The gardening style of Diana Dhaliwal
down, through the still pond near the carriage house and across the exten- sive lawn to light up, finally, the rustic harrow under the giant pine. It paints everything in its path with a magic glow, stirring the dew from the grass and waking up the shadows under the birch clump and the crabapple tree as it passes. There is a quiet sense of lives well
T
lived in this garden that hugs a centu- ry-old brick house on Wellington Cres- cent. “We are only the third owners of this
20 • Beautiful Gardens 2014
he early morning sunlight slips through the garden, over the little mountain at the end and
house,” says Diana Dhaliwal, a retired physician originally from London, England. She and her husband Dhali bought the house a decade ago, arriv- ing here by way of Thunder Bay, where they spent the better part of their married lives with their two children, a boy and a girl. The house was built on land owned
by “Bird” Wright, who acquired the property following the Fenian threat of 1871, which apparently caused great excitement in the then tiny town along the Red. In 1910, a land developer, Charles Simpson, and his wife Myrna built the house for $26,000 on what was then nothing more than a pathway
along the Assiniboine River. To access the property, you had travel down Portage and then cross the railway bridge, something many local residents still do. It was a fine house, with a staff of
five including a full-time maid, chauf- feur and governess, and a lovely coach house which never housed a carriage. The Simpsons had one cow and two horses but never a buggy. Sonya Campbell Wright bought the
house from the original family back in the fifties, when she recorded this inter- esting history after interviewing a Mrs. Christie, who was the second oldest child of the Simpsons.
localgardener.net
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