This Thursday, June 8th, Vicky Earle

 We’ll be having a Grandview Garden Club meeting this coming Thursday, June 8th, in person! We will meet at 7:30, at the 55+ Room at Britannia Centre, which 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! (There’s another Brit program in that room until 7:30.)

This month's speaker is Vicky Earle, a natural science, medical, and botanical illustrator. She delights in connecting people to nature through art. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in medical illustration and biocommunications, she moved to Vancouver. She has worked in health care for thirty years. She is now dedicated to sharing natural history stories that take place evry day all around us. Her goal is to help foster curiosity and an affinity for the natural world by encouraging people to follow their own art practice.

Vicky's preferred medium is watercolour on paper, occasionally using metalpoint and mixed media. She has kept sketchbooks throughout her career and began a dedicated sketchbook journal practice in 2014. To see her current projects and artwork, visit her website at drawinnature.com and follow her on Instagram @drawinnature.

She has recently published a new book Exploring Vancouver Naturehoods: An Artist’s Sketchbook Journal and she will bring copies of her book to sell.

Because this will be a face-to-face meeting, we will be allowing $4 drop-ins, so do bring your friends.

As usual, we’ll have tea and cookies and door prizes. Try to remember to bring your own tea cup and a sample of something from your garden that is looking splendid on the day of our meeting.

This Thursday (May 11th), Egan Davis!

 Hi Folks,

We’ll be having a Grandview Garden Club meeting this coming Thursday, May 11th, in person! We will meet at 7:30, at the 55+ Room at Britannia Centre, which 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! (There’s another Brit program in that room until 7:30.)

This month's speaker is the first speaker we ever had at Grandview Garden Club, the wonderful Egan Davis.

His topic will be "Plants that Thrive in Adverse Conditions”.

Gardeners have always grown plants in tough conditions, but with extreme weather associated with climate change there are more extreme horticultural challenges. Egan will discuss how to find solutions for growing landscape plants in the most adverse garden conditions. Rather than focusing on a list of good plants for tough locations, Egan will analyze principles associated with plant establishment and ecological systems.  

Egan Davis has a lifelong passion for horticulture. Currently, he is the Parks Operations Manager for the City of Richmond. As a horticulture instructor, Egan has taught the Horticulture Education Program at UBC Botanical Garden, in the UBC Urban Forestry Program and through VanDusen Botanical Garden’s Adult Education Program.As a horticulture practitioner, Egan has had leadership roles at VanDusen Botanical Garden, Park & Tilford Gardens, and in the private landscape horticulture industry. He is active in the industry on various committees and boards and has participated in local and international projects. Egan’s practical background and rich understanding of the plant world inform a unique and innovative perspective on the horticulture industry.

Because it’s face-to-face, we will be allowing $4 drop-ins, so do bring your friends.

As usual, we’ll have tea and cookies and door prizes. If you remember, bring your own tea cup and a sample of something from your garden that is looking splendid on the day of our meeting.

Cheers,

Penny, Moira, Christine

Penny Street

grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com 

Hardy Plant Study Weekend!

 

Grandview Garden Club Plant Sale, May 7th!

 

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