What is it that makes a garden designer? I’m not talking about credentials or schooling, but rather the predisposition or “calling� to do this kind of work.
Is it a talent we know we have when we instinctively position a fern (with its lacy, dancing foliage) next to the bold, leafy rosette of a specimen hosta? Or is it reflected in the way we first begin to understand how repetition of shape and colour in the garden creates an intensely satisfying visual flow.
Being a garden designer in our own garden is one thing — sharing this talent with others and making it into a career is another entirely.
Candace Traversy-Mallette’s love of gardening came as a complete surprise to her. It first appeared when she opened herself up to those peaceful moments at home during a maternity leave almost eight years ago.
It was during the first spring after buying their house in Orléans that she began to wander around her largely unadorned backyard and felt its peace and tranquility. She felt it when she noticed leaves unfurling, spring colours made fresh with dew and the promise of small shoots turning into magnificent perennials.
Traversy-Mallette had originally planned to become a lawyer; she attended university for two years to prepare for this vocation. It was not to be, however, and she found herself married, working at an administrative job at a large jewelry store and then pregnant with her second child.
When the gardening bug hit her, she began to dip her toes into the garden design world — she started inventing and expanding her own garden and during her “spare� time, reading about gardens and going on local garden tours.
Not yet trusting her own instincts, she hired a garden consultant, Jason Smalley, to come by for a consultation. During the walk around with him, it suddenly hit her: this was exactly what she wanted to do.
Itching to learn more, in 2009 she enrolled in a series of gardening and garden-design courses offered online from Guelph University (called The Centre for Open Learning and Educational Support). Her administrative job morphed from full-time to part-time, and she began to spend her extra hours helping a friend work in a client’s large country garden. Her growing confidence soon allowed her to believe that she could actually start creating other people’s gardens, rather than deferring to someone else.
Today she runs a small but busy garden design and installation business with two other full-time workers and a slew of part-time and seasonal helpers. She began this season by scheduling no less than 17 garden installations from designs she has drawn up.
With this busy calendar, you might think her own garden would suffer — not so. A visit to her home in early June showed me that, according to her own admission — she describes herself as an A-type personality — she is compulsive about ensuring her own garden is perfect. She even tells me that this year was the first time she let anyone else work on it: she had her employees lay mulch and says “they did a great job!�
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