With all the space available, perhaps it is only natural that the Wellington County Museum and Archives is planning some major attractions this summer dealing with its grounds.
Victoria Palmer has been hired as a seasonal employee to improve the grounds and she is adding gardens and plantings to what is already a showplace in Wellington County.
She begins her tour of the property with the kitchen gardens – and they are not ordinary gardens either. She said those gardens will grow crops associated with the former poorhouse back in the 1930s depression years and the years of World War II.
Palmer has expanded the first garden, which grows such things as asparagus and rhubarb, peas, spinach and lettuce. Those were the sorts of things the residents of the poorhouse would have grown for their food in those times.
The newest garden will focus on roots: potatoes, parsnips, onions, beets and carrots. Palmer said she will be growing “varieties that would have been in use at the time.”
In a way that is nicely in tune with the uses of those early gardens, the modern day ones will be available for people on tours, and they will also supply area food banks with fresh produce – so once again the museum lands will be helping the less fortunate.
Palmer said the museum has joined a group called Garden Voices, a group of heritage gardens around Ontario, and that will see the museum on a list of places to tour and see those gardens. It explains the lives and loves of gardeners past at Ontario’s historic gardens. People taking Garden Voices tours can immerse themselves in specialty programs and garden experiences in communities across Ontario.
They will hear the voices of garden personalities of the past, influential designers, garden owners and garden workers who shaped Ontario’s gardens from modest to grand.
Those gardens include a look at the era influences from First Nations to the Jazz-age and the evolving role of gardens, from sustenance and survival to highly-designed spectacle.
Garden Voices is supported by the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport.
Palmer said the tours will offer a “behind-the-scenes” look at what the museum has to offer. That includes displays of machinery in the old barn, which still has capabilities for housing animals but that might be a project a few years down the road. The barn display will highlight equipment used on farms during the depression and the war eras.
On top of that, the tours will offer a chance for people “to get their hands dirty by working in the gardens. Palmer said they would be able to do that using those old style tools, too. Alongside the barn were parked old harrows and discs that are used for the planting of crops to harvest during the harvest festival. The upstairs of the barn will have the farm related artifacts.
Then there is the entrance to the museum itself. Plantings used to run parallel to the sidewalk from the museum to the road in front. Palmer is planning “a reconstruction of what it would be in the 1930s, with triangular shaped hedges along the sidewalk. She noted there will still be lots of places for cars to park on the lawn for the annual car show, and the hedges might offer a little extra shade, too.
The museum grounds contain a butterfly garden, and it was already packed with Admiral butterflies. Palmer explained it has plants in it that attract butterflies, and it certainly did on May 3. She said it not only contains plants for nectar as food, but also plants that caterpillars can eat and cocoon in. She said it is vital there are no sprays hit that part of the yard because butterflies are very susceptible to chemicals.
There is a native woodland garden with all kinds of “well adapted wildflowers and other plants “so you don’t need fertilizers or pesticides.”
That one is very close to the butterfly garden.
The day of the reporter’s tour, the orchard was resplendent with several crab apple trees in full bloom. Palmer said in the past when it was the county poorhouse, there was an orchard that had over 100 trees to supply such things as apples, pears, and cider.
On the east side of the museum is the Cottage Garden. It is used for growing all kinds of herbs and plants that would have been used for flavouring main dishes and soups, as well as being grown for medicinal purposes. Palmer noted that some plants, like black-eyed Susan, were used to make a green dye.
Plants found in the Cottage Garden include chives, bee balm and lovage. The latter smells like celery and was used in soups for flavouring, Palmer said.
The garden also includes grapes and elderberries, black currents and apple and pear trees.
The final garden on the tour might be the most spectacular and it is certainly the most formal. Wisteria winds gracefully around the columns and along the arbour at the entrance to the Victorian Garden. It is right beside the exit from the museum, to the immediate east, and walking into it can bring a sense of calm.
It is used for such things as teas and a place to relax, say, during concerts and events that are held at the museum throughout the year.
“This is a very popular place for weddings,” said Palmer, who also noted that there are “a lot of old rose varieties in here.”
It appears the garden sections of the Wellington County Museum and Archives are going to be a busy place this summer and into the future.
