Most VRS members know Todd Major, a lively personality among us. He has served over the last two years on the VRS Executive Committee. Even more important, he has conducted several of our educational sessions, and done so with extraordinary success. He is a superb teacher. Todd has strong opinions, which he is not reticent in expressing or reluctant to pursue when convinced that truth is on his side. And sometimes it is!

For the past thirteen years he has been Director of the Park and Tilford Gardens in North Vancouver, where he has been responsible for most of the garden’s real development in design and the introduction of interesting and unusual plants. Moreover, he has introduced and advocated environmentally responsible methods of pest control and plant health enhancement. In addition, he operated the practical element of the horticultural programme at Capilano College, providing one of the best apprentice programmes in our area. Most obvious to the public, he essentially gave the Park and Tilford Gardens the look it has today, providing not only a restful, but an interesting and beautiful, spiritually enhancing respite from the usual relatively, and typically, crass atmosphere of the shopping centre to which the garden is attached.

Unfortunately, because of new unenlightened and uninterested management of these special gardens, Todd is no longer in charge of them, and it is uncertain whether the high standards that he has set for them will continue. But fortunately, Todd is still with us. And he is still one of the most knowledgeable horticulturists around. Members who have attended his educational sessions will surely want to hear him give a full-fledged lecture at our first meeting of the activity year the evening of September 16th. And his subject ‘Designing your garden for dynamic canopy structure' is highly relevant to anyone trying to grow rhododendrons, or anything else, along with trees. And who doesn’t want to include trees in a garden? Given the combination of speaker and subject, the lecture as well as the canopy structure should be dynamic

Todd Major