Travels in a garden

Elspeth Bradbury delivers her response to the increasingly urgent question: why travel to exotic locations?

March 04th, 2025

Master Gardener, artist and writer Elspeth Bradbury previously co-authored two books about gardens.

Bradbury chose instead to explore the wonders in her garden, season by season.

Journeys to the Nearby: A Gardener Discovers the Gentle Art of Untravelling by Elspeth Bradbury (Ronsdale Press $26.95)

Review by Caroline Woodward

Journeys lend poignancy to our experience as Elspeth Bradbury notes in Journeys to the Nearby: “When we set foot on unfamiliar ground, all our senses shift into high gear,” she writes. “Our observations grow more acute and we make memories. We feel alive. Uncomfortable, possibly, miserable maybe, but alive.”

As those of us who have read her books know, especially the popular Garden Letters (Polestar Press, 1995), co-written with Judy Maddocks, the Scottish-born Bradbury has a captivating conversational voice. She invites you to settle into your favourite armchair with a beverage of your choice and to read—safely, comfortably—with a trusted guide at your side. This book, adorned with her pen and ink drawings of flora and fauna, is structured like the travel books of Bruce Chatwin, Dervla Murphy or Paul Theroux, only with Bradbury’s dispatches coming from excursions into her garden, not faraway places. Her wry sense of humour, often self-deprecating, makes for a highly relatable travel guide.

Her journey, like so many resolutions, begins in January and falters within the first five minutes as she stares at her bedraggled plants, huddled under chilly Vancouver rain. She discovers, thanks to her trained eye, how unusually the leaves of West Coast winter-hardy hellebores are formed and is smitten by the unexpected fragrance of sweet boxwood shrub blooms; small, white and quite unspectacular to look at but with a divine aroma so welcome to the senses in the midst of January.

Onward to the compost bins, redolent of rotting cabbage and banana peels! Bradbury entertains us with a recollection of marauding black bears which may alarm “tourists from bear-deficient countries,” she says. Bear awareness is now firmly front of mind for herself, fellow gardeners and orchardists but this early dispatch is a good reminder of why that citizen education first began.

Standing near one of the hummingbird feeders, she writes another garden dispatch about Alf, the alpha Anna’s hummingbird, a “tiny tyrant” who guards his winter food source with all the sound and fury a four-gram winged warrior can muster. She takes us by the hand and makes us notice the footprints of squirrels and birds in the snow (“dainty hieroglyphs”) and helps us discover the meaning of the word “petrichor.” Hint: another sensual delight of early spring anywhere in Canada.

In another chapter, we ponder a pond. Then we observe a tasteful stone bird bath adorned with a turtle sculpture. Next, we nearly smell what happens when the neighbourhood racoons joyously use said bird bath as a communal latrine. I dare you not to laugh out loud at this travesty!

It’s no great surprise to learn, as Elspeth Bradbury is a Master Gardener and volunteered as a guide at the acclaimed VanDusen Gardens in Vancouver, that her own garden is a microcosm inspired by great botanical gardens. She has plants from China to the Mediterranean, New Zealand to South America and South Africa as well as cool weather beauties from North America not to mention treasured plants from green-thumbed friends. We also witness Bradbury encountering her “garden” of overgrown salal under the remnants of second-growth forest when she and her family first moved to their West Vancouver home.

Journeys to the Nearby encourages the reader to leave that cozy armchair and to really look at the major and minor changes occurring in our own gardens or nearby parks, boulevards, riversides, beaches, coulees or wherever we can gain access to living plants and trees. What also makes this beautifully written and illustrated book so special is that we read about the author’s interesting life along the way, although she wears her career accomplishments lightly, if at all. She also had a career as an architect and landscape architect. Gardens have anchored her life, given her literal and figurative roots, from the Shetland Islands to New Brunswick and then to British Columbia.

The seasons of the year are deftly interwoven with the seasons of her life, from young mother of three children under the age of five years old, to accomplished professional woman to concerned grandmother foregoing jet-fueled travels for a more contemplative lifestyle, resulting in this garden-themed memoir.

Read it to understand more about birds, mulch, ferns, fungi and rain, to grasp the resilience, adaptability and the signs of suffering emitted by both flora and fauna. Also read it to laugh well and often as when Bradbury’s Scottish thriftiness is completely undone by the sight of original Gastown paving stones. They can be read at random, these short lyrical essays, or read from start to finish, good to the last generous drop, bursting with colours, shapes, smells, history, literature and memories of children playing outdoors, creating whole other worlds with leaves and flowers and cones. Highly recommended!

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Caroline Woodward’s Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper (Harbour, 2015) describes her own triumphs and foggy trials as a gardener in challenging conditions.

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