You Grow Girlâ„¢

Complete strangers step onto Bill Hulet’s patio to tell him how much they like his garden. Many of the houses on his street, which runs between downtown and a commercial strip, are rented to busy students. Until Hulet and two others bought one of those rental houses two years ago and began turning the beat-up lawn into gardens, the street was an unremarkable but convenient route for pedestrians headed downtown.

Julie Petrella lives on another bustling pedestrian route on the opposite edge of the downtown core. She is surprised by the amount of attention her garden gets from passersby.

"People actually stop and talk to you," she says. "I think people start talking about gardens and then they do things. People are changing the way they think about their gardens."

Plants like clematis, Virginia creeper and hollyhocks now thrive in the "gritty" soil along the city-owned laneway behind her house. Her tree-sheltered front yard contains shade plants, and its edge, like those of her neighbours all along the street, slants steeply down to the sidewalk. When she established what is now a lush hillside tangle of spring bulbs, roses, peonies, lilies, ivy, myrtle, sage, lavenders, and spirea, many of her neighbours were inspired to follow her lead.

The garden of Tanya Olsen, who works at Royal City Garden Centre in Guelph, Ontario, where Hulet and Petrella live, gets the same attention. She naturalized her front yard three years ago. "We were the first people on the block," she says. "In the last two years, I’ve seen six or seven follow. We have an awful lot of people in the neighbourhood who stop by and look."

Petrella moved from a big rural property into the city four years ago.

"We didn’t even bring a lawn mower," she says. "I hate the noise. Our whole intention was to get rid of the thing."

Bill Hulet, along with Mike Clancy and Mary Van Der Woude, who bought their house together as a co-op, don’t have a scrap of lawn to mow either. Even the city-owned verge is planted. His garden is ecologically minded. He composts, collects water in rain barrels and makes great use of mulch. The yard contains many native plants, such as bee balm and celedyne, as well as others put there specifically to attract birds, butterflies, wasps, bees and insects. He also makes use of vertical space, and gardens in containers on the patio, formerly the driveway. Fellow resident Van Der Woude’s garden makes use of the principles of companion planting to grow vegetables, herbs, and berries as well as annuals, flowers, and even a cactus that survived the winter in perfect form. She also makes use of her space with trellised, climbing plants, and collects rainwater.

"It’s no secret that the lawn is an iconic image for the middle class capitalist world-view," Hulet says. "Our yard has different plants, different textures, and is always changing. It’s harder to see that with a lawn. The idea with a lawn is to be like a billiard table. What you aim for is to minimize diversity and maximize uniformity."