Artists and Vendors

Each year local plein air artists and artisan vendors are invited to display their works in selected gardens. View their profiles, contact information, and preferred payment options for purchases made on the tour or at at later date.

Meet the Vendors

Heather Benjamin

Heather Benjamin

With over 20 years of experience as a professional florist, Heather has a keen eye for design and a passion for all things botanical. After years of working with flowers, she has found a new medium for her creativity: cement. Heather crafts stepping stones, bird baths, alpine troughs, and whimsical mushrooms to add playfulness to any garden as well as bespoke outdoor dining tables with reinforced polished cement tops and solid cedar bases ( custom sizes available). 

Sharon Bognar

Sharon grows her own gourds and transforms them into bird feeders. She either paints the gourds or uses paper mache methods to transform them into various bird and animal forms.  Sharon will have seeds for anyone who may be interested in growing this wonderful art material.  

Foraged Floral Design

Foraged Floral Design is a nature-inspired floral studio known for its organic, artfully arranged bouquets and installations. Drawing on seasonal blooms and wild, foraged elements, their designs feel effortless yet intentional—blending texture, movement, and colour in a way that reflects the beauty of the natural landscape. Whether for weddings, events, or everyday arrangements, Foraged Floral Design brings a fresh, modern approach to floristry with a focus on creativity and storytelling through flowers.

Anja Kooistra

Anja Kooistra is the creative Artisan who founded Rolling Hills Creative Studio in
2011, tucked away in the rolling countryside of Sunderland, in the North Durham region.

In Spring 2018, she expanded her business and refurbished a rustic barn, located on
her property, into a warm and welcoming new workshop space that can
accommodate larger groups, along with providing her more space to create custom
pieces.

With reference to the female form and her love for animals, Anja creates and
transforms unique sculptures. Each of her sculptures is brimming with personality,
enhancing the beauty and delight of gardens and interior spaces.

Working with various fabrics and other recycled materials presents unique
challenges and possibilities – and it has given Anja an unusual freedom in creating
sculpture and art.

The medium she uses to sculpt her figurines is a non-toxic, environmentally friendly
universal hardener.

Mike’s Magic Compost

You will be able to check out the various composts that are a thermal-composted blend of aerobically processed horse manure and soft-wood bedding substrate enriched with beer mash. Compost is a soil additive that will help to regenerate your soil. It will improve your soil’s structure, add organic matter, boost microbial life and hold moisture. Also can be used as a top dressing to regulate the temperature of your plants and prevent soil erosion. Now available in a fine, screened version as well as the original M3 product. All products have a rich, organic smell and won’t attract flies or ‘burn’ your garden like fresh or even aged horse manure.

Sally Morgan

A love of gardening, including lavender, perennials and herbs, has been a core passion since a very early age of Sally as she was growing up in the UK. At our property a key component was to create a safe place for guests to mingle, relax and restore their energy and is the very essence of what our lavender farm is all about. Our quaint cabin space contains a curated collection of vintage items along with garden and home products, many either created here from our lavender or sourced from nearby artisans.

Stone Haven North Perennials

If you were on the 2022 garden tour, you would have visited Marie’s garden. She will be joining us this year to sell some of the perennial plants that she propagates and divides from her garden.

  • Payment Options: Cash

Valleyview Landscapes

Valleyview Landscapes is a small, boutique, design and construction company, with a strong focus on detail, and truly customized design. Using both natural stone, and timber materials to create lasting and inviting hardscapes, which always suits the environment fully.

Tracy Walker

Tracy Walker is an illustrator, designer, and photographer based in Uxbridge. You may already know her work — from the distinctive packaging of the Second Wedge, to the branding behind Blue Heron bookstore, to the street banners that bring a little colour to our town. Beyond our main street, Tracy has designed postage stamps for both Canada Post and the USPS, and created imagery for IKEA and Prada.

At the heart of it all is a deep love of nature — and the quiet inspiration she finds whenever she’s lost in her garden.

Meet the Plein Air Artists

Margaret Grandison

As an en plein air artist Margaret is drawn to the play of light and shadows. She enjoys immersing herself into the landscape to experience the sights and sounds that inspire her. She likes to add a touch of whimsy and playfullness of colour to her paintings using watercolors.

John Martin

John Martin

John Martin is a Mandala Artist and Plain Air Painter. He uses a variety of traditional and non-traditional media to create vivid pieces of art that he sells to raise money for the Canada-Ukraine Foundation Humanitarian Relief Fund..

Magnolia Take Over Laurel Martin

Laurel Martin

Laurel Martin is a landscape painter whose vivid colours and bold shapes reflect her years as a linocut printmaker. She now loves the thrill and immediacy of painting outdoors with oils. Painting outdoors requires you to react spontaneously to the landscape and gives you a chance to capture a fleeting moment in time.  It’s a different process from printmaking which is very planned.  You never know what will happen when you paint outside.  It’s exciting!

Ray McNeice

Ray has a painting style that is a product of his long career in graphic design… a concern for shape and form, eye movement and spatial relationships. His medium of choice has been transparent watercolour.

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Sjeli Pearse

“I am a tattoo artist, painter, homesteader and mom living and working in Sandford Ontario. My work varies from abstract, to detailed representation. Regardless of whichever style I’m working in, my focus remains the same.  Lately my work reflects themes of duality, contradiction, social commentary and nostalgia. At the core, the art I make comes from a reverent love of colour and deciphering the human experience.”

Michelle Richards-Clermont

“I grew up in the Muskoka bush surrounded by nature. I spent hours exploring which in turn changed to drawing then painting my beloved forest and lakeside. I am an art deducator and full time artist. I begin and end my day with art, no matter where I am.

I love experimenting, my creation process includes studies of my new subject before beginning a larger piece. I have many unbound sketchbooks filled with sketches and paintings tracking my progress. 

Plein air painting allows me to escape into the location and let it guide my brush. Watercolours are my preferred medium outdoors, and oils, printmaking, and handicrafts in the studio. 

You can find me at local events sitting and Arting in the night.”

Elvira Sloan

Elvira Sloan is a self taught artist working in many mediums, but finds oils enjoyable for plein air painting.
Elvira subjects are animals and farm lands.

Linda Virio

Linda Virio is a painter working with wax and watercolour. Traditional watercolour, watercolour batik on rice paper, and encaustic are her media of choice. She is fascinated by the tactile nature of wax and how it interacts with pigment, collage, mark making and texture. Gardens and country landscapes are Linda’s favourite subjects.