Our house has a large footprint for the size of its lot, the result of which is that there is not quite ample space in the backyard nor the front of the house, but we try to make the most of what we have on the exterior, for garden space. As it happened, when the house was built 30 years ago, its conformation made for an interesting space at the front of the house where a garden would naturally flow from.

Our daughter, one of those committed and talented natural gardeners, took time away from her own garden to start one for us. And it formed the early backbone of garden beds and borders that we gradually took to we extending substantially ourselves, over the following years.

In the early years of his retirement, my husband decided to excavate extensively at the front of the house, and to lay down brickwork to create living spaces in and around the garden beds. He cut stone and brick by chisel and hammer and gradually the little plazas he had envisioned took shape after he filled in the excavations with gravels of various sizes, tamping them down furiously with a tamper he had himself made.

Months of labour produced the hardscape of our garden and decades later the proof of the exhaustive quality of his work exists in the condition of the mature landscaping we now enjoy, built upon the infrastructure he had produced.

Now, the ornamental trees have grown to such a size they keep us busy trying to keep up with trimming them, their size alone presenting as a challenge. And the perennials that we rely upon to return year after year, once the hard winters of this northern area have passed, do their best to produce showy, colourful flowers to enliven the gardens each in their specific bloom period and give us great pleasure.

For variation in the seasons-long months of early spring throughout summer into autumn we also depend on annuals. With our limited planting space and paucity of sun exposure thanks to the mature trees sheltering the gardens in shade, we depend on strategically placed garden urns and pots in which to plant colourful, ever-blooming annuals and they do much to add to the variety, texture, colour, fragrance and overall sensuousness of the garden.

We had discovered, many years ago, the serendipidous presence of a family enterprise located on the outskirts of the city, that produced poured concrete statuary and urns using classical-inspired baroque forms, some of which were brought back by travelling members of the family, from Italy. Bit by bit we acquired both statuary and urns, and once commissioned the proprietor to pour concrete railings for our porch which my husband then installed.

We savour sauntering through the gardens, noting new arrivals, and taking in the entire prospect at a distance, or lingering at little separate landscapes revealed here and there in the greater scheme of the garden. The pleasure we derive daily from exposure to nature's bounty within our very own garden, much of it 'secret' and not visible from public view is enormous.