about the hows, whats, wheres and whys of her own personal journey as a bona fide green thumb.
As it turns out, her favourite thing about gardening is… everything! “I like the results, I like the manual labour, I like planting, and digging, and I feel strong and healthy at the end of the day! And exhausted! And I sleep well!” she exclaimed. “It’s the fastest-growing leisure activity in North America, I think. I guess because the boomers are getting older,” she posited. “It’s like being a little farmer, in a way. I put in raspberries, I’ve got rhubarb, I always get tomato plants, but I keep those containerized.”
The first garden my mother remembers visiting was her great-grandmother’s. “When I was a little kid, I would go quite often on the weekends to stay with her - she lived just east of Broadview and just south of the Danforth. She lived in a little semi-detached townhouse, and she had a beautiful little garden. It was very tiny. It was smaller than our garden here in Collingwood, but she had lots of beautiful clumps of daisies all over the back garden - Shasta daisies. So I have fond memories of that. And she always had the bird feeder out in the garden.”
Daisies weren’t the first thing ever cultivated on that patch of land - the short avenue where my mother visited my great-great grandmother is named after Cubit Sparkhall Jr, who owned a sprawling farm that once stretched across a huge swath of the area now known as Toronto’s east end. Sparkhill grew produce and raised livestock, which he sold at nearby markets.
My mother grew up near Edwards Gardens - a public park in North York that has inspired her since she was a child. “We were there all the time! I like their gardens, and it’s a beautiful place to walk, and it has signs all over the place that say ‘please walk on the grass’. That’s just so refreshing,” she confided.
When my parents first moved into my childhood home in North York, my mother saw tremendous potential in the roughed-in yard surrounding her new home. “When we first moved in, you guys were at school, so that gave me lots of time to spend out in the garden,” she recalled. “It was pretty rough - they’d planted mint, which was growing up through the driveway, and it’s hard to control. And there was another white plant - I never knew what the name was, but it was a spreader as well…. There were beautiful peony plants - we had quite a few of them down the side of the yard, but that was really the only flowers that were in there.”
Over time, my mother eliminated the minty driveway problem. But she found that the sloping terrain of the property was standing in the way of her green dreams. “We finally paid the big bucks and got somebody to put in a nice retaining wall, because our property was actually on a slight incline,” she explained. “It made gardening difficult, because everything always kept falling forward. So when we had that retaining wall put in, it gave me a nice, flat surface to work on - much easier when you’re gardening.”
Once she leveled the playing field, my mother went wild with it. Kim isn’t one to pick and choose when it comes to what she adds to her garden - rather, she lets the plants and decor pick her, one at a time. And less is almost never more. “The more, the merrier, I say,” she said. “Every year, I spend many hours at the Loblaw’s Garden Centre - particularly at the end, when they’re closing up, and everything’s 80 per cent off. I’m there every day, rescuing plants that are maybe having a hard time. I’ve met a lot of people over there that are like-minded and have the same compulsion - if the stuff is on sale, you must buy it. I try to find places - that’s why I do so much container gardening, because I find beautiful things, and then I just have to bring them home and make a new home for them.”
It’s also become a Collingwood visit tradition to participate in a sort of spice trade, in which we exchange choice culinary plants for other choice culinary plants. My mother is a merchant of walking onion seedlings and a purveyor of recycled film canisters filled with dried marigold seeds. In exchange, we bring her the seed garlic that we acquire from 100 Mile Produce in Belgrave.
My mother’s garlic is looking good this year. “I’m very excited about the garlic! I went out to check it the other day, and it’s just coming up,” she explained. “I just put it in a great big pot, because I thought I might be like a squirrel and forget where I put it, and I saw at least a half a dozen of them coming up.”
She was also an early adopter of solar-powered garden lights. At first, my mother was just looking for an environmentally-friendly and cost-effective way to light her way in the dark, but she turned illuminating her yard into an artform. “I have very few lights that aren’t solar,” she explained. “It makes me feel good to know that I’m not using more electricity for something that I love that is maybe not a necessity.”
At family parties at my parents’ house in North York, there would always be a phenomenal feast, and then, as the sun went down and dessert was served, my mother’s lights would come on. The illuminated lanterns, the glowing orbs, the fluorescent flowers, one by one, they’d come to life, gradually altering the entire landscape from urban backyard to infinite fairyscape. “I just love the way they look! It just gives me such pleasure to look out and see them - I have to look at them every night,” she confessed. Her eventual goal - transatmospheric recognition. “I want it to be visible from space - from the space station. I want them to say, ‘oh, look, there’s Kim’s place!”
Even though that garden was her pride and joy, eventually my mother realized she was ready for a change. “I’ve found, as I was getting older, that maintaining it was getting a little more challenging. I find that moving up to Collingwood and having a garden the size that I have now is about all I want to handle.”
When they made the big move north, my mother’s lights went along for the ride. Every year, she adds a few more. It’s beginning to look a bit like a glow-in-the-dark minigolf course, in the best possible way. Her current garden may be a bit smaller than the one she had in North York, but it’s also a lot more straightforward. “I really liked the fact that it’s flat and easy for me to handle, and just a nice size. I’ve tried to put in more perennials - it was quite sparse when we first moved in,” she explained. But, just like her previous home, her place in Collingwood came with already established peonies. “They’re white peonies,” she disclosed. “And last year, they were absolutely incredible.”
While she obviously loves peonies, they are not my mother’s favourite flower - they’re just too fussy! “My mom had two or three beautiful, big peony plants when she and your grandfather moved to their place in Don Mills,” she recalled. “I love peonies, but it’s like - hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, oh, they’re gone! It’ll be cold, and they’ll take forever to come out, and then finally, when they’re about to bloom, you’ll get three days of 80 to 90 degree weather and they’re done. The peonies when they first moved in were beautiful - there were very few trees, and peonies love the sun. Then dad went and planted all those trees, and then it became a shade garden.”
While she couldn’t understand why at the time, her father’s decision to enclose their yard turned out to be a savvy one. During his career as an architect, my grandfather was susceptible to flashes of foresight. He predicted that the quiet neighbourhood they’d moved to would not stay quiet for long, and he was right. Don Mills has transformed dramatically since then, but the now mature birch trees and feathery Japanese maples insulate the property from the hustle and bustle of city traffic. Yard maintenance is also at a minimum; years ago, my grandfather installed a carpet of periwinkle and ivy that he believes completely devours the detritus of autumn every year. He insists that he hasn’t raked a leaf in decades.
So what flower does my mother love the most, if not the peony? That honour goes to delphiniums! “I love the colours of delphiniums - they remind me of butterfly wings. When you look at them, and you hold them a certain way in the light, they reflect different colours,” she explained.
My mother’s garden in Collingwood also contains a whole world of inorganic characters that only she believed in once. In my mother’s hands, a long-ignored garden gnome, abandoned by everybody else, receives a cheap and cheerful makeover, and eventually ends up as the star of his own corner of the patio, right underneath the hummingbird feeder.
And it’s not just Kim’s gnomes that have been getting a glow-up - when she’s not gardening, my mother loves painting. And she paints pretty much everything she can get her hands on - sometimes she uses traditional canvases, but more often than not she paints found objects - sticks, stones, passed-over thrift store oddities. She designs dot-covered birthday cards, paints landscapes on little rocks, and turns wine bottles into illuminated masterpieces along the lines of Van Gogh and Picasso.
One day, a chance encounter led my mother to merge her two passions together. She was walking along the edge of the bay, she saw that somebody had mounted pieces of art on several of the trees on the nature trail. “I just thought it was so cool! And then we went to a wedding down in Erie, Pennsylvania, and somebody had put mirrors up on their fences. And I thought, what a great idea that is! So then I thought, well, maybe I could put some of my own work up as well,” she recalled. “It lets me combine two passions.”
Since then, quite a few of the literally thousands of things my mother has painted have migrated into her garden. The tree outside their house is surrounded by piles of painted stones, each one containing its own little universe with its own internal logic. She hangs paintings from the back fence, makes coasters to match the patio umbrella. Everything that goes outside gets a few coats of sealer to keep it safe from the elements before finding its forever home.
Whenever I visit my mother’s garden, I always come away from it with a few painted rocks or seedlings, or both. This time, I came home with a renewed passion for the peony that’s been nodding listlessly in the corner of our property for the past three years. Perhaps this year, I will give it what it needs to thrive. And perhaps I will plant delphiniums, so I can bring some to my mother the next time we go to visit.