• title:The Good Garden Guide: Ontario's Outstanding Gardens
• author: Patricia Singer
• photographers: John de Visser, Sidney Feitelberg & Turid Forsyth
• publisher: The Boston Mills Press, Erin, ON 1996
• contact: (519) 833-2407
• ISBN: 1-55046-169-9
• this wonderful garden book hit the book stands in May; Patricia Singer had spent the previous summer doing her research -- including a visit to Merike's garden on SwallowHill.
• the yellow house on the cover -- does it look familiar?-- compare it to Merike's sculpture garden or to winter on SwallowHill

Magnificent setting, rock garden, perennial garden, sculpture, studio

The view that stretched before me, as I stepped through the narrow opening in the cedar hedge, was stunning. Situated on a drumlin overlooking the Northumberland Hills, the garden was started in 1989 and grew according to three considerations: the first, to hold on to the magical feeling Merike Lugus had when she first entered the property; the second, to lead the eye toward the lake; and the third, not to involve her husband's time and energy.

Through the craggy limestone fingers that form the large rockery near the house, thyme mixes with heuchera, a maple lies prostrate across the stones, autumn-blooming clematis clambers through juniper and tangles with the soft blue flowers of caryopteris. Paths wander through fields of goldenrod, asters and milkweed pods, to ponds where willows lean into jade green water splashed with magenta waterlilies.

The garden is full of what she calls "consequential stuff like love, joy, and sorrow" -- the first thing to catch my eye was Merike's strong yet tender sculpture of a woman, known as the Madonna of the Tulips, gazing out over the garden to the lake in the far distance. As I rounded the corner I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a great steel arch of brilliant blue, a Matisse-like cut-out, its flamboyant shape echoing the billowing clouds and undulating hills captured forever in its frame. Merike created this special structure for the occasion of her daughter's wedding, and with the erection of the arch came the birth of the garden beyond. All her artistry comes into play here with plants of exquisite shapes, colours and scents skilfully combined, blooming in endless succession, from the first snowdrop and Iris reticulata in spring to the last Japanese anemone, snakeroot and rose in the fall.

Newly planted roses took on a special significance in the last months of her mother's life, especially the Rosa mundi and the warm yellow Graham Thomas. As long as she is their caregiver, she says, these plants, like others associated with people she loves, must never die.

			from Patricia Singer's The Good Garden Guide  
				The Boston Mills Press, Erin, ON, 1996

the blue gate
or "wedding arch"