Maybe it'll grow in by next summer...

Attention, home-grown garden designers. Canadian Gardening is running an online beauty contest for the best home and garden makeovers. This is a chance for all city gardeners to strut your stuff and show off your horticultural accomplishments. Even if you don’t think your garden is worthy, it’s fun to scroll through the entries with a savvy eye for design ideas, and while you’re there, vote for your favourites. (I found three great designs that I’d love to have in my own backyard.) Forget the federal election – voting for gardens is way more fun!

Here’s how I spent my summer vacation — designing a garden for my aunt on a small suburban lot hemmed in by fencing. It’s not quite ready for prime time, but maybe for next year’s Canadian Gardening makeover contest!

My "Italian" garden -- Oneofeachio

My cleaning lady is a “house fluffer”. When she’s not vacuuming and dusting, she’s tarting up a house to make it look its best before it goes up for sale. An outsider like her, charged with the task of transforming well-lived-in spaces into masterpieces of interior design, has a fresh and objective eye on what homeowners often overlook: it’s a bit like being able to see the forest despite all the trees.There seem to be three golden rules of fluffing: get rid of clutter, make it spotless and create a welcoming ambiance. Hmm, I wonder how a “garden fluffer” would apply these rules?

Rule 1: Get rid of clutter

The Ultimate Cluttered Garden

The first thing a garden fluffer would say about the eclectic planting scheme that I follow is, get rid of the clutter! A restrained palette of a few different plants makes more of an impact than the onesy-twosey method of cramming as many different plants into the garden as is horticulturally possible. But where’s the fun in that? There’s nothing I like more than strolling through the garden every morning to see what surprises await – sometimes it’s a forgotten perennial planted the fall before (unlabelled, which leads to hours of searching the Internet to track down its identity – bliss!), at other times, it’s watching a flower bud slowly unfold from day to day. Limited to three or four plants artfully placed in large drifts or blocks, the landscape might be beautiful to look at, but the wonder of discovery is lost (along with the plant-detecting experience).

Rule 2: Make it spotless

The Perfectly Manicured Garden

Precision-edged borders and immaculately mulched flowerbeds are the picture-perfect models found on the covers of glossy gardening magazines. Ready for their photo ops, these gardens look gorgeous – for one swift moment in time. Behind the scenes, you can bet that a garden fluffer is on-hand ready with a watering can to gently spritz a wilting Ligularia, or with a y-stake or two to prop up a clump of phlox flattened after a sudden rainstorm. Making a garden spotless for a special event might be do-able, but long-term, it requires a team of fluffers that would be the envy of the gardening crew at Kew.

Rule 3: Create a welcoming ambiance

A Fluffed Welcome

Contrary to what some may think, a two-four of beer plunked on the patio is not the kind of welcome that a garden fluffer works hard to achieve. (A chilled bottle of Chardonnay surrounded by elegant stemware is, apparently, much more acceptable.) Instead, a row of charming tea lights flickering in Mason jars that line a pathway is the fluffer’s way to welcome guests to a garden soirée (but try to keep the flames from singeing the leaves of the perennials that grow along the way). But in my experience, it’s not difficult to find a way to welcome guests to a garden – most people (especially if they have gardens of their own) are eager to take a look and find out about the trials and tribulations of creating a garden despite unpredictable weather, destructive aphids and sun-blocking Norway maples.

 So, flawed as it is, for the time being, I think I’ll leave my garden “unfluffed”.