Five Favorite Keweenaw Gardens

I admire gardens, great and small, I just can’t keep any alive. In my defense, I live on a Lake Superior sand dune where gardening is an exercise in futility.

That doesn’t mean I live in a neighborhood without elegant or fairytale gardens, and my lack of gardening skills does not preclude me from having some favorites here on my home turf in Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula.

In fact, you might call the annual creation of beautiful gardens up here an act of hope and defiance. Our harsh winters and a growing season that lasts slightly longer than a nature nanosecond make any flourishing garden here all the more wonderful.

Let me share my five favorites:

In-Town Oasis

Karena Schmidt’s garden in Laurium bursts with charm no matter the season. It’s been a work in progress since she bought the house in February 2005. A master gardener and ethnobotanist by training, Karena decided to get gardening right then – in deep winter.

“At the closing,” Karena recalls, “the owner told me that when the snow melted, I’d see that I had the most beautiful lawn in Laurium. I just smiled. Come April, there was still snow on the ground, but I’d already dug out a 5x20-foot chunk of turf to plant blueberries. I had no plan other than to maintain my honorable status as a member of the ‘grass elimination society.’”

And eliminate she did. At the time, she worked as a ranger at Isle Royale National Park and was gone to the island all summer. That meant her home garden happened sporadically in spring and again in October, the end of the park’s season. The evolution of lawn to garden was, understandably, slow.

“There was no real plan,” she says. “I’d see something I liked and then I’d figure out a way to put it in. But removing the grass was paramount because it interferes with plantings. I wanted the plants to have no competition.”

Bit by bit, the non-native lawn diminished and disappeared.

“I did it all with a trowel and my own labor, no rototilling or power tools,” Karena points out proudly.

Currant berries went in on the property’s north side, followed by fruit trees. Next she tackled the boulevard, the area between the sidewalk and street, owned by the city, which residents must maintain. She chose to transform that from grass to glory. “Irises come up first in the spring, followed by dahlias, which last through the summer. It’s really a lovely flowerbed. Neighbors enjoy it, and people come by to see it when it’s in full bloom, be it irises or dahlias.”

 Karena’s mother lives with her six months of the year and contributes to the garden designs. “My focus is an edible and beautiful garden,” says Karena. “But my mother has added whimsy to the garden.”

The whimsy includes a “rock river,” a drumming circle, a swath of wildflowers and several seating areas. The river of rocks protects a century-old silver maple and keeps it properly drained. “I’d admired one a friend had, as did my mother, and since it was also the perfect way to keep the tree healthy, my 80-year-old mother and I hauled in two tons of rocks and did it.”

Of course, if you lay a tasty buffet out in the yard, you’ve got to expect freeloaders. Karena continually battles hungry deer. She’s tried many tricks, but the best deer deterrent so far has been motion detectors connected to water jets. “It makes noise, it startles them and they get wet. It works perfectly, and it saves the garden plants.”

She even uses her plantings to honor history and people.

“Fundamentally, it’s important to me to honor the Indigenous people who were originally here – so I have sweetgrass, sage, cedar and (herbs for the smoking mixture) kinnikinnick. And it’s also important to honor my own family – sweet William and gooseberries for my deceased father, morning glory for my great-aunt, a rose for a special deceased girlfriend and a yellow rose for my sister who lives in Texas. Honoring people is a large part of this garden.”

Which perhaps is why it’s such an honor to visit it.

Hillside Magic

Not many people would take on the gardening challenge of a steep, shaded slope, but not many people are Elana Busova. She accepted the challenge, triumphed spectacularly and created a beautiful shady glen that exudes serenity.

On a rocky hillside, she’s created a magical space.  

When she and her husband, Victor, purchased their Houghton home, 12 years ago, the backyard was a steeply pitched tangled mass of unknown plants, everything plunged in deep shade.

The previous owner had attempted to garden on the slope, even though the land did not belong to her. The Busovas did own the space, purchasing the extra land within a month of buying the home. Elana evaluated the options and began creating a rock garden, starting with the existing beds. But because they weren’t stabilized, everything came apart.

“Over a couple of summers, I built all the walls, removed all the gravel and rock from the soil, put in new soil and rebuilt all the flower beds,” says Elana. “It was slow work, and it’s a good thing I was younger because I wouldn’t want to do it now. My husband would go to work, come home and say, ‘You’re still in the same place.’”

Although she was using rock rather than plants, you might say that Elana stuck to the use of “native” species. “I used all the rock that was in place. It might look nicer if we’d bought real gardening rocks, but we used what we had.”

A couple of years after the rock garden was finished, the Busovas’ driveway had to be redone.

“A big pine was destroying our and the neighbor’s driveway,” says Elana. “So we had to cut the tree down, and I ended up with the space to put in a full-sized sun garden. While I was sorry to lose the tree, I was really happy to get a sun garden, because there’s only so much you can do with a shade garden.”

A few years ago, her husband started working in the uppermost part of the rock garden, clearing brush, opening it to more sunlight and establishing fruit trees. A professor of genetics and bio-technology in the Forestry Department of Michigan Technological University, his field of study may help.

To grow vegetables, though, the couple use an off-site community affair with better soil and adequate sun. Elena is co-director of the Pewabic Street Community Garden, Houghton’s communal garden space. That’s where the Busovas grow their edible vegetables.

“I like all aspects of gardening,” says Elana. “I’m not a master gardener, but I have a master’s degree in forestry, and I keep up with gardening, especially vegetables because things keep changing on how to grow them. We came to the United States from Bulgaria more than 22 years ago, and when my husband ended up at Michigan Tech, I was a little worried about the amount of snow and the long winter.

“But we really fell in love with the Copper Country, and we like the snow. The gardens here are great, and I think it’s because people have to wait so long for greenery and flowers, so they put a lot of effort into a really short gardening season.

“I know exactly where my snowdrops are,” she says of the Galanthus’ drooping white bell-shaped flowers that are among the first to poke through the snow in spring. “I’ll go out in big boots and find them just to know that spring really is coming in the midst of all this winter.”

Hope, as it turns out, blooms perennially.

A Garden, Just Because

When Carol Normand and her husband, Tom, retired to the village of Gay 11 years ago, their property had no landscaping, not even a little.

“None,” Carol emphasizes.

“There were three maples in the front, and that was it. The yard consisted of naturally occurring grass and low profile weeds, which is pretty typical of the Keweenaw.”

Carol had created a garden at their home downstate without any real training.

“But you know how it is when you’re interested in something, you gravitate toward those activities and the people who do them.”

With the Gay property, Carol started slow. Planting balsam fir trees topped the list. “That was the first thing I noticed about the property,” she laughs. “Here we were in the North Woods, and there wasn’t a pine tree in sight. So my husband went into the woods, found some balsam fir and transplanted them to the property.”

After that, the garden started to sprout organically, creating its own landscaping plan. Carol did have a few thoughts of her own, though.

“I took ideas from our old garden and tweaked them to work in the north. For instance, we had a fence downstate, and I wanted another one, so that was something else we did right away.”

The property was very flat, too flat for Carol. “I told my husband we don’t want everything flat. So he had dirt delivered, mounded it and created visual interest. Then we got sandstones by looking all over the Gay sands, and then we hauled all of them into the backyard and made the patio and path. He jokes that whenever he sees me waving my arm and looking at a vista, he knows some work is coming.”

In the midst of creating her garden, Carol took a master gardening course, something she’d wanted to do, but “snowbirding” made impossible.

(Tom is from Lake Linden, and the Normands divide their time between the Upper Peninsula and the Southwest.)

“It was always on my bucket list, but they always did it during the winter, and I wasn’t here,” Carol says. “And in Arizona, it was done during the summer, and I wasn’t there. So we stayed here one winter, and that’s when I took the master gardening class. It was taught in Houghton at the library that year. I’ll never get my actual certification because you have to do 40 hours of community service. I have so much to do right here, I don’t have the energy or inclination to do any more. I just wanted to do the class.”

Eleven years on, the garden remains a work in progress – which is exactly how Carol likes it.

“One of the things the master gardener class did was connect me with like-minded people who were also passionate about gardening, so that’s been really nice,” she says, and adds with a laugh, “Gardening is something I’ll never be done with.”

One Garden, Three Generations

Any gardening in the Keweenaw requires tenacity, but attempting to establish a floral haven directly on the shore of Lake Superior, in the face of waves and gale-force winds, borders on delusion. Yet that’s just what the Marta family has done in Eagle River.

Trust me, for sheer beauty, it’s hard to top a gorgeous garden with the Lake as a backdrop.

“The original cabin on the property was built in the ’30s, but my parents didn’t build a year-round house here until 2001, and my mom started the garden in 2003,” says Lisa Marta.

“Most of the plants came from her garden in St. Paul, and one of them came from my grandmother’s garden. So we have three generations of plants in here.”

Lisa acknowledges that generational line in another way – she learned to garden from her mom, who learned from Lisa’s grandmother.

The primary lesson of gardening, Lisa sums up, is learning “what you pull and what you don’t pull.”

Her mom, Louise Marta, knew the technical botanical names of every flower in the garden.

As Louise’s health began to fail, Lisa took over all the heavier tasks of gardening, especially pulling and lifting. The summer after her mother died, she took it over completely.

“Like anyone’s garden, this one is constantly morphing and changing, but by the time my mom died (in January 2014), it had gone to seed and I had to rip the whole thing, weed it and then put things back. I’m the one in our family who’s taken on the responsibility of keeping it going. I know it gives my dad a great deal of pleasure, so he waters it, and I do everything else.”

A large portion of the garden has gone wild, seeded with native wildflowers. “To landscape all of it would be way too much,” Lisa points out.

“When we built the house, Dad said, ‘No gardens, no yard work, maintenance free,’ and you can see how well that worked out,” she laughs. “But he does really like it, and I like maintaining it. It’s a nice reminder of my mom, and all the time they’ve spent here. It’s a generational legacy.”

Past and Present

Probably my favorite U.P. garden of all is a community effort.

The Fort Wilkins Gardens Community Garden in Copper Harbor links our past with our present. I love the entire concept of this garden, originally planted by soldiers stationed at Fort Wilkins in the 1800s and now revived in the exact same spot. Today it’s used by the people of Copper Harbor.

This is a community garden, but it sits on private property owned by Lloyd and Clyde Wescoat. The Wescoats take on the major garden expenses: rototilling the ground, composting it, putting up a fence (deer eat everything). They don’t charge anything for the plots, though many community gardens do.

When Fort Wilkins, built during the U.P. copper boom of the mid-1800s, was operational by 1844, soldiers there planted gardens within the fort barricade. But the gardens were too close to Lake Superior, too close to Lake Fanny Hooe, and it was too cold to grow vegetables effectively. So after that first season, they moved the gardens west, to where the Wescoats’ property now sits (the same property where you’ll find their business, Grandpa’s Barn bookstore).

“That section of our property has always been referred to as ‘the Fort Wilkins gardens,’” says Lloyd. “Even in old photographs you can see where the gardens were.”

As a prelude to the community garden, the Wescoats started tilling a few years prior to actually creating it.

“I’d always wanted to create a community garden,” says Lloyd, “since most people in Copper Harbor live on bedrock, and it’s hard to have a garden. So I asked Clyde if he’d do it for me on our own property. The location is wonderful and the soil is great.

“Clyde started growing potatoes there,” she says, “and they grew beautifully … until one generation of deer learned how to dig up the potatoes with their hooves. Once a generation of deer learns how to do that, all the subsequent generations of deer know how to do it. So that’s when we put up the 6-foot fence. Marty Faassen helped us with that.”

The Wescoats then laid out 10x40-foot plots and invited people to participate. “I did a lot of research on community gardens,” says Lloyd. “They’re for food and for personal consumption, not for sale and not for botanicals. Neighboring plots need to keep themselves weeded. Clyde tills it at the end of every year, so no structures are allowed in the garden. You have to clear your own rocks and maintain your own plot and keep an eye toward your neighbors, just be courteous.”

Children are welcome, dogs are not. Individuals growing vegetables aren’t the only ones to take advantage of the garden. The Copper Harbor School maintains a raised bed there and one person stores pots of hybridized roses within the garden fencing to keep them safe from deer.

Keeping the garden soil healthy is a community endeavor.

“For compost, we take all the spent grains from the Brickside Brewery, here in Copper Harbor. The brewery doesn’t have to pitch it because we use it in the community garden. There’s a huge compost pile off site and every year, Clyde hauls the new compost over and tills it into the soil.”

You might call it yet another example of blending what’s from the past into what may be our future.

Now you’ve met some of my favorite gardens and gardeners. You can see more photos (and a couple bonus gardens) online at www.LakeSuperior.com. It’s not likely I’ll ever tend garden at my home by the Inland Sea, but I can enjoy the wildflowers painting the roadsides during a Keweenaw summer or the splashing autumn color among the trees. Plus I can always visit a neighbor or two to marvel at the results of their green thumbs. I’ll likely get a cup of coffee to boot.

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Lesley DuTemple, a gardener of words, has written more than two dozen children’s books. She lives in Eagle River.