Julie Paul, a former marine biologist and self-styled professional volunteer, says “I love construction” the way another woman might say she loves Paris. She should know. She recently finished a long-term affair as the chair of a committee that oversaw planning for the expansion of a local school, grinding her way through neighbourhood consultations and development applications for eight years before the backhoes started their engines.

By comparison, making over her garden was a brief fling.

In less imaginative hands, this standard pie-shaped city lot might be nothing more than a lawn-bowling green and dog run for the homeowner’s two bouviers. Instead, Edmonton artist Sharon Delblanc transformed her small, nondescript, lawn-covered front yard into a dramatic mix of xeriscapes and plantings built around showy, self-sufficient perennials that weather the extremes of a northern climate.

Perhaps not surprisingly, both back and front yards reflect Delblanc’s artistic leanings: her impressionistic wild woodland Prairie landscapes are sold in Edmonton’s Scott Gallery. The effect is a naturalized garden for all seasons, and the pleasantly inviting spaces refreshingly rethink the typical lawn-covered, tree- and flowerbed-ringed arrangement of this quiet, mature West Edmonton neighbourhood. The backyard was done in stages: the dogs hung onto a central swath of grass, while Delblanc kept a few hardy flowering crabapple, Norland apple and double flowering plum trees along the back lane.

But the rest was given over to freeform beds full of sun-loving stonecrops and sedums, day lilies, irises and garden sage. Unruly clematis and honeysuckle vines creep over solid wooden fences and up the original 1961 bungalow, while hostas overflow from lawn to pathways. A sweeping pea gravel pad and weathered wooden bench-swing anchor a far corner. Nearby, the audible landscape revolves around a small pond and waterfall. “You’re really creating an ecosystem,” explains Delblanc, adding that it took her close to three weeks to build and “tune” the rocks so that the waterfall would sound just as she wanted it to. “The sound attracts birds, but it’s incredible the critters and wildlife that come and go, such as ducks, herons, porcupines, salamanders—and even minnows get in there somehow.”

Delblanc mapped out the front yard’s new design in its entirety, working out the various elements on paper first for its major overhaul in 2006. A Bobcat took care of the lawn, sparing a few key trees, such as the striking two-storey twisting mugo pine in the very southeast corner. “After the Bobcat was done, I literally went out there with string to define the major shapes and I kept moving strings and stakes around until I was happy. Those are the bones, the constants. It’s important to get them right.”

Delblanc created a dry river rock creek that runs from the house, under the cement slab walkway and out toward the street. It’s tied to the eavestroughing and drains the surrounding area, providing a clever escape route for heavy rains. Two wicker chairs on a light grey flagstone platform toward the south end of the front yard are perfect for morning coffee. Just to the north is another, more secluded seating area for two on a contrasting bark-mulch pad, within arm’s reach of the three-by-eight foot potagers for garden veggies. Strawberry plants are interspersed with pinks, sweet Williams, mounds of campanula, blanket flowers, summer phlox and purple coneflower. Added texture is found in the dogwood shrubs that form a soft barrier on the south edge of the front yard. One of the dogwood variety’s bark is lime green in the winter, another ruby red. In the summer, the dogwood thicket grows in for privacy. Tall stands of a variegated Miscanthus sinensis grass and the feathery-plumed Karl Foerster create both dramatic and practical ends. Both grasses love the heat and full sun of Delblanc’s front yard and provide interesting screens both from inside the garden and from the road: a necessary element as this clever yard attracts more than its share of drive-by garden enthusiasts.

SOURCES Designer, Sharon Delblanc. Silver-green flagstone paving, Canar Rock, Edmonton,780-466-6650, canar.ca. Chairs and park bench, vintage.
Wrap-n-Strap, Garden Tubs, Lee Valley Tools Ltd., Vancouver, 604-261-2262, Calgary, 250-253-2066, Edmonton, 780-444-6153, Saskatoon, 306-652-6902, Winnipeg, 204-779-7467, leevalley.com. Planter’s Buddy, Garant, garant.com; Blight’s Home Hardware, Vancouver, 604-738-3312, homehardware.ca.