More than ever our outdoor spaces have become important to our well-being, which makes creating your own outdoor oasis something that should top your to-do list.
To get you started, All Things Home co-founder Anita Murray invited two industry experts to the stage at this year’s spring home show to share their insights, offer their tips and advice, and provide project inspiration. Here’s an edited transcript of their discussion.
Meet the panel
The importance of outdoor spaces
Planning
Budgeting
Finding a company
Lighting & extending the season
Perils of AI
Finding inspiration
Before & after
Who are the panel members?
Stephanie Hurman: Stephanie is the horticulture manager at Artistic Landscape Designs. A horticulturalist for more than 25 years, she worked in the United Kingdom for the Royal Horticulture Society for many years and ran her own garden design and horticulture consultancy company before moving back to Canada.
Ken Farquhar: Ken is the president and founder of family-run Aberdeen Development Group. With over 20 years of experience in landscaping and hardscaping, he specializes in patio design, retaining walls and garden features.
Moderator: Anita Murray is co-owner of All Things Home. She is an award-winning journalist and the former Homes Editor at the Ottawa Citizen. She has covered the housing industry since 2011.
Importance of outdoor spaces
ANITA: Stephanie, you were telling me that an outdoor oasis is not necessarily the same thing for everyone. How so?
STEPHANIE: Just like everybody’s home is very personal — the way you decorate inside, the way it’s laid out — everybody’s garden is personal to them, too. It’s an expression of your individual tastes, desires, workload. Whether or not you want to do a lot of maintenance or be able to see it all year round or see it at night with lighting.
Fundamental differences typically fall between a person who loves gardening and wants to get in it and be outside all the time and those who don’t — very often we’re asked for no maintenance, but that doesn’t exist. Those who want no maintenance, typically it’s because they want a break from the rest of the world. They want to be able to relax and not see it as work. And there are ways of being able to do that.
And it doesn’t have to be big and grand: a collection of plants, a bench in the shade, a place for cooking.
ANITA: Why are our outdoor spaces so important?
STEPHANIE: Mental health comes into it. It’s not just surviving COVID and everything that’s going on in the world now. It’s your sense of self, but in a free, no walls, no ceiling kind of environment.
It’s really important to be outside. I’m a plant person. I want people to be touching the ground, touching the grass. It’s super important for everybody to have that ability. If it’s a balcony then it’s the series of pots that you can tend to have that kind of retreat.
KEN: We’re rushing here, we’re rushing there, we’re raising a family or we’re always chasing something and it’s nice to come home to a backyard that you can relax in. You’re not confined to four walls and a roof and an interior; you can get out and breathe the fresh air and you can actually enjoy and decompress.
ANITA: And as humans, we’ve always been connected to nature, although in recent decades we’ve gotten further and further away from that. I did a story earlier this year on something that’s emerged as a new trend, although it’s been around forever, called biophilic design, which is the whole idea of bringing that connection back together and creating those indoor-outdoor moments. And it doesn’t even have to mean being out in nature, it can be just looking at it.
STEPHANIE: Exactly. With a good design, when you’re washing dishes and you’re looking out your window and you can see that amazing view — it does something to blood pressure. It does something to your state of well-being. So, even small glimpses of a garden from inside helps.
MORE: Biophilic design is taking Ottawa by storm
Importance of planning
ANITA: When it comes to creating our outdoor spaces, one of the key things is planning. What do you need to keep in mind?
STEPHANIE: It’s trying to see any space holistically, which can seem daunting sometimes, but seeing a space as a whole. And understanding how you use it; not everybody will use their space in the same way. In this picture (above), the owner had been gardening for decades, but this little vista was a corner that was just nothing and she wanted to incorporate her grandfather’s statue of a boy, which you can just make out, and we created a little gravel garden. She planned it. She knew what she wanted to do in that space, but she took time. There’s no rush to make decisions.
Incorporating professional design is important because a professional designer will be able to see it from a fresh perspective, be able to see it holistically, and then in conversation with you, be able to tease out the things that you might not know how to express. The planning phase is the fun phase where we’re just mapping it, we’re talking about it, and then you can make decisions in that space, how to get the most out of it, how to really find out what you want to use it for. Planning is better than making mistakes and having to do it over again.
KEN: It’s questions, all these questions. What do you think you want to do? What’s your dream garden space? What do you want it to look like? And based on that, we start coming up with ideas and trying to fulfil that plan for you.
ANITA: Other key considerations are determining budget, how much maintenance you’re willing to do and what kind of sustainability issues you need to take into account in terms of climate change (look at last year’s dry summer, for instance). Is this all part of what goes into the planning package?
KEN: Absolutely. And you’re also looking at your sun and shade levels. If you have the proper roadmap, you put it all together, but it does remain somewhat fluid because once you get going, you may come up with another idea you want to incorporate.
Budgeting
ANITA: How do you determine a realistic budget, and what is a realistic budget?
STEPHANIE: I know there are percentages that people use. I tend to think it’s as much as you’re willing to pay for the goal that you want to achieve. You want to buy a car, you want this kind of car, you’re going to be prepared to pay for it. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a high cost.
It’s worse when you’re not planning and you shell out on something that might be trendy and then two years later you don’t like it anymore and then you’re going to spend on something else. Think about a sustainable, planned effort in bite-sized chunks: you don’t have to do everything at once. If it’s done in a strategic way, you end up not having to spend more in the long run because you’ve done it in a cohesive, thought-out, planned way.
KEN: Or a phased approach so you’re not spending it all at the same time. You do want to get there, but you are going to get there in chunks as you go along.
ANITA: Are there certain outdoor projects that tend to give you a good return on your investment or good value?
STEPHANIE: Very good hardscaping, sustainable elements. It’s having experts who understand what will grow in your garden and moving away from trendy stuff. You want something that’s long-lasting, that defies trends; it’s easy enough to stick a different-coloured pot in and tart it up that way.
But to change hardscaping over and over is expensive. Done well the first time, it’ll last decades.
KEN: And taking the indoors outdoors. In this photo (above), they’ve got a wood-burning fireplace and a covered gazebo to extend their season. It’s back to that oasis. This particular client, that’s what they wanted. But you can still do it on a reasonable budget based on your space and what you want to do. Because we are stay-cationing more, we can take the indoors out, and it’s future-proofing.
ANITA: The foundation of what you do in outdoor spaces is also key, right? Kind-of like how with the inside of your home, it’s important to take care of the things that are sometimes behind the walls that you don’t see.
KEN: Absolutely. What you don’t see in the process is the most important part of anything.
STEPHANIE: When you’re installing something really big, the messy stage seems to last quite a long time. It’s the preparation of the space.
Finding a company
ANITA: So, when it comes to finding a company, how do you choose?
STEPHANIE: There’s a million different ways. Obviously, the old-fashioned, phone-a-friend references, people’s recommendations, people in your neighbourhood. If you’ve seen a beautiful garden, drop off a letter asking who did their garden.
But also professional organizations: Landscape Ontario, the City of Ottawa is now issuing professional hardscaper licences — there are lists of companies who are licensed hardscapers.
Check references of companies who you’re asking to quote. Just like finding a plumber or an electrician, you want somebody you can trust, that has a track record, that is open and honest about their work, so that you can research for yourself.
ANITA: You mentioned Ottawa licensing. This is new. Ottawa, as of March 1, is now licensing landscapers, basically. They have to be registered with the city. Ken, can you talk about that?
KEN: There’s a whole process. it’s not simply filling out a form and saying, ‘OK, now I’m a hardscaper.’ We have to provide them with all of our vehicles that are going to be working, we have to sign a form saying that everything is in proper working order and done properly. We have to provide the city a certificate of insurance.
STEPHANIE: And the city’s educational bylaw for hardscaping is really good. It has a lot of illustrations of what is not allowed. There is information for both parties. Bylaws get updated, landscapers have to go through this sort of process, and the homeowner now is looped in on what the city expects.
ANITA: And while this was initially set up to help the city, the side benefit is that it also helps residents. It gives you a lot of reassurance that you’re dealing with a reputable company.
Lighting & extending the season
KEN: Lighting is always a challenge; some have already had their landscaping work done and now they want to retrofit. Well, that’s a bigger challenge. But for somebody who has not got their gardens done or they’re looking at the roadmap, it goes back to future-proofing your project. As a landscaper, as a hard landscaper, we run conduits from the house to different locations in the yard so that, in the future, it’s simple to run wiring to that point.
STEPHANIE: And lighting extends the season when it gets darker earlier. You can still sit out and enjoy your space.
ANITA: But it’s more than just putting up string lights, right?
STEPHANIE: Absolutely. The low voltage stuff is super accessible. There are so many different companies doing it. Anybody can install it. Having a landscaper be able to include that in your planning is awesome. There are so many different types of fixtures, there’s safety issues, there are examples you can use for considering nature and not illuminating too much.
KEN: You can set it up so it’s connected by Bluetooth to your phone, then turn things on by zone, different colours, you can brighten them, soften them. You’re creating your own personal space.
STEPHANIE: It’s another element for the design.
ANITA: What about extending the season in general?
STEPHANIE: Outdoor fire pits and things like that, covered for rain, gazebos with a roof so you can sit out in the rain — spaces that you can enjoy having meals without worrying about if it’s going to start pouring or if it’s going to be too chilly.
Perils of AI
ANITA: Stephanie, you wanted to talk about how you have to be careful when it comes to artificial intelligence.
STEPHANIE: For people trying to investigate on their own, I put a quick search into Google for a low-maintenance garden in Ottawa. And this picture (above) came up, which looks really nice, but it’s not in Ottawa, it is not real, and it’s the most maintenance you could possibly think of doing.
Not to mention it’s all one type of plant. With boxwood, there are problems with box blight, boxwood caterpillar, the fact that you have to clip this several times a year, if we get a really bad winter with no snow it half dies.
So, this isn’t good advice. You want to talk to an expert who can really understand our climate, understand the perils of certain types of plants and reliance upon one species of plant. I’ve had images brought to me that are completely fake and you have to explain to people it’s not real, you can’t grow that in this climate, but also that’s not a real plant.
Finding inspiration
ANITA: What do you recommend for finding inspiration? Where should people go?
STEPHANIE: Don’t use AI, but I would use real sites. So, pictures of real gardens. Use magazines, walk around neighbourhoods, keep an eye out when you travel.
Any image can be used as inspiration. Whether or not it’s applicable — literally — in the Ottawa climate is where you need a conversation with an expert. But you can get inspiration from anywhere. It’s like a mood board.
Before and after
Both Artistic and Aberdeen shared before and after project examples for inspiration. Here’s a sampling.
