Brushstrokes of Giverny on Vancouver Island

There are gardens, and then there are gardens… farms and farms… nurseries and nurseries… some purely pragmatic, some crassly commercial, some mundane and monocropped. And then, there are gardens and farms and nurseries in which horticulture transcends the merely functional to become an intricate ecology of form, interdependence, efficiency and beauty—an ever-changing kaleidoscope of life—the thinking gardener’s grail, perhaps?

While watching Monty Don’s one Sunday afternoon, I was struck by his description of Claude Monet’s journey as a gardener: “Monet found this old cider farm in the village of Giverny in the spring of 1883, when he was looking for a home for