Artist's property rental business is blooming

Artist's property rental business is blooming. Vivian Reiss stands within her backyard textile garden. Staff Photo/JUSTIN SKINNER

Reiss, an artist and urban farmer, has become known in her community for the lush gardens outside her home, which boast a new variety of colourful fruits, vegetables, flowers and other flora on a regular basis.

With more than 35 years of experience gardening in the city, she certainly knows her stuff and has shared her knowledge with countless others after being featured in magazines, books, television shows and even a CBC documentary on the future of cities.

Her Yorkville home is but one of several gardens Reiss tends, with others at rental properties she and her husband Irving own.

While she plants primarily for her own enjoyment, there is little doubt her hard work pays off for others as well. At an office property the Reiss family rents out in midtown Toronto (www.124merton.com), she shares the bounty of a rooftop vegetable garden with tenants, offering up several types of organic vegetables including dozens of varieties of tomatoes for sampling.

She said beautifying her home and other properties seems a natural idea, unusual as it may be in Toronto.

"Instead of giving a cold, uniform look to the city, there's a bit of variety and flavour and people appreciate that," she said. "It's just so pleasurable to have someplace that's beautiful to look at and walk through."

Reiss' home is the crown jewel in her gardening crown, with lofty and colourful stalks of Hungarian broom corn towering over everything from beets and artichokes to rice and cotton plants.

"Last year, I decided I'd move a bit from edibles to wearables, so I thought I'd give cotton a try," she said. "I'm always trying out new plants to see which ones work and which ones are a bit more of a challenge."

To that end, Reiss is constantly mixing things up, adding and subtracting different kinds of plants from her garden. Sometimes she will plant a certain piece of land multiple times a year, replacing spring flowers and plants with summer varieties.

No matter what, she always ensures spring brings new ideas.

"I like to start with a blank slate every year," she said. "I'll plant things I haven't planted before and then whatever happens happens. It's more of a serendipitous thing."

That leads to some disappointments - not every type of plant she tries to plant fares well in the Canadian climate, but her successes far outweigh those that do not turn out.

"I plant some things that never come up, but I think it's just more interesting to keep changing things and seeing so many different plants in all their various phases," she said.

In addition to simply growing flowers and vegetables, Reiss has made sugar from sorghum she has grown and has used her vegetables to make porridge, dye and other typically store-bought fare.

While she does still have copious amounts of fruit and vegetables in her garden, it hardly qualifies as an urban farm. If anything, she has stopped planting some kinds of edible plants because it drew raccoons to her property.

"A farmer would never plant a garden like mine," she said. "I'm not really after yield."

The garden draws the attention of neighbours and passersby, many of whom will stop to thank her for her hard work if they catch her outside tending to her front garden.

"People express such amazement and joy," she said. "Mothers will come by with their children who bring tape measures and watch things grow through the summer."

As impressive as her front yard is, Reiss' backyard textile garden is even more striking, with colours and shapes replicating a Persian carpet, giant knitting needles and wool made of wood and garden hose and a giant wooden elephant in among the bounty of vegetation.

She paints her gardens on massive canvases, which work almost as a humongous panorama and are frequently on display at the Reiss Gallery at 500 College St.

Though Reiss is a practiced hand, cultivating her skills as she has cultivated gardens since moving to Toronto from New York 35 years ago, Reiss is quick to note that most anyone in the city has the possibility to grow something beautiful, even if their garden space is limited to a window box.

She herself started out that way, trying to grow string beans and marigolds on her New York windowsill as a child.

"People shouldn't be afraid to try it or afraid of how much work it is, because it's amazing how much less work it is that you'd think," she said. "The plants do it all themselves, so my advice to anyone is to just start. Just plant something."