When Kathie Vitale bought her property on Billings Spit in Sooke 12 years ago, she noted that much of it was carpeted with grass. She figured she could soon fix that, and made plans to transform the garden. Little did she know that beneath the grass and the garden beds, much of the long, narrow lot covering almost an acre was carpeted with actual carpet.
Sue Hyslop, who co-ordinates the Sooke Secret Garden Tour, confirmed that using old carpet to keep down weeds was not unknown in Sooke in decades past. It’s a practice Kathie found distasteful: preparing the ground for horticultural enhancement turned out to be a more expensive project than she had anticipated. “I had to spend about $2,000 in transport and dump fees to get rid of all that carpet,” she said wryly.
Not all the carpet has gone. At the ocean end of the lot, a berm divides Kathie’s property from the beach. “There’s still carpet under that,” Kathie said.
The berm used to be covered in grass, but mowing it entailed hauling the mower up the steep slope. Kathie solved the problem by turning the area into a moss garden, and setting sheets of slate onto the ground, with various mosses providing cushions of rich greens between them. On this she has arranged patio furniture into a seating area for the summer months — a sitting room with a close-up view of Sooke Basin.
There were already a couple of secondary dwellings on the property when she bought it. One had a long-term tenant, but today both cabins are rented for short-term stays, and the visitors can wander through the mysterious paths among the greenery, finally following a narrow, bark-mulched trail leading to the beach.
Billings Spit is definitely “mixed use.” As well as single family homes on large lots, there are multi-family developments and commercial enterprises and, right next door to Kathie’s home, the Blue Raven Gallery where Carey Newman and his family display their work near their home. Fences, hedges and a solid gate give Kathie’s garden its serene, secluded quality, ensure guests’ privacy and keep marauding deer from eating the garden.
Over the years, Kathie planted scores of new trees and shrubs, while pruning or removing some older ones that had become too old, dangerous or unfriendly to a garden.
The garden still isn’t finished — gardens never are — but Kathie thinks she has reached the point where it’s now a matter of tweaking and refining what she has created.
The first few years were taken up with the battle against invasive species that ran wild through the property. Some were probably planted as ground cover by one or another of the three previous owners of the house, which was built in 1993. A lot of plants sold as ground cover are considered by the garden cognoscenti as invasive nuisances. Kathie engaged in armed (with hoe and spade) combat with convolvulus, vinca, English ivy and other plants that like to travel. At one point, she said, when she dug out some old carpet, she found underneath it an even thicker carpet of morning glory roots in a horrible, matted mass.
At first, garden time was limited. As well as her family commitments to husband and teenage kids, and taking care of the vacation cabins in the garden, Kathie was operating a garden centre within walking distance or a three-minute drive from her home. Having your own garden centre can be a boon for the keen gardener — you know exactly what’s available and you can make sure your neighbourhood garden centre has what you need when you need it —but running a shop does cut into gardening time.
When she finally decided to wind up the garden centre three years ago, a lot of the unsold stock found a new home in her own garden, so visitors wending their way through the little paths stop to smile at small concrete figures such as Mr. Mole from Wind in the Willows digging beside clay toadstools, a Buddha holding a bowl and a lotus flower, and South Sea Island faces peering out from behind azaleas.
There are several places to stop and contemplate the scene from the comfort of a bench or wooden chair. Kathie told us that each of the cottages has a hot tub, but we couldn’t see them from the pathways. Trellises and shrubs provide plenty of privacy. Buildings seem to melt into the rustling, leafy landscape.
The colour contrasts of the plants add to the esthetic experience. When her visitors admired a particularly striking combination of chartreuse foliage behind a deep magenta azalea, Kathie assured us it was no accident.
“The neighbours must have thought me crazy,” she said with a chuckle, describing how she’d buy plants, arrange the pots in her garden, look at them, then rearrange them. Sometimes, the plants would remain in their pots for days until she decided on the right place for them to put down roots. Some plants were later dug up and relocated if they needed more or less direct sunlight, or a more congenial neighbour.
Kathie did most of the work herself, including the heavy lifting, only occasionally hiring outside help.
The main house presents a modest face to the garden. The cedar shake walls blend into the cloak of trees and shrubs that surrounds it. The large kitchen windows and sun room look out on the sea side of the house, and between the building and the berm lies Kathie’s own secret garden, with the tinkle of water recycling into a sunken pond competing with the susurration of the waves on the beach.
The house is 25 years old, and Kathie is contemplating some renovations, but that must wait until she has time for more major projects. It would be nice to move the kitchen further back and have a space to relax right in front of the large windows, but that’s not top priority just now.
The view from the kitchen is stunning, and the view from upstairs is even more expansive. Kathie took us up to her little sitting room over the kitchen. “This is my favourite room in the house,” she said. “I like to have coffee in here every morning.”
At high tide, the basin might look like a lake, but it is actually tidal, ebbing and flowing around the end of Whiffen Spit. That makes the beach part of the sea shore, which, by Canadian law, is a public area. Often, the place is deserted apart from the wildlife, but at other times the beach is alive with children playing, sweethearts strolling or clam diggers competing with voracious gulls for seafood.
Kathie’s secluded garden is one of several you can see on the Sooke Secret Garden tour (see story for details). To book a stay there, search online for Westburn Seaside Cottages.
