“Gardening is learning, learning, learning. That’s the fun of gardens; you are always learning.”
– British actress
Helen Mirren (1945-)
For all her wonderful acting, Dame Helen Mirren never spoke a truer word.
How often have you visited a local nursery and found yourself stumped for an essential piece of information? Caught in that situation, did you turn to the master gardeners you’d seen sitting around a table piled high with their gardening reference books?
I did so mid-May after online research failed to identify a pink-flowered perennial I wanted to add to others I’d planted in a small garden that used to be a gravelly horsetail patch.
Fortunately, gardeners are happy and friendly folk, ever willing to share the tips they’ve gathered over their own years of learning by trial and error. But although I’ve queried master gardeners before, I’ve never gone beyond my immediate question to ask what the designation really means.
Are they professional horticulturalists or “just” enthusiastic gardeners? What special training do they have? Are they volunteers?
This time, although no-one could run my mystery plant to ground, we decided to adjourn our conversation in favour of satisfying some of my curiosity over a cup of coffee — and that’s how I met Linda Marshik, a master gardener since 1994, and MG-in-training Brenda Anderson.
Recently moved to the North Shore, Anderson became interested in the program as a way to learn about the differences between gardening practices in our coastal climate and those of her previous home in Smithers — a much harsher growing zone.
The master gardener program (mgabc.org) is available in several centres throughout B.C., in most other provinces, in Washington and Oregon and in the United Kingdom.
Marshik explained that, with a heavy focus on volunteer service, interested gardeners first take the theory component of a three-month basic training program. Hosted by Vancouver’s world-famous VanDusen gardens, classes are held one day a week and instruction includes volunteering and 10 hours of homework. The course offers training in the areas master gardeners encounter when they are faced with questions home gardeners ask: topics such as choosing and caring for woody and herbaceous perennials; lawn care, pesticide use, composting and growing plants successfully in shady versus sunny gardens.
Continuing education and volunteering are necessary to maintain certification.
Volunteers enjoy interacting with the public as they share their knowledge at garden centres, clinics, schools and care homes.
Arising out of people’s interest in recent 100-mile diet initiatives, the sharp spike in questions about growing vegetables has been especially encouraging. Rewarding, too, are the excited reactions of kindergarten to Grade 3 children when volunteers teach them about different types of pollinators — bees being especially important.
For me, there was a bonus hidden in the information Marshik and Anderson shared.
“If you’d like to know more about the program,” they said, “you should call West Vancouver master gardener Roy Holloway.”
So I did — and lucked into a wonderful hour-long chat that covered not only Holloway’s 22-year history of volunteering and learning, it included the tales of how, unwittingly, he had replicated my own journey from London to a new home in Vancouver.
Laughing, we compared notes about the pocket-handkerchief gardens we had left behind, the tribulations of mastering our cross-country treks from Quebec to Vancouver and the good fortune we each had to find good jobs before the money ran out.
If you’re wondering whether I found the answer to the question that led to this story — yes, I did.
During a later trip to a different garden centre, on a small table at the back, I found two, one-gallon pots of a plant called silene (pronounced sy-lee-nee), a variation of rose campions.
Alongside their cousins, they now have a new home and are blooming right outside my door.
Holloway’s parting advice was for me to plan a call to another West Vancouverite, VanDusen member Nigel Bunning, “He’s been a master gardener longer than I have. He was a farmer, came from Herefordshire, I think.”
And so the circle of unexpected friendships and knowledge widens.
American horticulturist and author Liberty Hyde Bailey once said, “Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.”
Remarkably, Bailey’s biography at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Hyde_Bailey notes: “He dominated the field of horticultural literature, writing some 65 books … efforts to explain botany to lay-people …”
Isn’t that the epitome of the master gardener torch now being carried so ably by Holloway, Marshik, Anderson and, no doubt, by their colleague Nigel Bunning?
My thanks to you all.
After 16 years with the multi-disciplinary Perinatal Programme of B.C. and later in various endeavours in the growing high-tech industry, Elizabeth James now connects the dots every second Wednesday on local, regional and provincial issues. She can be reached via email at [email protected].
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