On August 22, 2007, over 100 people boarded the bus in Ottawa for Flora Montreal, a garden festival along both sides of the locks at Old Port Montreal. The show featured the latest in gardening design and technology by Quebec’s best and brightest garden designers, as well as several designers from other countries. Over 45 residential gardens were featured including water gardens, city gardens, front yard gardens, roof gardens, container gardens and even a meadow.

As an added bonus, the trip included a stop at two magnificent private gardens in Hudson. Sue and John Zacharias’s garden has been dubbed “The Hanging Gardens of Hudson.” It is built on a steep cliff overlooking Lake of Two Mountains and includes a pond on a rocky ledge, extensive plantings of perennials, a trompe l’oeil, and high above the garden a roost for ospreys. Don and Simone Cameron’s three-acre garden, appropriately named Le Jardin du Bonheur, is a work of love created by these two avid gardeners over the past 30 years. An avenue of spruce trees along the side of the Racquette River leads to a quiet shade garden. Up a hill by the house late summer flowers like cone flowers, monkshood, and rudebekia basked in the August sun.

The trip, which was a joint venture of the Ottawa Botanical Garden Society and the Friends of the Central Experimental Farm, was thoroughly enjoyed by all.

Jane Panet, Chair

The first garden presented is that of Sue and John Zacharias