Saturday, March 08, 2025 – 10:00 am – 3:45 pm
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
1100 Chestnut Street, Vancouver
Registration
$50 for members, $60 for non-members and all tickets at the door.
PLEASE READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY
To register for the Spring Study Day
Please send an e-transfer to danaatvhpg@gmail.com with your name or names in the note section.
Or send cheques payable to “Vancouver Hardy Plant Group”
c/o Dana Cromie
1118 Lily Street
Vancouver, BC, V6R 1H2 CA.
Fergus Garrett – Great Dixter, Northiam, UK
Presentations:
‘’Biodiversity’’
‘‘Great Dixter: Past, Present and Future”
Biography and synopsis coming.
Amy Sanderson – Stellata Plants, Saanich
Amy Sanderson is a gardener and owner of the specialty nursery Stellata Plants in Central Saanich. Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Amy’s unquenchable thirst for better garden plants sent her on a study tour of English gardens, including Beth Chatto’s and Great Dixter. Subsequently, there was no choice but to move to Vancouver Island and open a nursery focused on resilient perennials. With a passionate interest in the future of ornamental horticulture, in 2018 Amy coordinated the first international Beth Chatto Symposium: Ecological Planting for the 21st Century.
She is a regular volunteer in the Doris Page Winter Garden at the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific. You can find regular updates on Instagram: @amysandersonflowers or @stellataplants
Presentation:
“Making Abundance”
The first five years of gardening and starting a specialty nursery on Vancouver Island have been a roller coaster. Every year has seen infrastructure improvements and garden expansion, experimentation with new plants in collaboration with new friends, novel weather extremes, and deeper exploration of Pacific Northwest ecosystems. Aided by the time-tested techniques of unfounded optimism and turning a blind eye, this lecture will revel in the joy of increasing seasonal dynamism, colour, and diversity with flowers in a garden culture that continues to champion irrigated evergreens.
Dave Demers, Cyan Horticulture, Vancouver
Dave Demers’s love for gardening sprouted early in life—he had his first greenhouse by age 10 and started a local garden club before graduating from high school. After studying horticulture in Montréal and New York, he travelled the world for internships in a variety of botanical collections and for plant-hunting expeditions. A Quebec transplant, Demers moved to the West Coast to work at Heronswood and finally settled in Vancouver, BC, where he runs Cyan Horticulture, a design/build/maintain landscape firm, as well as a small specialty plant nursery, Cyan Plants.
Presentation:
“Maximalist Gardening – Making the Most out of our Changing Ecologies”
Gardening is hip again: homeowners, designers and politicians alike seem to embrace plants for their many attributes. The importance of biodiversity – and bioabundance – has become a rallying call that gardeners are well equipped to answer.
And yet, the pressure of being under the spotlight, the finite resources and a changing climate, all contribute to making gardening more challenging than ever. In this talk, I will share some of my experience as a designer, a gardener and a former elected City official. I will go from a humble hell-strip trial to the expansive lawn-gone-wild roof meadow of a stylish furniture store, from no-mow City parks to generously planted private gardens.