From hollyhocks to peonies, your grandma’s old-fashioned garden flowers are back in style | Canada Voices

Looking for inspiration with your backyard or outdoor space? To help plant some seeds, The Globe is digging into a garden trend with professionals each week in April. Next week’s theme: The Joyful Garden.

Because my grandmother’s garden was a cottage garden, it wasn’t some prim and proper little thing. Instead, it was a bright, bold, exuberant display of colour, shapes and scents.

She had dahlias the size of dinner plates, spires of hollyhocks that reached eight feet tall, sweet peas that twined and twisted around a cedar rail fence, clusters of phlox in bright red, violet and pink, peonies that spilled onto pathways, and fragrant roses that snagged my clothes as I ran to her raspberry patch.

To this day, when the scent of lilacs drifts on the May breezes, I’m reminded of her and happy childhood memories come flooding back.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the wondrous world she created on her half-acre plot of land, and I find myself wanting to fill my own garden with the so-called, old-fashioned plants she loved, the asters, dahlias, poppies, bearded iris, lavender and the four o’clocks that opened their pretty petals in late afternoon and closed them again in early morning.

Apparently, I’m not alone in longing for the plants of my past. Master gardener Sean James says nostalgia gardening, with its emphasis on layered blooms, relaxed pairings and a lived-in, cottage-garden feel, is trending and getting stronger every year.

“Nostalgic gardens connect us with our histories, give us comfort, and make us feel safe,” says James, owner of Sean James Consulting & Design in Milton, Ont. “In an increasingly stressful world, gardens filled with plants that our parents and grandparents loved, are the mood-boosters we all need right now.”

The nostalgia garden, in keeping with the beloved cottage garden, was borne out of necessity when English peasants used every inch of their land to grow everything, fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers, says U.K.-based gardener Stephen Crisp.

“This type of garden can be whatever you want it to be, and that’s the beauty of it,” says Crisp, who was the head of horticulture for 37 years at Winfield House, the 12-acre Regent’s Park estate of the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom (the second largest private garden in London) until he retired late last year. “There are no hard and fast rules, so nothing screams a mistake. A weed in the midst is barely noticed, which for less experienced gardeners, is a get-out-of-jail-free card.

“Nostalgia gardens are charming and beguiling because of their lack of formality,” adds Crisp.

Of all the different types of gardens, Nova Scotia gardener Niki Jabbour says she finds the nostalgic garden to be the most personal and intimate because it is inspired by our own life experiences. Hers, for instance is packed with plants that filled her with wonder as a child.

“Prior to the [COVID] pandemic, I was growing mostly vegetables,” says Jabbour, who is based in Tantallon, N.S. and has written four books on gardening. “During the lockdowns, when many of us were trying to make sense of things, I thought, what do I want from this garden?

“I was lucky enough to grow up with two grandmothers who were avid gardeners, and I realized that while I still want the veggies and fruits, I also wanted armfuls of sweet peas and lilacs, which reminded me of both of them.

“Now I have peonies and lavender, bee balm and cone-shaped hydrangea that fill me with joy. I have hollyhocks in front of my fence, shrub roses, and dahlias in all shapes and sizes. And I have colour, an abundance of it, and lots of natural elements in my garden, like stones and untreated wood.”

Buck Buchwald, site supervisor of VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, says he would argue that the appeal of heritage plants “has never gone away,” especially among seasoned gardeners.

However, since COVID-19 sparked a worldwide gardening boom, he says “a whole new generation of gardeners has fallen in love with the ‘old’ plants – such as the roses, phlox, lilacs – and made them seem new again.”

The good news for novice gardeners, he adds, is the diversity and breadth of these blooms has never been more extensive. Breeders have worked hard to make many of the Old World plants that were susceptible to diseases (roses, phlox, snapdragons, for example, are prone to powdery mildew) far more resilient and easier to grow.

One of Buchwald’s favourites is the poppy, which can handle a wide range of environments and soil types, making them a good choice for beginner gardeners. He has a soft spot for them because his dad “always grew poppies in our backyard in Alberta.

“I keep cultivating them because they remind me of him. That is the beauty of this style of gardening, it’s very individualistic: everyone has a plant or plants that mean something special to them.”

For James, the plant that pulls on his heartstrings most is the sweet-smelling lilac. “When I catch a whiff, it’s like time-travelling back to my childhood,” he says. One of the top lilac cultivars is Beauty of Moscow, a flowering shrub known for its highly fragrant, double flowers that attracts hummingbirds, bees and other pollinators to your landscape. The common lilac is best avoided, he adds, because it is invasive and can take over your garden.

He is also partial to roses, whose scent is another powerful memory trigger. He recommends Vineland’s 49th Parallel Collection, from the Niagara Peninsula. “It’s a group that is disease-resistant, easy to grow and hardy for most zones in Canada.”

Crisp says no nostalgia garden would be complete without herbs, which provide texture, look pretty, and taste good. His garden has an abundance of them – rosemary, thyme, sage, chives, lavender and mint.

He has advice for gardeners who love mint: “It can take over a garden due to its underground runners. I usually put mine in containers, rather than the ground. It’s just easier.”

As for lavender, he says if you trim it back hard after flowering, it will last 20 years. “People think of lavender as a short-lived plant, but if you treat it mean, it’s incredibly resilient. In the wild, lavender would be razed by sheep and goats. So, at the end of the summer or early fall, you have to be the sheep or goat, and run your sheers over it.”

For Crisp, the nostalgia garden is no passing fad. It’s a tradition-based way of gardening that respects the people who came before and made a difference in our lives – as well as a way to pass that gift onto those who come after us.

“It’s a testament to our collective yearning, today more than ever, for connection and continuity.”

How to bring nostalgia to a small garden

You don’t have to live in the country to capture the essence of a nostalgic garden. It is a feel-good, more relaxed way of gardening that can be scaled down or up, depending on the size of the garden you have and what will grow in your location, whether you have a small deck or patio.

Vintage containers: It’s easy to capture a sense of nostalgia with an aged copper pot or a moss-covered urn, filled with plants you love.

Potting nostalgic plants: A potted lavender plant, or many Bloomerang varieties of lilacs are compact and suitable for containers. For a showier look, you can fill a good-sized pot with dahlias (there are hundreds of cultivated varieties suitable for small spaces and different growing zones). The 49th Parallel series of roses – such as the Yukon Sun or Aurora Borealis – also work well in pots or small yards. Sean James suggests putting anything fragrant near a door or window so you get the fragrance upwind.

Put a vining tomato around a porch or balcony railing: “Nothing is lovelier than being able to pop out your sliding door and grab some tomatoes,” says James. “It’s lovely, sweet and very reminiscent-driven.”