We didn’t come to gardening as experts.
For years, we admired gardens from the sidelines. We were urban dwellers with a love of plants and not much space to grow. But after spending several years in the UK, our perspective on gardening changed completely.
There, gardens felt like personal expression. They were part of the culture. Even the smallest spaces carried beauty, mood and a bit of magic.
When we returned to Ontario, the contrast was hard to ignore. Gardening here often felt compressed into a two-week rush around Victoria Day, followed by garden centre sell-offs in June. This had become “gardening season”, a season shaped more by retail calendars than by the joy of gardening itself.
People blamed the climate. But it wasn’t the climate. It was the culture.
And we knew it didn’t have to be that way.
The Farm Years
In 2020, our family moved to a farm and started planting. We named it Kawartha Family Farm.
What began as a desire to create a particular kind of garden quickly became a massive experiment. Over the next five years, we planted and observed more than 15,000 perennials, testing hundreds of varieties to see what actually held up in a lasting garden.
Some plants surprised us. Some failed completely. Others became plants we returned to again and again.
The farm became our laboratory. It gave us a place to test plants, growing methods and ideas about what a garden could be.
We spent years planting, moving and taking apart what we had built until the spaces became clearer. At times, it felt as though we had poured a pool of concrete and were slowly chipping away at it to reveal something beautiful.
The Next Chapter: Honest Perennial Co.
Honest Perennial Co. continues the work that began on the farm.
What we learned became two guides. The Immersive Garden Guide covers the design system, while The Honest Perennial Guide covers the plants themselves. Our Design Blocks bring the two together as complete, ready-to-plant gardens.
The farm chapter of our lives has closed, but the ideas behind it continue. We want to help gardeners understand their plants more clearly and create gardens that last.
Each season, we also grow and offer a small batch of perennials from our palette. We’re not a traditional nursery. Think of us more like a local bakery, with a fresh and limited supply of plants we’ve nurtured individually.
Gardening as Creative Work
We believe gardening is creative work. In that spirit, we’ll continue developing tools and sharing what we know so that more gardeners can experiment, create and make informed choices of their own.
We’re doing that while building our own new gardens, this time from a much more informed starting point.
We still believe garden culture is something we build, one gardener at a time.
Stephen and Shelley Hood
& Family