When the landscape you inherit isn’t yours

I’ve seen this many times. Between the cottage and the lake, there’s a lawn. It slopes gently down to the water, where there’s a sandy beach or a rocky wall.

Because it’s a lawn, the cottage owner mows it every other week. A Saturday morning ritual, just like back home.

This lawn was here from the beginning. They inherited it when they bought the cottage.
For many cottage owners I meet, this is where the discomfort begins. Because they look around and the rest of the land isn’t like this.

The gravel road down to the cottage is surrounded by maple and beech. Brown leaves cover the ground in fall, ferns bring hope in spring.

And by the causeway is a wetland: cattails, irises, rivers of grass that are half land, half lake.
And the lake itself – calm on a misty morning, grey and angry in a storm. Behaving just like a lake behaves.

And the lawn? It looks like it came from the GTA.

Because it did.

Hard edges

Shorelines are my favourite part of the Highlands. They’re fed by the lake and by the land. They’re the most ecologically productive part of our environment.

They soften the waves of the lake, protecting the shoreline. And they filter excessive nutrients from the land, protecting the water.

And as the years go on, they thicken. Sedges, irises, dogwoods, willows. Early green in spring, blue and purple in summer, yellow in fall. And then stems and branches that persist under the snow, their buds promising another season.

A lawn interrupts this. A hard edge replaces a fuzzy line. Shallow roots instead of deep; compacted ground with plants that are never allowed to grow.

Rain runs across it instead of through it. It’s like the land and the lake stop talking to each other.

It’s not just lawns. The same thing applies to the forest edge, hacked away when the cottage was built.

Or the carpet of invasive periwinkle or lily of the valley, each growing and ignoring the conversation going on between the rest of the plants in the forest.

When something’s not right

Sometimes the wrong landscape just has to change. It’s not because of the damage caused by a storm or a flood, just that you couldn’t live with it anymore.

It’s the moment when the landscape you inherited – designed by someone else in a different time – doesn’t work. The gap between mowed lawn and thick forest is just too wide.
This is when people call me. They want to replace something that doesn’t fit there with something that does.

The project starts with the site itself: what’s growing, what the light does, how the water moves. The design comes from that.

The plants are selected for this place. They’re native to Ontario, suited to the conditions at your cottage, and will fit together as a community over time. Stewardship in the years to come is part of the plan.

The first couple of years are all about establishment. The plants are putting down roots and finding their way. But over time it will work because it doesn’t require what a lawn requires.

Because it belongs here.

At some point, the wrong landscape stops being something you’ll put up with. If you’re ready to replace it properly with something that feels like here, I’d be glad to talk.