A living art gallery Spindletree Gardens


By Dorothy Dobbie Photos by Veronica Sliva


Above: The bridge over the spillway and Long Pond.


“Ideas can come unbidden from fragments of a leaf or a bird call or the way the light lies on paving stones in the early morning . . .“


you have been magically transported across the seas. This is no ordinary garden nor does the singular here reflect the reality. Spindletree is a series of large rooms and gardens that sprawl, with careful design, across eight hectares that were once farmland. It all started with the 100-year-old farm-


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house that Tom and Susan purchased as a place to retire away form the vicissitudes of city life. Tom, who spent 40 years as an ar- chitect, had in the latter years been creating landscapes for the buildings he designed. This, combined with his mother’s love of gardening and his imprinting experience as an 11-year-old working for the grower of a million gladiolas, was a natural evolution that seemed to get more compelling as he aged.


Now 73, Tom declares that he is nearly


done building this dream, the latest mani- festation of which is a curved 4,000-square- foot orangery (much more than a simple greenhouse) next to a 450,000-litre reser- voir, masquerading as a water feature called


26 • Summer 2012


t’s a little bit of England in the middle of Ontario. When you walk into Spin- dletree, the gardens of Tom Brown and Susan Meisner, you feel at though


Jubilee Pond, to overcome issues such as the drought he experienced last year. The mas- querade includes a walkway over the water with an island garden of trees and shrubs in the centre, a “small emerald isle set in a sil- ver sea”, he says. The new greenhouse is a wonder in itself, featuring a curved design and 60 French doors that have each received three coats of paint (everything he does is meticulous). Now, says Tom, he can add a Victorian fernery and grow things such as Himala- yan Blue Poppies that need coaxing in this part of Ontario, at Tamworth, 250 km east of Toronto. This marvel encompasses luxu- ries such as a misting system that will spray 40-degree water into the air to create the precise climate needed by his favourites. But this is only a micro shot of the big pic-


ture, the harvest of 20 years’ worth of inno- vation, creativity and backbreaking labour. After renovating – gutting and rebuilding, really – the century-old farmhouse, he be- gan garden with a cedar shake fence along the driveway. Then came the addition of the swimming pool at the south side of the house to complement the gardens that were already taking shape in his mind. “The 20-foot-high curved granite prom-


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