08/31/2026
🌿 My Special Late Father — A Horticultural Legend 🌿
Looking through these photographs brings back a lifetime of memories.
My father wasn’t simply a landscaper. He was a true horticulturist, and gardening, plants and landscape design were his life.
I grew up beside him. From the time I was about five years old, I was deadheading rhododendrons. At six, I remember him helping me pull the cord on my first lawn mower in our front yard in Brentwood Bay. By the time I was around ten, I was already learning to prune and use landscaping equipment.
Those childhood memories became the foundation of the career I have today.
My father completed a four-year horticultural apprenticeship, training at Government House in Victoria and also working at Butchart Gardens. He believed strongly in education and passed that knowledge on to the people who worked for him, putting many of his employees through years of horticultural training and apprenticeship.
One of his greatest talents was landscape design and bringing old gardens back to life.
He could walk onto a property that had been neglected for years and immediately visualize what it could become. He understood height, proportion, colour, texture, evergreens, flowering times and how every plant would eventually mature within the landscape.
He taught me that you don’t design a garden for how it looks today.
You design it for what it will become.
Tall plants, medium plants and low-growing plants. Cedars and spruce for beautiful backdrops. Different shades of green and blue. Flowers blooming at different times throughout the seasons. Every plant carefully chosen and every placement having a purpose.
So much of what I know today came from watching this man work.
Even though my father is no longer here, I see his influence every time I walk onto a property, pick up my tools, renovate an old garden or stand back and visualize a new landscape.
His knowledge continues through me and through Elite Garden Maintenance & Landscaping.
Dad, you were one of a kind. ❤️🌿
**My father. My teacher. My inspiration.
A true horticulturist and a hortic
