Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site, in partnership with the Alexander Graham Bell Foundation and Cape Breton University’s Weston Family Visiting Professor in Ecosystem Health and Food Security, Dr. Alana Pindar, are recreating some of Mabel Bell’s gardens.
Mabel Hubbard Bell
Mabel Hubbard Bell was Alexander Graham Bell’s wife and business partner. Deaf from a young age, Mabel was an advocate for education and is recognized as a person of national historic significance. She was also an avid gardener. Baddeck neighbours used to recall her walking through the village, leaning over fences, looking, and chatting about what was growing. Many village gardeners had plants grown from cuttings or seeds she had given them.
The Beinn Bhreagh Hall grounds had many gardens, all planned, managed, and loved by Mabel Bell. There was a fenced kitchen garden near the hall’s kitchen entrance, vegetable gardens between the gardener’s cottage and Beinn Bhreagh Hall as well as on the lake side of the estate, fruit orchards on the hill behind Beinn Bhreagh Hall, and flower gardens. The gardens were both practical and ornamental.
The old fashioned perennial flowers that come up year after year in the same places and are always happy looking and vigorous. They have become to me like old friends, and I should feel very badly to miss them and their greeting.
– Mabel Hubbard Bell
Besides providing food for the Bell family, food from the gardens at Beinn Bhreagh was sold to the public. Mabel had an advanced understanding of the role of bees in pollination and in what we now call food security. During the First World War, she turned the lawns at Beinn Bhreagh into potato fields for the benefit of the local community.
Mabel Bell was an incredible woman with many interests but 3 key passions of Mabel were education, agrology, and conservation. To celebrate Mabel Bell’s love of nature, gardening and growing her own food, and her steadfast support for science and technology, a re-creation of her beloved garden was re-planted in 2022 based on journal entries from over 100 yrs. ago. Mabel Bell’s garden is considered to be a functional living laboratory for all ages on many important aspect of our environment. The garden is divided into 2 key areas: floral and food. Each section is roughly 700 sqrt feet to represent the average size plot of a backyard in Canada. The re-creation can be found on site at Parks Canada Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck, Nova Scotia.
In her Garden Notes (circa 1896) she writes “Then I do want very much to have the wild part of the place a sort of museum for all the wild flowers found growing in Nova Scotia, particularly Cape Breton.”
Dr. Alana Pindar commenced monitoring pollinator activity and the increases in biodiversity that will result from this legacy of Mabel Bell.
Visitors can take home a part of this story with seeds that are available at the Alexander Graham Bell Museum.
In the News
‘A dream come true’: Cape Breton scientist leading project recreating Mabel Bell’s gardens