A gardening prodigy next door

My neighbor Nan tipped me off to a story about a kid gardener. She sounded like a hockey scout, sizing up a prospect for the Junior "A" grind.

Yep, he can handle a hoe, he's got good speed, and he's tough in the corners (of the compost bin).

She was excited though, because she has a daughter, and she has a garden, and I'm sure she's hoping her daughter follows in the steps of Vita Sackville-West, rather than say, Britney Spears.

So, on a Saturday morning I chugged up Highway 6 toward Caledonia to meet Charles Hunt, age 13, gardener.

As I drive, I think about being a kid and loving growing things. When I was seven, we lived in California. We were from the Midwest and my father searched long and hard for a house that had Midwestern bones, not the unfamiliar Spanish-stucco stylings of the California homes of the early 60's.

He loathed California, I think. He thought it was populated with drifters and serial killers. In back of our house was a wild field full of sagebrush and tumbleweeds, and when the Santa Anna winds started blowing, this dry tinder ended up collecting in his tame garden.

It was a garden full of fruit and vegetables - with a highly engineered moat that circled it, delivering water to new seedlings.

We had lemon and orange and peach trees, but my favourites were the plums. I have searched my whole adult life for the plums of my childhood. They had beautifully thin, dark purple skins, and the flesh was pinky-plum inside, sweet and runny. I was sure Luther Burbank planted those plum trees.

Charles Hunt may like fruit, I'm not sure, it didn't come up in our conversation. What came through was his feeling for flowers, and love for putting his ideas into action.

His family's big property is surrounded by fields and an abandoned golf course, where Charles says they "see deer and find golf balls."

Charles has met me politely at the door and takes me to the garden he started building two years ago with the help of his mother Janine.

"It all started when we took down the (above ground) pool. Me and mom decided to put in a path and the garden. Dad just does the tomatoes," says Charles.

There is a winding path through the shady space, a pond, and places to sit and think. It strikes me that Charles has deftly designed a garden room - but it came right out of his brain, with no influence from TV, books, or magazines about gardening.

"Did you lay the path yourself?" I ask Charles.

"Well, two years ago, I was pretty young. So my mom helped me, and I made sure the path was level."

He shows me his favorite spot to sit and look at the garden. And it strikes me how often we adult gardeners forget to stop and contemplate. Garden designer Joe Eck who wrote Elements of Garden Design, a very thoughtful book about garden design, calls it the "element of repose."

But it's hard to keep a good man down, so Charles jumps out of the chair to show me his next project. The transformation of an old chicken coop into a tearoom.

"My grandpa worked in a mine, he built the chicken coop out of gypsum and dynamite boxes. There's a lot of dynamite boxes on the property."

Charles has already started work on the coop, cleaning and taking out partitions. When it's too hot to work there he retreats to the garden where he likes to hoe weeds, prune and plant what his mother collects. His favorite flower so far is the Bleeding Heart, but he also was pleased with the Easter Lily which he planted last year and bloomed beautifully this summer.

They seem to be a good team-learning about gardening together. Janine asks me about some of the mystery plants she has assembled. I identify a Japanese Toad-Lily (Tricyrtis hirta).

I tell them what a perfect perennial it is for late summer and fall in the garden. It will have many tiny, intricate flowers that look like orchids. In the semi-shady area where they have it growing it would look lovely with other late-blooming plants like Japanese Anemones (Anemone x hybrida), and bugbane or snakeroot Cimicifuga 'Brunette', with its rich, mahogany foliage.

"Remember that Charles," she says. "He's going to start a journal next year, or take photographs, or sketch," says his mom.

I ask Charles if he is artistic.

"Nope."

I get the feeling he'd rather have a shovel or a hoe or hammer in his hands.

"He's the only one (of six kids) who likes gardening. I hope it lasts," says his mother.

So do I.

When my neighbor Nan told me about Charles, we were in her backyard admiring a patch of special sunflowers she grew from seed.

The seeds were escorted out of Japan by a friend and there seems to be a lot of secrecy about them. They are from the Sakata Seed Corporation, and the sunflowers are named after Van Gogh, Gauguin and Monet.

The Van Gogh's are Nan's favorite with their twisting petals that search for the sun.

I called Sakata Seeds U.S. in California and asked about these painterly sunflowers. They seemed mildly uninterested in the query and put me on to "their man" in Michigan. "The man" in Michigan sounded like he just jogged through ten acres of bicolor corn, and wasn't much of an art lover. He directed me to Renee Shepherd of Renee's Garden back in California.

"Oh I can't believe they wouldn't have any information on those sunflowers. Sakata Japan is well known for their pollenless hybrid sunflowers. But their seeds are very expensive and some seeds are never sold outside Japan. But we have great sunflowers of our own in North America, McKenzie Seeds in Canada has a great selection, and we do too."

For the record, Renee's favorite sunflowers are 'Music Box', at two-and-a-half feet, a great border plant, and 'Valentine', with a dark centre and lemon yellow petals that are "elegant and evenly spaced," according to Renee.

So the Van Gogh sunflower across the street will remain a mystery, just like the artist.