The Four-Season Garden at Greenbank Farm

The entry area for the Education Garden was re-designed in 2021 and installed in 2022 to be an inviting space that encourages people to gather and to explore the rest of the gardens.

The primary goal was to create an aesthetically pleasing design with four-season interest. A four-season garden shows diverse characteristics of plants throughout the year, with variety in such features as flowering, foliage, fruit, seed pods, structural appeal, and much more. Additional goals were to use plants that would attract pollinators, are drought tolerant, and relatively low maintenance.

More generally, the design adheres to the same underlying principles that guide the rest of the Education Garden, namely, to provide horticultural education through signage and living examples of sustainable gardening and wildlife support.

Our design process illustrates key steps for a four-season garden.  

1. Assess environment. We began by examining the space in terms of soil, sun exposure, climate, and aesthetic environment. The red backdrop of the existing cottage created a focal point for contrast and balance. 
2. Determine plant options. We created a spreadsheet of potential plants that met our key requirements, in this case, low maintenance in sun to part shade with seasonally dry and windy conditions. Each potential plant was characterized for its water and light needs, bloom time, seasonal color (flowers, leaves, stems), growth pattern, size, and evergreen versus deciduous. 
3. Choose and install plants. A series of drawings helped us map the placement of selected plants so that colors and textures would repeat throughout the garden and something interesting would be happening each season. For example, Yellow Twig Dogwoods planted below the sign on the cottage wall create dramatic yellow lines in winter, while the Japanese Snowbell and Eddie’s White Wonder Dogwood trees have showy white blossoms in the spring.

Resources on four-season gardening include: 

• Great Plant Picks – navigate to Seasonal Plantings in the Helpful Lists  
• The Four-Season Landscape: Easy-Case Plants and Plans for Year-Round Color, by Susan A. Roth, Rodale Press, 1994 
• A Year Full of Flowers: Gardening for All Seasons, by Sarah Raven, Bloomsbury, 2021

Plants in the Garden

The chart shows how each plant in our four-season garden contributes seasonal interest. Plants with an asterisk (*) indicate attractiveness to pollinators.

Plants

Garden Bonus Feature!

An intriguing element in this part of the Education Garden – unrelated to the four-season design – is the capped stump located to the right of the large Douglas fir on the north edge of the planting area. The stump is all that remains of a dead tree, but the stump itself has continued to grow and has healed over completely. Note the “cap” on top of the stump.

How is it possible that a dead tree would grow a bark cap and heal itself? Douglas firs are able to produce root grafts, where the root systems of two trees come into contact and grow together. These two trees – the live one and the “dead” stump – have become one organism. The stump cannot produce a new tree but can continue to increase in size over the years.

For more detail on this amazing phenomenon, see Vancouver Island Big Trees.