Keppel Croft Gardens, A Horticultural Treasure on the Bruce Peninsula

Welcome to Keppel Croft Gardens

Bill and Dawn Loney

Welcome to Keppel Croft, the home and gardens of Bill and Dawn Loney. Every year Bill and I, and the gardens, get older and, we hope, more interesting!

Bill is the guiding garden spirit at Keppel Croft Gardens. He's a self taught gardener whose interest, he readily confesses, became a hobby, which in turn became a passion and then an obsession! I grew up in New Zealand where my parents kept an extensive garden.

For a number of years we lived in the Eastern Arctic where all our gardening was done in juice cans. The serendipitous purchase of our farm at Big Bay, Ontario, in 1977 allowed us to contemplate gardening on a larger scale. The original garden included a bank of lilacs, several old apple trees, a clump of rhubarb, two blue columbines and a tulip. Little did we know that we would be gardening on a prehistoric beach with a skim of topsoil over three metres of gravel.

The large rock garden is an on-going project.

The four acres of gardens at Keppel Croft include perennial borders as well as rock gardens, xeriscape gardens, a zen garden and a woodland garden. There are several ponds as well as numerous art installations. Our collection of lilacs is growing with additions each year. Among plans for this gardening season, Bill hopes to complete the dry stream bed, a project that has taken several years already. We also hope to renovate the iris beds and the old vegetable garden which got overshadowed by trees.

The Nature Trail offers our visitors an opportunity to stroll through the arboretum and the fields to our hardwood bush. There are numerous benches along the way to entice you to sit and enjoy the serenity of Keppel Croft. This trail also gives you access to our volunteers' vegetable garden as well as to picnic sites. In the fields you will also find Keppel Henge and the new analemma project.

Bring your picnic and experience a memorable visit to Keppel Croft and beautiful rural Grey County! We invite you to discover more about Keppel Croft.

Web Designer's Note:

Just like our gardens, our website is a work in progress. There are great plans but not enough time! I hope to update the website this spring, and add more pages.

If you can't wait for that to happen, come and visit us and see the gardens for yourself. And if you can't manage that, try finding a copy of the May, 2013, edition of Canadian Gardening which features a very generous article on Keppel Croft Gardens.