Derek was born on the family farm which he now operates in partnership with his sister as fourth generation farmers. The farm is dairy and grain and consists of approximately 600 acres.

When Derek married Marlene they built their home further up from the farm along the Jacques Cartier River just west of Quebec City. The land was nothing but a flat field at the back and branch covered slope in the front, leading to the river.

It was Marlene who introduced Derek to flower gardening as she slowly started building flower beds around the house. At some point Derek decided to share her passion and together they were an unstoppable team as they expanded on their gardens year to year.

Derek with his artistic ability experiments by just laying out a few ideas directly onto the land and uses it like a drawing board. He gets as much pleasure from the designing aspect as he does from the gardening itself.

Both Derek and DW favour planting large massed beds with sweeping curves and are always visiting other gardens in search of fresh ideas. Their gardens cover approximately one acre. He doesn’t count the hours spent in maintaining the gardens but knows it is “many”. Derek rises early, around 5 a.m. and does the rounds of weeding the many beds and making sure they are adequately watered. As we all know Derek and Marlene have been going through some difficult times and they are fortunately blessed with some wonderful friends who helped in the garden when Marlene no longer had the strength left for garden chores.

Hostas, campanulas and astilbes are amongst their favourite flowering plants and by far their favourite conifer is the White Pine of which they have many and regard it as a most majestic tree.

Many of their garden beds are bordered with impatiens and ageratum in hues of blue and mauve. They grow a lot of their annual seeds indoors and such plants as the cleomes, cosmos, datura and malvas are direct seeded.

Being a cold zone they do have to be selective with their plantings but Derek does experiment with some plants by pushing them to the limit and giving them extra covering for the winter. Come spring time the river often floods when the snow melts and they have to bring their groceries in by canoe but the flooding doesn’t affect any of the garden beds.

The greatest pleasure for Derek and Marlene is to walk in the garden in the early morning light or in the evening shadows and enjoy the harmony of hues, saying hello to a new bud and goodbye to those whose glory will return next season. He gains much inspiration from his own garden for his paintings but he still loves to get out into the open spaces and paint large landscapes of fields and rivers.

Derek surely is an artist in many ways, on canvas, on soil and with his words. I will close with Derek’s own words when I asked if they have a favourite season “Every season has something to offer --- the constant seasonal changes allow you to look back but more importantly to look forward”.