About Us
At tranquility we are dedicated to creating artful landscapes for humans and animals alike.
Director
Rebecca Catching
Rebecca Catching worked for several landscaping firms in Toronto before starting Tranquility. She works with a diverse team of artistic and horticulturally-passionate people with backgrounds in agriculture, horticulture, tropicals, and soil health.
Ecological Focus
Before her career in landscaping Rebecca lived and worked in Shanghai as a contemporary art curator which gave her a background in working with color, texture and space. She developed an interest in gardening from her mother, who taught her how to identify the native plants which grew in the forest behind their house near Ottawa. After returning from Shanghai in 2018, she got her training in horticulture at Humber College.
She incorporates natives, nativars as well as pollinator-friendly ornamentals which can support the greatest number of bird and insect species. She also utilizes grasses and fruiting shrubs to help support birds through the winter months and includes water features to create drinking and bathing opportunities for birds and insects. Gardens which are full of life always tend to be more interesting and enjoyable helping us de-stress from the sounds of the city.
Design Style
Rebecca's approach to design is both practical and fanciful, incorporating things like sight-lines, texture and a combination of bold and delicate plants to generate interest beyond blooms.
Unlike some designers who mainly work behind a desk, she has developed an understanding of how plants grow in different conditions, which ones can survive without regular irrigation, which ones thrive in this climate, and which natives tend to do well in urban environments. As part of her research, she buys many new natives each year for trial in her family's garden.
Her design focuses on flora and fauna over hardscaping, an approach which tends to be more budget-friendly. In one case, a client who had a very low budget had a pile of wood to move and she also needed edging. She and her team arranged the wood as edging to create a spiral pattern with different plants growing within the rings. Her gardens reflect the unique personalities of their owners as much as they do her own artistic vision—offering colour and variety, sound and scent throughout the seasons.
Approach To Maintenance
We take a holistic approach to caring for your garden, while always trying to keep ecological principles at the forefront of our maintenance practice. From battery-powered tools which emit less noise and no emissions, to environmentally-friendly pest reduction, to sustainable fertilizers (no synthetics or peat), to leaving stems for insects to overwinter in spring and fall and using leaves and debris as natural mulch, we strive to tread lightly on the earth.
For us, maintenance is more than cleaning, pruning, and deadheading; it's a chance to take stock of your garden's overall health and make surethat it is headed in the right direction. We spend a lot of time trouble-shooting irrigation problems and tweaking irrigation systems to make sure that your plants are getting adequate moisture without being waterlogged.
One of our big passions is soil health and in addition to having an in-house expert trained in the Soil Food Web program, we work very closely with a professional supplier of compost and soil amendments to get recommendations on which amendments work best in which situation. We aim to foster beneficial microbial activity and mycorrhizal networks that help your plants absorb more nutrients and develop better resilience. By creating a rich and ecologically diverse soil, we also help to maintain your investment and combat climate change.
