“The Side Gardener”
Rosie shared how she transformed a little patch of land at the side of her home into a lush garden and her favourite ways to use the vegetables you can grow in your own backyard.
Rosie founded the bakery and gourmet food business Butter Baked Goods, which she ran for fourteen successful years.
She sold Butter Baked Goods in 2021 when she returned to her original career as an interior designer whose work has been featured in publications internationally. This allows her just enough time to keep gardening on the side.
Rosie lives in Vancouver with her husband, Paul, her old chihuahua, Pickle. She had chickens, but that’s a long story…
(Put your mouse over the slide, and arrows will appear bottom left)
wvgc-presentation4-The first few images are the house when we purchased it in 2006. I had been on the hunt for a very specific style of home, ideally one on one level with direct or easy access to the outdoors. Ultimately I wanted to create a home that highlighted an indoor/outdoor lifestyle and I was able to achieve this by enclosing the front yard with a 4’ concrete wall and installing large sliding glass doors across the front of the house. In keeping with the more modern design of the house, I planted a lot of bamboo, grasses, and boxwood planters.
I originally didn’t plan to develop the backyard, as I assumed we would do all of our entertaining and outdoor living off the front of the house. But I had a change of heart when I considered how the bedrooms overlooked the property.
Our lot is quite large, 80’x165’, and the back had never been looked after. It was a neglected woodland, punctuated with several enormous cedar trees. I designed a series of paths and large beds around the yard, with the idea of giving the space some direction. At the time the East facing yard was quite shady.
In an effort to keep the maintenance as easy as possible, I chose to plant a lot of ferns, hosts, hydrangea, grasses, etc. Given that our lot has a steep grade down into the back, the lower level of our home is at ground level so I was able to install the same large sliding glass doors off the family room and continue that desired indoor/outdoor situation I had created off the front.
The next few images demonstrate the finished renovation of both the front and back of the house, and include a feature that Australian Vogue Living did on our garden.
In 2007, in addition to being an interior designer, I also opened my bakery, Butter Baked Goods. Needless to say… the garden took a back seat during that period and I was very grateful that I had chosen to plant with simple and low maintenance material.
Over that same period my husband and I were fortunate to travel quite a bit and we found ourselves returning to England again and again. I fell in love with the English countryside and the many cottage-style gardens we visited and envisioned one day creating that same beauty in my own garden.
In 2020 Covid struck and we decided to use this time to develop an unused piece of land on the South side of our home into a vegetable and cutting flower garden. The land was levelled and topped with birdseye pea gravel, new fencing and planter boxes were built, and drip irrigation was installed in all the beds and pots. I filled the raised beds with a variety of vegetables, including heirloom tomatoes, English peas, French radish, spinach, arugula, butter lettuce and many herbs.
The surrounding pots, and beds were filled with all my favourite flowers… old English roses, Erigeron, nepeta, dahlias, salvia, chocolate cosmos, pansies, foxglove, sweet peas and hollyhocks. We even decided to add chickens to the mix and had a lovely coop built at the back of the garden.
Due to its protected location and a lot of love and attention, the side garden thrived and quickly proved to be an enormous success. Canadian House and Home magazine did a wonderful feature on the garden and I opened the garden to many clubs to tour, including the Hardy Plant Group, Vancouver Garden Club and UBC FOGs.
To allow me to continue on my gardening journey and grow more interesting varieties from seed, I purchased a greenhouse from BC Greenhouse and had it built over one of the existing beds int the backyard. I made sure to have my arborist, Mike Safronick of YVR Tree Care, cut back and limb many of the trees to provide ample sunlight for the greenhouse and all the new perennials I was growing.
The last piece of the puzzle for me was having the patios and surrounding walls resurfaced in blue stone and basalt, as I felt these materials were much more in keeping with the overall feel and look of the new garden.
In 2022 I was very fortunate to be able to work with Andrew Montgomery, a revered English photographer, who flew to Canada to photograph my newest book, The Side Gardener, Recipes and Notes from My Garden.