Toronto Garden, 494 Dovercourt Road, 2026
24”x18”, gouache on Arches Paper
Toronto Garden, 494 Dovercourt
I grew up visiting and loving my maternal grandmother’s garden. It was long and narrow with a little slope past the feature display of flowers in a planter resting on the remaining stump of a long dismissed tree. My little sister and I rolled down that hill with great delight and ran a race to the very back where our Nana cultivated the vegetables and fruit that graced her summer table or filled the mason jars that sparkled on the shelves of her winter pantry. On either side we progressed through every sort of floral explosion imaginable. My grandparents worked in tandem; he was proud of the grass and she framed that space with roses, peonies, lilies, foxglove and marigold.
As a young artist in the 1970s I often dropped by with my watercolour block to capture what ever was flourishing. Nana would watch my progress silently then with the failing light, invite me in for a little supper. It was a special part of our history.
Over time someone else inherited that property and I moved on to other subjects often in far away countries but, I never forgot the enchanted space I first visited as an infant, through childhood and as a young woman.
Last month I took on the project of painting the Dovercourt Garden from memory working to re-establish the overwhelming wonder and delight that sparked inspiration from my first visit to the last. Once completed I shared it with , my sister who surprised me with a poem she wrote in 1970 about that very garden.
Image: Toronto Garden, 494 Dovercourt Road, 2026 (detail)
Dovercourt Backyards, 1970s
A bitter smell of weed killer clings
to scraped grass instead of dew. From each
cramped plot, beanpoles shoot, ignorant
of giants’ castles, eschewing hens laying golden eggs
for fava beans. Slugs shuffle among cabbages;
blown roses slump against each metal fence,
weary ladies of the night.
Once in a while a bird rests on a laundry line,
forbears to sing, then darts to shadier spaces. Grapes
straggling over brown brick walls, shed more tears
than wine. And yet
our grandmother’s Dovercourt garden makes
an Urban Eden: the same narrow plot,
earth equally manured, plantings of vegetables
as well as flowers. But the grass here is like a queen’s
velvet train, down which we somersault all summer.
Skirting extravagant roses, succulent peonies,
we refugees from stilted suburbia
run headlong to the bottom of the garden
where raspberries riot; and strawberries
offer red lips to be picked. We eat,
and eat, while from the catalpa tree
(small enough to suit a nursery rhyme)
Yurko trills his canary heart out, his cage rocked
by the happy-ever-after breeze.
Poem by:
Janice Kulyk Keefer
