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North Vancouver garden club wants to rescue plants before construction destroys them

A group of master gardeners conducted a daring rescue mission last weekend.
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A group of master gardeners conducted a daring rescue mission last weekend.

Although the air was cold and the ground was partially frozen, at least half a dozen local green thumbs showed up to plow the earth and dig the soil at a development in the Moodyville neighbourhood in order to salvage the remaining plants before construction at the site would have likely wiped them out.

Members of the Lynn Valley Garden Club met at a large plot of land in between East First and East Second streets near Moodyville Park to conduct what they referred to as a “plant rescue” on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1.

Wall Financial, the developer behind the townhouse and single-family home project called The Trails along East Second Street, gave the garden club permission to recover what plants they could in the adjacent land plots that weren’t quite shovel ready for the developer’s next phase of construction.

However, the gardeners themselves were more than shovel ready for their own project, according to garden club member Maria Gyongyossy-Issa.

“There’s so many plants that get trashed every time there’s a development,” said Gyongyossy-Issa. “Somebody would be happy with these.”

Armed with buckets, shovels, flower pots, snippers, loppers, pruners, digging forks, and plenty of “strong backs,” the group of gardeners was busy trying to rescue everything from rhododendrons to magnolias to winter jasmine and more, said Gyongyossy-Issa.

“They’re beautiful in a garden, especially in winter because they’re green. In the spring, they have these fantastic flowers and they live well on the North Shore. Plus, my mother always loved rhododendrons,” she added.

While the group plans to take a break from plant rescuing during the holidays, they hope to finish up work on the site early in the new year.

The plan, according to Gyongyossy-Issa, is for garden club members to stow the rescued plants at their respective home gardens and then re-introduce them back to the community when the club has its annual plant sale in the spring.

“We’ll overwinter in our gardens – we pot them up and we look after them to the spring – and then they go into the plant sale,” said Gyongyossy-Issa.

Partial proceeds from the Lynn Valley Garden Club’s annual plant sale are earmarked to support local horticulture scholarships, Park & Tilford Gardens, Loutet Farm, and more, according to Gyongyossy-Issa.

While the group of master gardeners who gathered at the Moodyville site Saturday had the right skill set to identify the hidden horticulture gems littered among the lot, not all developers may be aware of the green gifts that could be in their own backyards, said Gyongyossy-Issa.

The garden club commended Wall Financial for allowing the group to conduct its plant rescue, and hopes that other local developers might consider letting gardening groups perform similar plant salvages on their own development sites prior to the start of construction.

“These are all ripe for rescue,” said Gyongyossy-Issa, pointing to a patch of winter jasmine nestled by an embankment. “If we could rescue the plants here then it would go back into the community. … When the development goes in, some of these plants will get a new home.”