April 13th meeting & Figaro's Garden Workshops

 Hi Folks,

We’ll be having a Grandview Garden Club meeting this coming Thursday, April 13th, in person! We will meet at 7:30, at the 55+ Room at Britannia Centre. This is right across from the Info Centre at Brit on your left if you’re walking west from the Drive, before you get to the library. 

Note the time is 7:30!

Our speaker is GGC member Betsy Jones, artist and Master Gardener. Betsy studied Graphic Design and Communication Arts at Douglas College, and has twice been invited to Stiwdio Maelor in Wales, UK as an Artist in Residence. She will share some of her botanical art as well as her experiences in Wales, including her visit to the printmaking department at the beautiful University of Aberystwyth and to Bodnant Garden, an exceptional 80-acre National Trust property. Because it’s face-to-face, we will be allowing $4 drop-ins, so bring your friends.

We’ll have tea and cookies and door prizes. It’ll be just like the old days, pre-Covid!

Also, I received this timely message from GGC member Andrea Bellamy, below, and thought you all would be keen on some of the workshops Figaro’s will be offering this spring. (Apologies if you’re already on Fig’s mailing list and receive this info twice…)

Cheers,

Penny

Penny Street

grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com

Hi Penny,

I’m looking forward to meeting everyone at my first meeting with the club next week, but in the meantime I wanted to introduce myself and let you know about some upcoming events that may be of interest to members. I’ve recently joined the team at Figaro’s Garden (a dream job, really, after nearly two decades in post-secondary education coupled with a similar length of time doing garden writing and teaching). Part of my role at Fig’s is to organize workshops, and we’ve got three coming up this month:

• Houseplant Repotting Clinic - April 12
• Earth Day Tree Walk - April 22 (Free; marks the launch of our new Waste-free Growing line of products* and the kick off of our East Van Tree Mapping project**)
• Small-Space Tree & Shrub Workshop - April 26 The first in a series of small-space gardening workshops)

*A line of products packaged in responsible, plastic-free (and in some cases, refillable) packaging. The 21 products include indoor, outdoor, and specialty potting soils; fertilizers and amendments; and bird seed. 

**Hartley, the owner of Figaro’s Garden, has had the idea for an East Van Tree Map simmering at the back of his creative brain for years. Think of it as a map of interesting, rare, and unusual trees around the neighbourhood — kind of like those Hollywood Stars maps, but for stellar trees. If members know of any outstanding, publicly viewable trees in Grandview Woodlands, we’d love to hear about them.

Thanks, Penny! Please share part or all if appropriate.

Cheers,

Andrea

Upcoming Events and Activities

Hello and Happy Spring (as of 2:24 p.m. March 20th!) —

Save these Dates!  If you put them on your calendar now, you won’t forget them.

Thursday, April 13th

Our next Grandview Garden Club meeting will be Thursday, April 13th, in person & face-to-face, 7:30, at the 55+ Room at Britannia Centre. The speaker is GGC member Betsy Jones, artist and Master Gardener. Betsy studied Graphic Design and Communication Arts at Douglas College, and has twice been invited to Stiwdio Maelor in Wales, UK as an Artist in Residence. She will share some of her botanical art as well as her experiences in Wales, including her visit to the printmaking department at the beautiful University of Aberystwyth and to Bodnant Garden, an exceptional 80-acre National Trust property.  Because it’s face-to-face, we will be allowing $4 drop-ins, so you'll be welcome even if you aren't a member for 2023.

Saturday, May 6th

Grandview-Woodland Area Council (GWAC’s) Annual General Meeting. Attend! Or you may want to run or could encourage a friend to to run for the GWAC board. See the GWAC Website for details. 

Also Saturday, May 6th

The Seed to Sky Plant Sale, 11;00-2:00, Cityview Church, 4370 Sophia Street (at 28th) – A great selection of plants, including perennials, herbs, and veggie starts. Cash only and bring a container to carry your plants!

Saturday, May 13th

VanDusen is hosting a small plant sale this year, 10:00-4:00, at Bloedel Conservatory Plaza at Queen Elizabeth Park, featuring food plants for humans and pollinators. 

Sunday, May 14th, Mother’s Day 

Grandview Garden Club’s Annual Plant Sale will take place at our usual location on Rose Street. A large selection of unusual plants, perennials, herbs, annual flowers, and veggie starts. Cash only and bring a container to carry your plants!

Sunday, June 18th, Father’s Day

The East Vancouver Garden Tour of a dozen or so splendid private gardens in East Van. Tickets are $20 and will be available at Figaro’s, online, and through Britannia. For more info, email or visit the website.

Our March 2023 Meeting

We’re hosting this month’s Grandview Garden Club meeting on Zoom. The meeting will start at 7:00 p.m. to accommodate our speaker, entomologist and wasp expert, Rob Longair who will be joining us from Ontario.

Rob has spent almost half a century studying insect behaviour, ecology, and diversity, including doing field research in Canada, the western United States, West Africa, and Belize. He developed an appreciation for what E.O. Wilson called “the little things that run the world” during an undergraduate degree at Queen’s University and has focused on insects ever since. He is particularly interested in the behaviour of solitary and social wasps, although he concentrates on solitary species, which are less likely to sting him. After retiring from a faculty position at University of Calgary, where he spent 27 years teaching a wide variety of courses, his favourite of which were field courses, he returned to the Ottawa area where he grew up. He now lives on an acre and a quarter, which he has allowed to revert to meadow from its formerly manicured state. He currently volunteers at the Canadian National Collection of Insects and Arachnids in Ottawa.

Here’s a description of Rob's talk, “Wasps in the Garden: The Furies, Pest Control, or Just Doing Their Best To Make More?”:

For many people, the sight of a wasp brings nervousness or, at worst, sheer terror. Will it sting me? What good are these things, anyway? Tonight, we’ll see if we can answer those questions and a few others. What, exactly, is a wasp? How do they help maintain populations of pests (real pests) in the garden or fields at numbers that allow us to grow what we want, at least most of the time. We’ll take a look at some species of wasps that lay their eggs in other insects, some that make nests by themselves and store food for their young, or the most familiar, and most feared, that live in groups of mostly sisters and feed their young with vast quantities of insects, many of which would be eating our flowers and vegetables. No, they aren’t all our friends, doing just what we want. And yes, we’ll even mention those big, disturbing hornets that have recently been identified not too far from Vancouver.

Zoom start time this month will be 7:00. We will be meeting on Zoom and our meeting link will only be sent to current members. If you'd like to join before the meeting, we'll send you the link.

(Note: this will be our last meeting via Zoom for the time being. Next month we will return to in-person meetings at the Britannia 55+ Centre. Our start times then will be 7:30 P.M. because there’s another Britannia program in the space that ends after 7:00. Once we’re meeting face-to-face again, we can resume the $4 drop-ins so people who aren’t yet members can come to the occasional meeting. We had to suspend drop-ins during Zoom/Covid, so it’ll be good to have them back. Do bring your non-member friends from April onward.)

Cheers,

Penny

PS - Our GGC Annual Plant Sale will be on Sunday, May 14th, at our usual venue on Rose St. If you are dividing plants or starting seedlings this spring, please pot up any extras for the sale. We’ll provide more details in our April meeting message.

Please note: We will not be able to accept plant/soil donations from any members who live in the Japanese Beetle regulated area west of Clark Drive. 

See this map: https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/japanese-beetle-regulated-area.pdf

And plan ahead to join us for our East Vancouver Garden Tour. We’re once again having it on Father’s Day, which, this year, is Sunday, June 18th. Please note it on your calendar and we’ll tell you more about it soon.

grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com

Grandview Garden Club meeting, October 13th, 7:30 in the 55+ Seniors Centre at Britannia

GGC will be meeting face-to-face on Thursday, October 13th. There will be no Zoom this month! 

• This month's meeting will start at 7:30 p.m. 
• Also, because Britannia Elementary is using our regular old meeting room, the LRC, as a classroom this year, we have a new Britannia meeting space, the 55+ Seniors Centre. It’s a lovely space and we’re assured we can use it from now on, but we can’t occupy the room until 7:30.

Our speaker this month is Alex Downie, and his presentation will focus on tree selection for urban gardens and fundamentals of tree care.  Trees suitable for smaller gardens will be highlighted, along with those likely to succeed in our warming climate. 

Alex began his horticultural career at the UBC Botanical Garden where he gained his Trades Gardener qualification. He then worked at VanDusen Botanical Garden, mentored by founding curator Roy Forster. In 1993 Alex went on to supervise Bloedel Conservatory and Queen Elizabeth Park for about twenty years. His responsibilities grew when in 2012 he became Supervisor of General Parks for the City of Vancouver. Alex capped off the last seven years of his 37 year career as Manager of Specialty Parks and Urban Forestry for the Vancouver Park Board.   

Alex co-wrote the book "The Woodland Garden" published in 2004. He is a Certified Arborist, holds a National Diploma in Horticulture, and earned a degree in Business Administration from Simon Fraser University in 2005.  Alex co-founded the Vancouver Palm and Exotic Plant Society and is a lifetime member of the International Dendrological Society.

After retiring this spring Alex now spends his time travelling with his wife, working in his garden, and enjoying his classic car hobby.

We will start at 7:30 and end by 9:00.

Please be sure to wear a mask for everyone’s comfort.

We will have tea and goodies and a few door prizes. One of our door prizes this month is a beautiful fall arrangement that will thrive well into the winter. It was put together for us at Southlands nursery. Another prize is the Thomas Hobbs book Shocking Beauty, a real classic.

Try to remember to bring your own teacup. 

As well, bring along your gardening friends who aren’t quite ready to join the club but want to come to the occasional meeting. Now that we’re back to meeting in person, we are happy to be reinstating our $4 drop-ins.

Please bring a sample of something beautiful or interesting from your garden on the day of the meeting.

Bring and wear a mask.

Bring a tea cup.

Bring a friend. 

Bring a sample.

See you there!

Questions? Send us an e-mail at grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com.

Grandview Garden Club meeting, September 8th

Grandview Garden Club is meeting face-to-face on Thursday, September 8th. No Zoom this month! But please be sure to wear a mask. Drop-ins for non-members, $4.

Our speaker is Lori Weidenhammer ("Madame Beespeaker") who will give a presentation on Growing Herbs for Humans and Bees. She will focus on plants that are medicinal and appetizing for humans and our favourite pollinators. Many edible and medicinal plants are a boon for humans and bees. Find out how you can create an “herbaliscious” garden that fills your pantry while feeding pollinators. Lori will focus on some edible annuals that are easy to grow and some perennial “keystone” herbs which are an essential part of the infrastructure of a healthy pollinator garden.

Lori Weidenhammer is a Vancouver performance-based interdisciplinary artist and educator. She is originally from a tiny hamlet called Cactus Lake, Saskatchewan. It was in this place, bordered by wheat fields and wild prairie, that she first became enchanted with bees.

For the past several years she has been appearing as the persona Madame Beespeaker, practising the tradition of “telling the bees”. As a food security volunteer and activist Lori works with students of all ages on eating locally and gardening for pollinators. On occasion, she likes to dress up in silly costumes and talk to bees.

 

Lori's web site is Victory Gardens for Bees. Follow Lori on Instagram @beespeaker.

This is going to be an in-person meeting and Lori will bring copies of her book, Victory Gardens for Bees: A DIY Guide to Saving the Bees, published by Douglas and MacIntyre. The list price is $26.95. Please bring cash or a cheque if you think you might like a copy.

You're sure to enjoy this meeting. We will meet in the "LRC" — the Learning Resources Centre, which is downstairs from the Britannia VPL library branch. As you're walking west toward the library, veer left on the walkway, walk alongside the library, and you'll come to a ramp entry to the LRC on your right. We start at 7:00 and end before 9:00.

Please be sure to wear a mask for everyone’s comfort.

We will have tea and goodies and a few door prizes. Try to remember to bring your own teacup. 

As well, bring along your gardening friends who aren’t quite ready to join the club but want to come to the occasional meeting. Now that we’re back to meeting in person, we are happy to be reinstating our $4 drop-ins.

Questions? Send us an e-mail at grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com.

What’s beautiful or interesting in your garden this month? Please bring a sample of something from your garden.

So... Bring a mask, a cup, a friend, a cutting or plant from your garden. See you there!

Grandview Garden Club — Back to face-to-face meetings!

 We will be meeting masked-face-to-masked-face this month, June 9, 2022! No Zoom!

Our speaker is Ben Stormes, and he has agreed to present in person. His topic is Designing Resilient Gardens. 

Here’s his description: 

Heat domes, atmospheric rivers, and deep freezes have all come our way over the past year, testing us as gardeners and our gardens themselves. To help overcome these challenges, and the unknown extremes yet to come, designing your garden for resilience can help ensure success. This presentation will span theoretical concepts through to hands-in-the-dirt solutions, bringing together aspects of garden design, landscape ecology, and urban biodiversity to help support resilience in you, and in your gardens.

Ben is the Curator & Horticulturist for the North American Gardens at UBC Botanical Garden. He holds a master degree in public garden leadership from Cornell University, a Bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from The University of Guelph, and a diploma in ornamental horticulture from The Niagara Parks School of Horticulture. Ben has worked with a number of botanical gardens in Canada, as well as municipal arboriculture projects, public outreach and education programming, and private sector horticulture. A keen gardener from a young age, Ben always has some dirt under his nails, no matter how hard he scrubs.

You're sure to enjoy this meeting. We will meet in the "LRC" — the Learning Resources Centre, which is downstairs from the Britannia VPL library branch. As you're walking west toward the library, veer left on the walkway, walk alongside the library, and you'll come to a ramp entry to the LRC on your right. We start at 7:00 and end before 9:00.

Please wear a mask for everyone’s comfort.

We will have tea and goodies and a few door prizes. Try to remember to bring your own teacup. See you there.

As well, if you aren’t quite ready to join the club but want to come to the occasional meeting, now that we’re back to meeting in person, we are reinstating our $4 drop-ins.

Questions? Send us an e-mail at grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com.

What’s beautiful or interesting in your garden this month? Please bring a sample of something from your garden.

Also, a general announcement: The annual neighbourhood-wide Grandview Garage Sale is back this year, June 18, 10-2!

October 14th meeting

Hello GGC members,

The speaker I had engaged for our October meeting has cancelled and so far my efforts to find a last-minute replacement have failed.

I'm wondering if anyone among you has a gardening subject you would like to share with the rest of us. It doesn't have to be a lengthy presentation. If there are 4 or 5 people out there who would be willing to talk about a plant, a tool, a technique or a useful tip for 10 to 15 minutes each, that could give us a varied and enjoyable program.

I know we have many knowledgeable gardeners in our club and am hoping that there'll be at least a few of you who will respond to the opportunity to pass on a little of what you know already or have perhaps recently learned.

Please contact me at christineallen88@gmail.com if you can help.

Thanks,

Christine