Rare Japanese Maples & Unusual Trees in an Ontario Collector’s Garden #gardentour #japanesemaple

When you were coming today I thought I don't think the garden has ever looked more beautiful than it is with the daylilies and the tuberous begonias so perfect timing. I'm Dennis and this is my wife Carol. We're in Ilderton, Ontario. This is our home here and we've been here for 40 years now and been avid gardeners in the last 20 years. Well this is July the 12th today and so it's summertime and everything's blooming and it's one thing with our hot climate we've had lately everything's really popping now and really looks amazing this time of year. Dennis has really worked hard at having something blooming all the time and so that you know you go through a season of the lilies and then something else starts to bloom and then the Japanese maples are starting to change color and so I think it's just a combination of all of those things that makes the garden special. Well I guess it started basically when we bought the place 40 years ago and but it was just trees a couple of trees in the front of the backyard and sort of evolved from there had a blank canvas and started with a flower bed out front near the lamppost and just made that a little bigger and then made some more. We're in the side part of our garden here as we come around through the side here and this one right here is a ice breaker it's a Korean fir standard. I don't know if I say maybe I'm an actual collector but I guess maybe that is the term because I try to buy unusual more shrubs and that are unusual. We have over 100 Japanese maple they are a beautiful tree in so many different colors. They certainly are a lot tougher now than they used to be for our climate but I think mulch around them like with anything in the garden certainly does help protect the roots too. We have roughly it's a little less than a half an acre lot and we've maximized by trimming up the trees around the outside so we garden every square inch of this of this property. This is a northern lights dawn redwood here it would just stay a small tree but it's so soft to touch it's just beautiful so. And this is another one of the succulents here and as people say they need sun but this gets afternoon sun but it would get four to six hours of sun but they still do well but they don't go get really out of bound. I never water these at all it's just the rain water they get when it rains. We have a lot of succulents and cactuses in our window boxes. Well just leave them alone and it's just being the main tip with them that's the one thing in your garden that you can't leave alone and they just do well you give them too much attention that you over water them and they they're like tuberous begonias they start to rot and nothing left. The bougainvillea obviously which is popular in Florida we go down to Florida every year for a month or two and the place that we have rented down there have a bunch around and so this past year we took it out to a greenhouse and kept it over the winter there for us and brought it back and so it's got the nice flowers coming out on it's a beautiful color so. And here we have a gaiety euonymus and it's really been a nice tree and nice color for the garden we just kept to keep it trimmed back and the hock and the clova gold grass underneath it really makes a nice undercover for it and spreads around but so we have to keep trimming it around the pathway a couple times a year. As far as an annual tuberous begonias are my favorite annual so we have lots of them for the shady areas with a little euphorbia in the middle give it a little different color but they do they do very well. They might get a little bit of morning sun there so in a little bit later that's a fromenberg Japanese maple right there and it's a nice stately little tree so then in front of that that's another sweet gum tree it's a pyramidal one called silhouette but they have nice waxy leaves on them it's just a different look in the garden not just the traditional one and this is a weeping hemlock this one's called the Kelsey's weeping hemlock and actually I have one big one over here that's the sergeant weeping hemlock so you can see the difference in size how the sergeant will grow so much bigger than the Kelsey variety. This is a red dragon Japanese maple it's a nice weeping one that stays within bounds you don't have to really do much trimming so very nice tree and that's a carnival hedge maple this one with the white the variegated one it's really a beautiful tree and it'll grow up into a not a big tree but a nice compact tree. Another the villa taranto Japanese maple it's a nice one but it just stays green but fine leaves and turns a nice vibrant color in the in the fall. That's a liberty hosta right there and it's beautiful. I just like things to get big so but they don't get out of bounds or anything so I've got enough space and that's one thing I think with our climate change now with the heat and everything it's things and we're not getting as much moisture that things aren't maybe growing as big as they could and so I've had to water more because we have too much invested here so I'm not going to let things die but some of the plants do suffer a bit because I have so much I can't water everything all the time but and now I'm putting a lot more mulch on the soil and helping that way it's a mixture of sort of hardwood and whatever they would they have they've cut down over the more over the winter and it really does a great job it of course it deteriorates over time which is part of that and goes into the soil and gives it nutrients and this over here this is a knobby deer Japanese maple and this this has been here for at least 15-18 years but all these turn such a vivid like a vivid red in the fall that it's they just give an amazing color so when we look up from our deck in the fall it's almost a sea of red out here and it's just a vibrant red my favorite part of the garden has always been the bridge that Dennis basically built the bridge this is where the kids were had their graduations and that the bridge would be full of kids in the graduation pictures this one here the summer gold one it's they tell me this was comes from Italy but it's a beautiful tree and just because of the color and the shape of it and I think the benefits of a garden are enormous first of all just to enjoy the space and I think it's good for everybody's mental health and physical health and you can tell that he enjoys sharing his garden with people and so you know it's really nice to talk to other gardeners and like I say you just get a an idea or a tip on something and so gardener gardening people are great people thank you for watching this episode of sometime in the garden to join in on the conversation click like and subscribe