Francesca Albertazzi & Rita Monaco - 11 June 2020

My Rosemary and I started gardening full time in 1986 when we moved from our little strata title home in Burnaby to our big corner house and garden in Kerrisdale. We soon realized we could not afford the local and excellent neighbourhood Japanese gardener.

Visiting other gardens was important in that we wanted to see how other people did their gardens and we would “rip off” what we liked. The garden eventually grew to be a very good one because my Rosemary was and is a perfectionist. Soon garden clubs and people from abroad came in buses to see our garden.

Things are much different now as we have settled in small deck garden. Visiting other gardens and especially those of the Vancouver Rose Society has for us a different and much calmer purpose.

In this virtual lockdown the idea of being able (if only for a short while) to converse with people who have a mutual interest (roses) is a very good thing. It is almost as if those gardens, as beautiful as they were (the two I visited yesterday), were of secondary importance. It was the conversation that topped my experience at Rita Monaco and Francesca Albertazzi’s garden as well as in Mary Irvine and David Macvey's.

Rosa 'Mme Hardy' -  Mary and David Macvey's garden

At the Irvine/Macvey garden I noticed hidden in a little corner a lovely and most wonderful petal dump! The garden with lots of varieties including old roses, and very new ones hybridized by Brad Jalbert was neat to the point that it reminded me of my Rosemary who in our Kerrisdale garden used scissors to trim and edge the grass by flower beds.

I will be sexist and say here that behind every successful woman’s garden there is a man. The man in question, David Macvey is the man who weeds, mows and makes her-and-his garden the delight that it was for me to enjoy.

The rose petal dump at the Irvine/Macvey garden

Rita and Francesca's garden combines the talents of mother and daughter. I never got to meet Francesca’s husband as he was sent away to shop. Mother (Rita) is a talented painter whose landscapes remind me of the northern Italy we visited last year. There are those columnar and very Italian cypresses in them.

Rosa 'Compassion' - Rita and Francesca's garden

Francesca is an able interior decorator. This means that if you combine that popular garden discovery of the 90s that gardens should have rooms with Rita’s sense of the artistic you have a garden that is smallish but full of detail (neat detail and well grown plants) no matter where you look.

In both gardens I was helpfully de-snobbed a tad. In the Irvine/Macvey garden I just happened to smell Rosa ‘Julia Child’, a rose I have snubbed because of the name. What a divine scent this rose had!

In the Italian garden I spotted a beautiful English Rose that wasn’t. It was Rosa ‘Compassion’ a Harkness rose.

I look forward to further delights next week.