Mastering It is a summer series to introduce you to Canadians who have sought to rise above being simply good at their chosen endeavour – and who, by perfecting their skill, strive to become the best.
One day this spring, I was browsing in the charming little prefab cabin that serves as the storefront of Green Thumb Garden Centre, when owner Mary Reid accidentally reassured me that I was not losing my mind.
She was behind the counter, talking to a customer about the plant she was purchasing: a perennial flower called Columbine.
A few years earlier, I found a few at a big-box garden centre and was instantly drawn to the blue-and-white blooms as intricate as origami cranes. I planted them in my perennial beds, but to my disappointment, they never returned.
But now here was Reid, giving her customer a cautionary heads-up that Columbine can cross-pollinate, so they may migrate to a different part of your garden or pop up in an entirely different colour. Suddenly, my disappearing Columbine – and the reddish doppelgänger that appeared in another spot – didn’t seem like crossed wires in my brain.
When it was my turn at the counter, I babbled to Reid about my revelation and then asked, baffled, how this happens. She peered over her glasses at me with a smirk. “Do we need to have a talk about the birds and the bees?”
From her garden centre in Nepean, Reid has catered to the Ottawa community since the 1990s.
This is often what it’s like when you visit Green Thumb, a bucolic little island of lushness tucked, incongruously, into the back corner of an industrial court in Ottawa’s west end.
Customers come to Reid with their gardening wish lists, pest woes or questions about how to nurture their leafy friends, and she methodically walks them through a series of questions that helps her figure out, sight unseen, what’s going on in their yard. She’s always matter-of-fact and friendly about it, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an expert on any topic riff so effortlessly through astonishingly deep and intricate knowledge.
“You’ve got to remember it’s like looking after a person for the first year, because it’s a living, breathing thing,” she said, as we sat at a plastic patio table under an umbrella in the yard at Green Thumb, surrounded by marching rows of shrubs, swaying trees and tables of flowering plants sunning themselves on the first really hot day of the year.
“And then once they’re established,” Reid continued, “some are needier than others, and that’s when you get into personalities.”
Whether she’s helping someone rehabilitate an unhappy plant or choose a new one for a certain setting, she likens her process to those Choose Your Own Adventure books, in which each choice branches out into a set of other options.
If someone says they want to add some plants to their yard, she wants to know how big the space is, how much sun it gets and whether they’re a casual or formal gardener.
She also asks the purpose of a plant: Maybe someone is trying to block a view or “no longer embarrass themselves in front of their neighbours” – in which case five Spiraea shrubs are perfect, because they flower, they’re low-maintenance and people on your street aren’t looking askance at you any more.
“You’d be surprised how much I know about people, it is the craziest thing,” Reid said. “I think ‘Holy crow, why do I know that?’ Then it just goes in one ear and out the other. I think it’s like going to the hairdresser or the barber.”
If someone complains that their shrubs are being eaten, she wants to know what kind of bush it is (most pests hang out on specific plants), what time of year they saw the damage, whether the person has ever seen the bug (if not, maybe it works the night shift, or it’s too small to see) and what the damage looks like (“eaten” can mean leaves nibbled around the edges, along the veins or a hole right through the middle, each of which offers a clue). Then she can try to diagnose what the intruder is and how to deal with it.
Watching her do this in real time is like watching a magic trick.
Sometimes, Reid will ask potential customers to come back later after completing ‘homework assignments’ to glean more information about their garden spaces.
Reid subscribes to a ton of university and government research websites, and in the winter – there’s no time during the gardening months – she does a lot of reading, filing away bits of intel and clues that will help her guide the next season’s customers.
She’s also a member of Master Gardeners of Ontario, which, she explained, sounds like a professional title but is in fact a volunteer organization with a mandate to provide free advice to residential gardeners, along with monthly speakers and a wealth of written information. As a species, gardeners are generous with their knowledge, Reid said.
She estimates she’s answered at least 2,500 plant identification questions over the years at Green Thumb; the hardest mysteries to solve are along the lines of, “What’s that small green shrub that’s all over Ottawa, you know the one?” Reid also figures she’s doled out about 500 “homework assignments,” when she sends people home without buying anything so they can gather more information about the dimensions of their space, how much sun it gets or what they love in a plant.
“I want them to have success with this garden, because I want them to continue to garden,” she said.
Reid comes from a family of hobby gardeners; as a kid, her chores were dead-heading day lilies, picking up rose petals after pruning and washing the bird baths for her grandmother. And in university, she worked as a gardener, weeding, pruning, planting and helping clients choose new plants. “My grandmother was an absolutely fabulous gardener,” Reid said. “It was kind of the old-fashioned garden with peonies and day lilies, and she had a magnificent rose garden – absolutely unbelievable – and the perennial borders and all that kind of stuff.”
Reid still loves those old-fashioned flowers the best, though her husband gets the run of their home garden – his style is “wild and crazy” – because she’s never home before dark during the gardening months.
Hobby gardening is a cherished pastime for Reid’s family, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that events would make it her career.
But Reid’s ownership of Green Thumb came more from a practical place than her own gardening history.
In the mid-1990s, she’d been working at a bank for years when there was a consolidation that left her with the option to transfer out of province, or do something completely different. She set out very deliberately to find a new business that was people-focused.
“I researched gardening, and gardening was overtaking golf and curling as the primary hobby for Canadians,” she said. “And I thought, ‘I can make this work.’”
A teacher had started a garden centre in Ottawa during a sabbatical year, but he was finding it difficult to keep up with it once he went back to teaching. Reid bought him out in 1998, after they’d worked alongside each other long enough for him to feel comfortable handing everything over.
The early years were lean; Reid vividly remembers calling her husband some weekends to ask him to come water the plants because she was too tied up with customers. But Green Thumb grew steadily, and she now has a staff of 17 working out of a cul-de-sac lot, the tiny cabin surrounded by perennial gardens, green houses and endless rows of beautiful leafy and flowering things: Eden in an industrial park.
“There’s definitely having the little opportunity to commune with nature in a very busy world,” she said of the magic of gardening, though she figures it’s different for each person who loves it. Her goal, always, is to help people succeed with whatever project or problem they have, so they’ll keep going and there will be “one more gardener in the world.”
At a certain point, much of Reid’s expert, pragmatic gardening advice starts to sound like a road map for life as a human, too.
Give things a chance to settle in before you decide if they’re working. Be gentle with creatures that are adjusting to big changes. If something isn’t working, don’t raze it to the ground – salvage what’s good in it or see if it will be happier in a different situation. Everyone needs something different from the world, and watching and listening is the best way learn what that is.
“I think that plants are pretty forgiving, which is perhaps unlike some people’s relationships with their job or their sports team or whatever it happens to be,” Reid said. “I think it’s an opportunity for people to take control, and hopefully end up with what they want. And if they don’t, we encourage them to come back, and let’s sort this out.”
Mastering your garden: More from The Globe and Mail
Gayle MacDonald on gardening
How to plant an eco-friendly space that will invite birds, bees and butterflies
Want to create a soothing garden? Let simple design and soft colours be your guide
Make your garden your happy place with joyful blooms, bright colours and, yes, even goofy gnomes
From dahlias to peonies, your grandma’s old-fashioned garden flowers are back in style
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The Globe and Mail
