Style at Home: In your book, you recount how a green onion sandwich inspired your gardening journey. Tell us more.
Liz Primeau: My agent was the first to ask what started me down the road to gardening. It was like a door opened, bringing back a flood of memories. I was transported to my childhood in Winnipeg: I saw me and my mom sneaking out into the garden at dusk to steal green onions. I felt the bond between us. There was also taste, smell and colour in that memory. My whole childhood was associated with the outdoors – exploring and roaming. My whole life, really, depends on a love of nature.
S@H: There’s a quote in your book about all nature being a garden....
LP: Yes. Horace Walpole, an 18th-century writer, said that landscape designer William Kent "leaped the fence and saw all nature was a garden." Kent and Lancelot "Capability" Brown started the highly influential natural landscape movement of the 18th century. They realized you didn’t need the formal, controlled gardens prevalent among the French nobility. They were trying to return gardens to nature. (Although they also created vistas of huge lawns and really influenced our love of front lawns.) I truly believe that all nature is a garden, and a garden is nature – your little microcosm of the natural world. I mean, I could sit outside for hours watching the ants and learning about their world.
S@H: In your book, you wrote about young gardeners wanting instant gratification. That’s antithetical to growing a garden, isn’t it?
LP: Wanting lots of colour right now is a youthful desire that's very normal when you're young. But gardening helps teach you patience – if you’re listening and willing to be open to learning that lesson. You can't make plants grow any faster, so you have to be willing to go with the flow and to let go of those things you can't control. With a garden, you experience various levels of appreciation and understanding as you move through your life.
S@H: You’re candid about suffering from anxiety at one stage in your life. How did your garden help heal you?
LP: At one point, I had trouble going out of the house. The garden helped calm me down. Connecting to the earth and reconnecting to memories of warm summer afternoons as a child grounded me – quite literally.
S@H: Lately, there has been a movement toward heritage plants. Is that something you support?
LP: The obsession with heritage plants is a fashion, but a healthy one. In the '80s, we became fanatics about our gardens, relying on chemicals to achieve a level of perfectionism. In the '90s, we became more aware of the
environment and the potential harm from pesticides.
S@H: What foils most gardens and gardeners?
LP: The desire to create a garden that looks better than everyone else's. That competitiveness is selfish and is the wrong path. The true purpose of a garden is to make yourself happy and, by extension, others, too.
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