When did the cottage become work?

Raspberry plants produce the most delicious fruit and the most painful headaches.

I was standing on the patio of a new client’s cottage the other week. They’d landscaped the building with beautiful tiers of stones that dropped towards the lake and its natural shoreline. It was well designed and executed – they’d clearly got one of Haliburton’s top-notch landscapers to do the job.

But something was wrong. Mainly the raspberries.

My clients sighed and gestured at the area beyond the patio. The landscaping had run away from them.
When you get to visit the cottage only on weekends, this can happen. The most well-executed landscaping project can go wrong when you don’t have time to take care of it.

And when that happens, a weekend away turns into a task list instead of a boat ride. Exactly the opposite of what’s meant to happen.

The future is written

This happens with the best of intentions and it starts on the drawing board.

Any landscaping project comes with a contract with the future. While the tiers of stones solve a problem, they also create a commitment of maintenance.

We don’t want to think about that. Once the crews have gone, we’re delighted with the results. The cottage is finished, the lake is accessible. Everything is new and perfect.

But like most things – your car, your home, your puppy (looking at you, Rufus) – a shiny or fluffy new thing is just the beginning.

With landscaping, that looks like weeds. Nature loves to fill a vacuum, so the new topsoil you added soon gets filled with plants. This is ecological succession: some plants are ideally suited to colonizing disturbed ground, and those plants are the ones we consider the most annoying. Like dandelions and raspberries.

A future with these plants was written the day we signed the contract with the landscaper.

So we’re set up with a choice where each option is as bad as the next. We can spend our weekends pulling raspberries and adding mulch, or we can let it all run riot and feel sick and guilty.

Never done

We want to build the ideal cottage with its ideal landscaping and then we want to be done.

But nature is never done. It’s always in the process of moving from the past into the future. It’s always growing and it’s always dying. Which means more leaves and more dead stems, more new plants in places you thought they’d never grow.

The problem lies when we don’t accept this, when we kid ourselves that nature will sit back and behave just how we want it.

What if instead we work with it? I’m not saying we allow nature to run riot – although that is an option… those raspberries will be replaced by shrubs and the whole thing will be forest again.

Instead I’m saying we follow the land’s direction from the beginning. We recognize that if we create landscaping with bare soil, that soil will need to be covered, so why not cover it with something whose niche is to solve your problem without you needing hours with a spade – something less annoying than raspberries.

I know what’s going to happen here. The raspberries will be gone and in their space will be a dense planting of swaying grasses that turn bronze at Labour Day, mountain mints that host scores of pollinators, and the scented leaves of flowering bergamots.

And my clients will stop having to bring a trowel when they walk to the lake.