What's Cooking at Sunset Nursery

February 2, 2004 - The Park Board has always been very fortunate in having the very best in horticultural hearts and minds busily sowing the seeds of future public garden displays in a little known location in south Vancouver. The hub of this green-thumbed action takes place in a 9 acre enclave called Sunset Nursery located behind an evergreen hedge at 51st Avenue and Main Street. As a matter of fact, thousands of Vancouverites have probably sped past this site often wondering, "what's behind that hedge"?

Well, beyond the green surround is a bustling operation of dedicated staff whose raison d'etre is to provide healthy annual and perennial plants, bulbs, trees and shrubs for the entire Park Board operation. And that's a big ticket item! In all, more than half a million annual plants are produced from seed to seedling to bedding plant every year at Sunset Nursery to beautify a host of park and recreation locations. These include the spectacular gardens at Queen Elizabeth and Stanley Park, VanDusen Garden, at Community Centres, Bloedel Conservatory and general parks. The Bloedel Floral Conservatory alone demands three seasons of intense planting from early spring bulbs to summer tropicals to the widest array of traditional Christmas plants such as poinsettias, mums and amaryllis.

If you think the nursery staff is only now thumbing through the dozens of seed catalogues that most home gardeners turn their mind to during winter, you'd be wrong. As the last tulip bulbs and other spring harbingers were making their way from the Sunset sorting bays for city-wide dispersement this past autumn, nursery staff were already sorting through an enormous variety of plant requests from an army of gardeners. Add to this the nursery staff's own penchant for trying something a bit new, or old for that matter, the task of whittling down the plant list to please as many horticultural appetites as possible becomes a challenge. But please them they do and by end of May each spring, the many, long greenhouses and cold frames at Sunset are awash in plants, blooming and ripe for sore eyes, all awaiting their pickup truck ride to their final park destination. Lovingly settled into compost rich soil by some of the Province's most dedicated gardeners, these plants then start a stupendous floral performance through summer and into early October for residents and tourists alike.

In 2003, Sunset Nursery staff took home the "gold" for their hanging basket entry in the annual VanDusen Flower and Garden Show. Of course anyone who has visited park restaurants and special gardens in summer already knows that Park Board baskets could rival the best in the world!

A Little History

The Sunset Nursery site was purchased by the Park Board in October 1929 in order to take advantage of some 10,000 surplus Provincial Government trees at the bargain basement price of $5,000. Through the years Nursery staff have gone to great lengths to maintain their plants and to help citizens at the same time. During the Great Depression, when funds were cut to the bone before spring bedding out could take place, Park Board gardeners planted out their lovingly raised plants on their own time and for no pay. Further, they devised a plan to distribute a variety of vegetable seeds to residents with instructions for starting their own back yard gardens or coordinated community plots on little used park land to sustain them with fresh produce through these hard times.

The quaint but modest park house located at the Sunset Nursery has always been the official residence of Sunset's "Head Gardener". This was the home of the legendary Jimmy Livingstone, head gardener from the 1940s whose brother Bill served as Park Board Deputy Superintendent until his retirement in 1973. The Livingstone brothers were the sons of one of Vancouver's first nurserymen and were reputedly "green fingered up to their elbows". Living at the nursery had a purpose- electrical outages were not rare so emergency measures would be put in place when the power failed and that meant someone had to be on the scene through the night.

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