The Bay of Quinte is nearly glass this morning. A sailboat is moored at anchor and a scant breeze lazily nudges the craft and its reflection. To one side is a view of the Bay Bridge, far enough away not to hear the sound of vehicles crossing. In the other direction, the shoreline curves around the bend making its way west toward other communities along the water’s edge. Facing the bay is a collection of cheerful stone-clad homes. It is a quiet enclave that embodies peace. To Alanna and Boyd this place is the sum of a half century of decisions.
Alanna sets the scene for our visit: “This has been a process of probably 50 years of cleaning and fixing up and changing the area from a little cottage to the home we now enjoy.” The property has been in Boyd’s family for nearly his whole life. Reaching back he recovers a memory of an incident that happened on this very spot involving a creek that ran straight into the bay. “When I was two years old, I almost drowned in it,” he explains with a slight smile. “So now, 65 years later, I finally got it moved and enhanced it.”
A Vision, and the Person to Help Build It
The creek is also where the recent chapter begins. For decades it behaved like a ditch: it filled with water when it rained, and the rest of the time, in Boyd’s words, it looked messy and unkept. He and Alanna had a vision for their property, and the patience to wait for the right conditions and the right approvals.
“Last fall, Kyle helped us with a major change, which was taking the little creek that went beside the trees along here to the bay and redirecting it,” Alanna explains.
With Conservation Authority permission in hand, the work became a collaboration rather than a transaction. This is the part Boyd really enjoyed. Kyle and the Green Acres team is operating heavy equipment and the homeowners are able to interact in real time. “It makes life easier because you don’t have to draw your design on a page, give it to someone, and then come back and say, oh, you made this mistake or that mistake,” he says. “When you’re working hands-on with Kyle’s team, you’re working together and you deal with things as they come up. You end up with something that fits the site.”
What they envisioned for the creek solution was anything but a straight line. “We’ve come up with something we think is a little more aesthetically pleasing,” Boyd says modestly.
The creek, redirected into a curve that fits the shoreline.
Alanna describes how that elegant design came to be, standing in the yard with Kyle and his excavator. “Boyd would just say, I’d like to kind of curve it and have it come out to the water. And Kyle just knew what to do.” With established trees in close proximity, it took a careful approach. “They worked so well together as a team,” she says. “It took a couple of days. It wasn’t a fast thing to do, but over a couple of days he made great progress.”
The Small Strokes
If the creek was the large gesture, the yard is where the collaboration turned to the finer touches. Alanna and Boyd are hands-on people, the kind who want to be involved rather than handed a finished result, and they found in Kyle someone willing to work that way. Their exquisite Japanese garden came together stone by stone involving heavy equipment. “We had to pick the stones,” Alanna says. “Kyle would come and he’d give input. That one looks good, and that one looks good. He kind of had an idea of what I wanted, and he placed them, and I’d say, oh, maybe a little more this way, a little more that way. So it was fun.” The result has become part of her daily life. “I love this garden,” she says. “Every time I’m in the kitchen, I look out and I see it and it’s just perfect.”
Stone set one piece at a time, with input from the owners at every step.
The same care governed the more technically challenging jobs. When a large tree had to come down near the dwelling, the goal was to remove it without leaving a wound in everything around it. “We took a huge tree from a group near the house,” Boyd says. “But when we were finished it didn’t look like a tornado went through. We’ve done it selectively and carefully and not damaged everything else in the vicinity.” It is a principle the couple returns to often: advance the property without tearing it apart. Alanna says. “You want to have a balance of keeping what you’ve got without destroying anything unnecessarily.”
That instinct turned a problem into one of the property’s quiet successes. Behind the carriage house stood roughly a hundred dead ash trees because of the ash borer problem of the past decade. Once the trees were felled, the family was left with rough, weed-prone ground and an enormous pile of branches. “My idea was to have Kyle help me, and we used the mulch to create a woodland garden,” Alanna says. What had been a liability became a feature. “That was just like, oh, here’s another thing we could do,” she says. “Even though it was already two weeks into the [waterfront work], we’ll just extend this job, make it three weeks.”
Working in Real Time
Ask Alanna and Boyd what set the experience apart, and they describe a kind of responsiveness that is hard to schedule and easy to appreciate. “Something would come up,” Boyd says, “Kyle would get in the truck, go to the shop, come back with the right piece of equipment. In real time. We’re not thinking, oh, we’ve got to wait three weeks.” When they needed soil to level and top up, Kyle brought his own. “Truckload after truckload after truckload of his own soil,” Alanna says. “He was so good to do that, and obliging.”
Their willingness to be part of the work shaped both the outcome and the cost. “We did this path and all these rocks, and someone said, ‘I bet that cost a lot of money,’” Boyd recalls. Without naming the exact amount, Boyd shares that the invoice from Green Acres was a fraction of what people might guess. He attributes a great deal of this value to collaborating with Kyle and being able to steer the outcome in a direction that considered a balance between needs and expenditures.
The path and stonework a visitor guessed had cost a quarter of a million dollars.
The Way Kyle Sees It
Kyle Hokkanen, the owner of Green Acres Forestry and Landscaping, describes his work in almost the same terms his clients do: “It always starts with a problem, and there’s always a solution.” The next step involves the same question every time: “How can we solve this and bring their vision to reality?”
The distinction he draws is between moving earth and shaping it. “Anyone can come in and move dirt around,” he says. “It takes someone with a bit of vision and a lot of patience and a lot of hard work to do it artfully.” It is, plainly, the part he loves. “Running equipment is boring,” he says. “But turning landscapes into art is fun.” And the reward comes later, on the return visit. “Being able to come back to these spaces after you do them and see how people utilize them, how much it transforms their property, and just the joy that it brings people,” he says. “I’m just glad we could be a part of the collaboration.”
Underneath the craft is a way of working he keeps coming back to. “We have great relationships with our clients because I make that my first priority,” he says. “Being a man of my word: if we say we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it.” And underneath that, a philosophy about the land itself. “We are an Earth first company,” he insists. “We try to do everything respectfully, with nature in mind.” He searches a moment for the word he wants. “To be a steward of nature,” he says.
New Chapters Are Beginning
There is more to come. There are more homes planned for Boyd and Alanna’s property on the bay, and there are stakes in the ground marking where the next chapter will begin. The meandering waterfront path is already established so residents can picture the life that is theirs to enjoy. Other pending elements include a woodland garden Alanna intends to extend along the creek and more trees she wants to plant to finish the whole area. “What we see now is still a work in progress,” says Boyd. And as plans come together, the couple are already making a list of collaborative projects they’ll work on with Kyle and the Green Acres team.
Boyd and Alanna’s waterfront — the creek redirected, the stonework, and the garden it became.
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