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By Mike McNeney
UVic Grounds staff Jeremy Quin and Rhonda Rose with one of the newly donated Finnerty Gardens rhododendrons. Photo: UVic Photo Services “It was like starting with a blank canvas,” says Jeremy Quin, a UVic Grounds gardener, as he guides a visitor through the new “West Coast” bed section of Finnerty Gardens.
Quin, along with co-workers and volunteers from the Finnerty Garden Friends, developed a whole new section to the gardens to accommodate part of a major donation of 126 rhododendrons from the estate of Dora and Bob Kreiss of Sooke.
The Sooke-area gardeners started their rhododendron collection in 1973 and developed it into one of the largest private collections of species rhododendrons on Vancouver Island. (“Species” refers to the original plant as it occurs in nature, as opposed to rhododendrons hybridized by human intervention.)
With the passing of their parents, Kreiss family members are planning to sell the property, and to avoid losing the prized rhododendrons to backhoes or neglect, they opted to donate as many as possible to Finnerty Gardens.
The size of the donation required UVic Grounds staff to open a 280-square-metre section of the gardens west of the Interfaith Chapel by removing blackberry, ivy and underbrush.
In their place is a cultivated bed beneath protective conifer trees—ideal for rhododendrons, which are favoured by gardeners for their spring flowers and varied foliage.
Some of the rhododendrons are native to the Himalayas and feature impressive broad leaves. The donations range in height, with the tallest rhododendron reaching about 8 metres tall.
“It was really a lot of fun,” to work with the rich variety of donated rhododendrons, says Quin. “We got to play with the size of the leaves, different heights,” in deciding which plant would go where.
About half of the Kreiss plants were transplanted to the new bed, while the others were placed throughout the rest of the gardens.
Each of the rhododendrons was removed by hand and a cube van was used to protect them from wind damage during the trip from the Kreiss family’s French Beach property to the UVic campus. The process began in February and took about a month to complete.
Finnerty Gardens already included more 1,500 rhododendrons and azaleas, including more than 200 species rhododendrons.
This is the largest single donation of plants to Finnerty Gardens since 1974, when the estate of Jeanne Buchanan Simpson of Lake Cowichan was left to the university. The gardens were founded on the Simpson donation.
The new “West Coast” rhododendron bed will be formally dedicated to the memory of Dora and Bob Kreiss at a ceremony tentatively set for July 31 in Finnerty Gardens.
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