Somewhere, there is a picture of me sleeping in a wheelbarrow while my Mother potted roses in the wintertime, so when I introduce myself to my students when I’m teaching, or if I’m doing a talk, one of the things I consistently say is: this is not our job. Horticulture is not a career, this is what I wake up and do because, quite frankly, I don’t know what else to do.
I’m the third generation in the Royal City Nursery family. I grew up with my sister running around the Garden Centre and remember hating every second of hand-pricing those 4” pot perennials and weeding the fields until the cows came home. What I miss most about both my Grandfather and my Father was their love of nature which I proudly inherited from them, and to see nature through somebody else’s eyes is pretty cool.
I started working for Royal City Nursery when I was very little. One of the first paying jobs I remember my sister and I having was getting paid 25 cents a pound by our grandmother for dandelion heads. She was a brilliant woman, of course, because she found a captive audience in the two of us and could look out the window, and know her grandkids were right there and she didn’t have to do anything. Plus, we dealt with the weeds! The Garden Centre, to me, is home. If you asked me why, it would be standing outside in early spring and smelling wet soil. That’s what gets me. That’s home. So the Garden Centre is deeply home for me, and I love seeing the marriage of the indoor space to the outdoor space. I also love watching that light bulb come on, when you help somebody seed or plant something and they succeed.
Through high school, I was always the plant geek, the one everyone asked “what’s that?” anywhere we went, but I got used to it. It was during high school I did a co-op, and that was the first time I got to see the Royal City Nursery throughout the week. Prior to that experience I had only worked in the garden centre on evenings and weekends, so I had no concept of how things like shipping and receiving worked. Weekday clients are different clients than the ones you see on the weekend. I also remember I had to write the curriculum for that co-op because it just didn’t exist!
University was also kind of wild because most of my professors were also my customers, so it made a very unique dynamic. One in particular, Professor Jack Eggens, was also a student of my Grandfather’s when he was an advisor at the University of Guelph. My Dad was a professor too and taught at Humber College. Peter was the first horticultural apprentice in Ontario in the very first class. He was invited back the year after he graduated to teach in the same program and he continued to teach for 35 years. It took me a long time to get over the “I’m Peter’s Daughter” mentality and to develop a great sense of pride in my own knowledge. One of the reasons I started teaching is to have the ability to stand on my own two feet. Teaching is super important to me. I love that I shape the future of this industry, both on campus and in the Garden Centre, and it’s a really neat legacy to be involved in. I have been teaching at Humber for over 15 years, and am extremely proud of my students.
I remember being asked once “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
My response?
“I want to run Royal City Nursery and I want to be a horticulture apprenticeship instructor, just like my Dad.” The idea was pretty confident from when I was really little. I knew I wanted to succeed in the business, and the gardening industry as a whole.
It all started with my Grandfather who was a master horticulturist in Denmark. He decided to emigrate to Southern Ontario 67 years ago for the North American dream, coming over with my grandmother and their three kids; Peter, Leif and Karin. My Grandfather then worked for Sheridan Nursery and ran the farm in Georgetown where they lived for a number of years. The family moved to Guelph, and because my Grandfather was a master horticulturist, he really wanted a Nursery. That’s when he started planting the field in Guelph with evergreen cuttings. In the interim, my Grandmother and the three kids farmed, planted and harvested cucumbers on site while my Grandfather worked at university.
My Dad joined the company when he was in high school. He actually started off landscaping, so he and my Grandfather would load the truck, and my Grandfather would drop him off and say, “I’ll be back in four hours to pick you up—you better be done.”
When my Dad joined the company, the Garden Centre side of things started to grow and it wasn’t just evergreens anymore. It included soil, peat moss, perennials, annuals and fertilizer. That really started the evolution of what we know today. They also added a large garden and pond as a department, and my Dad added Christmas in the mid 80s as well. So, by doing both of those meant we weren’t just open for six months of the year, but we could extend into a nine month company which was a lot easier on our staff, and it also became a lot more well-rounded.
In September 2013 I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer and my 40th birthday was my first chemo treatment. When it was time for surgery, they removed the nine centimetre by four centimetre lump from my left breast. There were three lymph nodes that were infected, with the biggest one being about half the size of a golf ball. Not really the way I wanted to spend my 40th birthday. Sometimes your choices are a whole lot simpler than you think, and you have to find that silver lining very, very fast. I was an avid rock climber, so everything around treatment at that time was geared to protecting my hands and protecting my fingers, so I could spend more time in the climbing gym—which I love.
In 2014, when the Garden Centre was facing expropriation, my Dad was also not doing well. He had a double lung transplant in 2007, so my parents really only had one choice and that was they needed to retire—and so they did. The lawyer called me soon after and asked me if I would be interested in the business and she needed to know the next day. I just said, “Yep!” The expropriation was also the same time my cancer treatment ended and marked the start of “my” Royal City Nursery.
My personal story is aligned very closely with the story of Royal City Nursery and I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. I do what I do for my customers, my students, my parents, and Grandparents who introduced me to this universe of plants and of growing things in the hopes that I can pass along some of that childlike wonder I had as a kid. I still have it—that wonder for nature, and share my passion for horticulture with my husband, Dave.
Tune in next week to hear Dave’s story, and the week after for a full history of Royal City Nursery.
In the meantime, come see us at Royal City Nursery for a bit of advice, history, and of course, plants! We’ve been in the community for many years and look forward to serving Guelph for many years to come.
