Garden Voices of Ontario’s Historic Gardens

This is a new initiative organized for 2012 by Parkwood National Historic Site. Prompted by interest expressed by participants at a 2011 historic gardens workshop at Parkwood, it was then organized with grant support from the Ontario Ministry of Culture’s Cultural Strategic Initiatives Fund.  Ontario Garden Tourism Coalition and National Historic Sites Alliance for Ontario came on board as collaborative partners, and a steering committee was formed with representatives from historic gardens, tourism and related sectors.

Project Aims

We set out to tell the stories of Ontario’s historic gardens, with enriched programs and experiences that would motivate Ontarians to get out and explore them.

We knew a little about some of the recognized names associated with some of the garden designs, such as Dunington-Grubb and Olmstead, and we hoped to increase greater awareness of our design roots.

We considered a single week or timeframe to create an event (such as Historic Gardens Week in Virginia), but from submissions we found that best-viewing times and programming themes were too varied to bring together in a single week. 

We left it to each garden to devise its best showcase opportunity, and established a broader scope and a sort of umbrella theme for the project –
taking inspiration from the wonderful publication Garden Voices:  Two Centuries of Canadian Garden Writing by Edwinna Von Baeyer and Pleasance Crawford.   For in a sense, we can hear or experience the voices of the owners, designers, workers, and era influences that have shaped our historic gardens, in the physical evidence and in the animation of those voices through interpretation and programming.

The project received a lot of good feedback anecdotally from colleagues in the museum, garden and tourism communities.  The project gave support to broader garden tourism initiatives, as a complimentary stream to other garden attractions, festivals & events generally, and as part of a build-up toward major international garden showcases in Ottawa and Niagara to mark Canada’s 150^th in 2017.

The project was intended not only to increase awareness about historic gardens, but also to increase visitation and visitor revenues, attract volunteers and dollar support.  Given provincial investment and perceived interest of gardens and historic gardens as “new” tourism offerings, the project was timely.  Readiness of the gardens to participate was a challenge however.

 
Project Results

Thirty-five historic gardens were identified, and grouped together perhaps for the first time.  Eight feature gardens came forward with experiential offerings beyond the standard fare.

The project prompted dialogue about what constituted a historic garden or landscape.  Notable 20^th century gardens for example are clearly preserved historic gardens, while many other gardens would be considered recreations of gardens lost to time.  For that matter, gardens we would call historic are still on the drawing board.  Historic garden movements or practices also draw in cemeteries, forts, railway gardens and parks, and merge with the broader idea of cultural landscapes – all Intriguing and useful discussions.

More problematic were discussions about garden tourism, particularly experiential tourism which calls for a much richer visitor offering than the typical talk & point garden tour.  As many owners or operators of historic gardens do not speak “tourism”, we worked with Brain Trust Marketing & Communications to develop a number of tools and materials.  These can also be adapted to other projects or used in future. 

A new website was created, www.garden voices.ca, to showcase the feature experiences and the rest of the historic gardens.  It too  can be adapted for future use and linked to any related historic, horticultural or tourism site.  Other marketing efforts provided an opportunity for gardens to maximize on their own budgets (eg. with placements/publications not normally within reach of small organizations). 

A number of difficulties encountered illustrate, in our view, that historic gardens and landscapes need to be better understood and supported.  They are generally lacking in resources, volunteers, and the will to present gardens as more than “second-fiddle” to buildings & collections.  Programming is generally quite limited, and the historic garden voices are often not well-articulated. Recreated gardens aspire to period-correctness and authenticity but often lack resources for research, design and upkeep.

As  project milestones and submission dates approached, some gardens dropped out as feature garden contenders, finding themselves unable to make the programming leap, or that their gardens would not be up to scratch in terms of conserved state or event basic maintenance.   An additional aggravation for some gardens was centralized budget, programming or marketing controls that did not allow for decision-making at the site level. 

We prefer to view this as not a sad state of affairs, but rather as a new beginning for Ontario’s historic gardens and landscapes.  Indeed, those gardens that declined to participate as feature gardens were quick to add “this year”, adding their pledge to resolve their readiness issues or other challenges in preparation for next year, suggesting life beyond the project.