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| Marion McDonnell & Gretchen |
Marion
McDonnell, Vancouver’s Blue Poppy Lady, was singly responsible in bringing to
our city the elusive, rare and hard to grow Meconopsis
betonicifolia and Meconopsis grandis.
She died quite a few years ago but she
is remembered because anywhere in some dappled shade garden where you might
spot this brilliant blue flowered plant you know it originally was grown in her
green house on the West Side of Vancouver. Because she had bad knees she manned
the visitor’s cart at VanDusen and took people on tours of the garden. She was a fixture at VanDusen plant sales always protected by a rain bonnet.
McDonnell
made the best coffee and cookies. I often visited her on Saturday mornings. In
her throaty Lauren Bacall voice she greeted me with a, “How are you my friend.”
Being her friend was a privilege I will never forget. Alas, her Meconopsis is
impossibly difficult to grow but I remember her through another plant.
The plant
in question is the only Rhododendron that gets close (but not quite) to having
blue flowers. It is Rhododendron augustinii.
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| Alleyne Cook |
One day
shortly after McDonnell died my friend, New Zealand-born plantsman Alleyne Cook
(responsible for personally planting many of the rhodos in Stanley Park when he
worked for the Park Board) appeared in my garden with a little black pot
containing a small sapling. “Alex this my selection of Rhododendron augustinii.
It is called ‘Marion McDonnell. It is bluer.”
Today my
eldest daughter Alexandra (Ale) helped me man-handle the now very big
rhododendron and we carefully drove through side streets (so cops would not see
us with the rhodo hallway out of her passenger side window.) Our prized rhodo
is not planted at the end of our deck and unlike the iffy Magnolia grandiflora
(will she bloom this year?) it will surely celebrate a spring in blue.
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| Photograph - Alexandra Waterhouse-Hayward |