This year, our August Garden Tour will be a guided tour of the Yoga Fellowship Temple property on Tuesday, August 19th, at 6:30 p.m., rain or shine!
Because this is a guided tour, you must register in advance. Registration opens on Saturday, July 19th at 9am and closes on Monday, August 18th at 6pm.
A reminder that GardenKitchener Garden Tours are open to active members only. If you need to purchase a 2025 membership, you can do so online here.
About the property:
Back in the 1970s, Dr.Bedesee bought 33 acres of land on the outskirts of Kitchener. Over the years he built a yoga meditation center and a recreation facility that has a dining room, kitchen and a lounge. His daughter Nadia (our guide) remembers her dad silently handing her Patrick Lima’s book on Perennials. He planted the seed in her that eventually led to the creation of a six-acre garden. The other 27 acres are rented to a local farmer who does a three-crop rotation of corn, wheat and soybeans.
The six-acre garden is bordered by tall trees with a large open area dotted with trees and several garden spaces. There is a 100-foot-long memorial garden planted in honour of Dr. Bedessee who passed away in 2008. This flower bed has large masses of daylilies, phlox, coneflowers, roses, daisies, false sunflower, rose campion and sedum. Another garden at the back of the space was originally a vegetable bed that has gradually had flowering plants incorporated into it. A current favourite of Nadia’s is the dahlia. Beautiful red dahlia plants are interspersed with the garlic, tomato, squash, bitter melon and pepper plants. In the middle of the field where a cricket pitch used to be is a four square garden that again combines flowers and vegetable plants, raspberry bushes and two American Hazelnut trees. There is a long row of comfrey that is harvested three times a season and is used as a compost accelerator for the compost beds tucked discretely away at the back of the garden’s lot. A challenge for the garden is preventing voles from eating the vegetables.
What is especially amazing is that Nadia maintains the six acres with a small group of dedicated volunteers. Nadia has many more ideas, such as sharing the vegetable bounty and planting more native plants, that she would love to see happen with more volunteers and different group partnerships. For example, the GRCA has planted a row of pines near the back of the garden.