French Knot Garden in Elbow Park

French Knot Garden in Elbow Park

We are very grateful we found Laureen Rama and Eco-yards. People walking by usually stop and comment on how unique and beautiful our yard is. We have great chats with folks passing by when we are in the garden. It is wonderful in the Spring – a mass of colours as one flower after another blooms. One Spring a 10 year old boy cycling by with friends told them ’this is the bestest garden in the world!’

We have loaned Laureen’s book to several people who want to do the same thing in their yards.

We enjoyed working with the Eco-yards crew. We are so happy with our garden; we just wish that we had done it earlier. It was well worth it.

Chris and Alison Longson

The Challenge

These avid vegetable gardeners wanted a more attractive vegetable bed surrounded by mostly native flowers.

The Solution

We designed a variation of a French Knot garden – raised beds of local rock filled with rich composted soil for the vegetables and a lower raised area for herbs in the middle.

We dug out the lawn where the rock wall and flagstone pathway were to go, turned over some of that sod to create beds, and took the rest of the sod to be composted into soil. We covered the turned over sod, and the rest of the lawn and invasive daisy crop, with newspaper to minimise digging and hauling and to keep that rich organic matter in the yard.

We built a rain garden / rock pond with another client’s extra rocks to capture run-off from the roof. Rain water soaks into the yard to minimize the need for watering.