How I Got Into Gardening & Growing Flowers

Though I didn’t feel very lucky about it at the time, I was lucky that my parents involved me in gardening before I could even walk. The year I was born, my mom would set me with a pack-and-play beside her in the garden and weed for as long as she could before I would cry too much. Because I was an only child, my parents took me along for everything they did. That meant every day in the summer when it was time to go in the garden from May long weekend to September long weekend, I was right beside them sowing seeds, picking weeds, shucking corn, and any other myriad of tasks.

My parents were also really big into landscaping and did not let me stay home when they had a flat-rock-finding mission in mind! I would moan and groan bitterly when they said that it was time to go for an “evening drive” when the whole point of the “evening drive” was to find flat rocks in farmer’s fields for our yard (we had permission, of course!). It might have partly been because my parents wanted to save money, but I also think they genuinely liked hunting for rocks and found the ones they liked best this way.

A bouquet of assorted flowers, including pink and white blooms, is placed on the running board of an old, rusted truck parked in a grassy, wooded area. The background shows blurred trees and foliage. — You’d think with all this tag-along gardening, there’d be some photographic evidence, but try as I might, I can’t find any photos of me in a garden between the ages of 0 and 18!

I felt most unlucky when my parents announced we were going away for the long weekend. I thought, “We are actually taking a trip!?” (My family was not normally a trip-taking family.) But where were we going? Dauphin, Manitoba. And why were we going there? to buy Saskatoon berry tree saplings. In a normal family, this might have also included a stay in a hotel with a pool or a fun kid activity. In my family, it did not.

A close-up of a branch with ripening berries. Some berries are dark purple, nearly black, indicating they are ripe, while others are still red. The green leaves surround the berries, and a blurred background suggests a lush garden or forest setting.

Those same Saskatoon berries became our Saskatoon berry u-pick farm. I was so excited that this was going to happen! I imagined the beautiful Saskatoon berries and how tasty they would be when, in reality, this meant weeding at least three nights a week with my mother at 12 years old.

The weeding was never fun, but the weeds were at least manageable at the beginning of the summer. By the time we got to the end of the summer and the end of the three-kilometre-long rows, these weeds were taller than me! And no, this is not an exaggeration. I was 5 foot 5, and they were easily 5 foot 8! Thankfully, I was stronger than the average woman who didn’t work out (even back then) and could wrangle those weeds out of the soil, but it took a lot of effort!

A woman wearing a floral dress tends to plants in a garden. She is surrounded by lush greenery, including tall leafy vegetables and flowers. A wooden fence and a large evergreen tree are in the background. She seems focused on her gardening activity.

Needless to say, I did not think I would be much of a gardener in my teens and 20s. However, I’ve always had to have a pot of flowers in every house I’ve lived in. Whether it was a townhouse or a house with five roommates, I would still buy a pot, fill it with soil, and, at the very least, put some petunias in it.

When my husband and I bought our first house in Bradwell, my dad came and helped me figure out a nice flower bed. We filled it with perennials and annuals, and it was a good bonding experience. The urge to garden only grew as I got older. When we bought our first house in Saskatoon in Caswell Hill, unfortunately, we did not have gardening in mind because our budget was tight. When l tried to make a garden there, the lack of soil amendments and the shade of the trees made it difficult.

A woman sits on wooden steps with three young children. Behind them are potted plants in blue containers and a wooden fence. One child, a boy, sits cross-legged beside the woman. Another young child sits beside him, and the woman holds a baby on her lap.

Once Dominic was a little older and we moved to our house on 9th Street, the gardening beast was fully unleashed. That first spring, once the snow melted, I saw that someone who lived there in the past had clearly loved gardening. There were nine peony bushes, a dedicated but severely overgrown gardening space, and a delightfully rundown garden shed beside the house.

When we settled there, Shifting Roots became a gardening blog, which gave me permission to grow all of the things I wanted to grow. It didn’t matter if they died or not, because I could write about them no matter what happened! I had a fully justifiable reason to spend all that money: it was for the business!

A small wooden greenhouse stands in the center of a lush garden with surrounding raised garden beds filled with various plants. A pathway leads to the greenhouse, and there are trees and greenery in the background. A white chair and a wheelbarrow are on the lawn.

Now that we’re at the acreage, the garden just keeps getting more ridiculous. But honestly, I wouldn’t even have it any other way!

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How I Got Into Gardening & Growing Flowers

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