September 17, 2025
Bonita Elliott
Bonita Elliott has been a life long gardener. Starting with her mother and continuing, contaminating her own children to love growing and nature. Her own garden is an acre and has numerous vegetable gardens, flower beds and fruit trees, which her husband and her tend. She is a life time member of the Peninsula Garden Club, a member of the Victoria Floral Artists Guild, and has a certification in Landscape design. She will present ideas about colourful containers for four seasons, including colour theory, pros and cons of the different containers and design principles.
May 21, 2025
Caroline Haywood
In this timely presentation, Caroline will show us how to prepare entries for garden shows. We ask that you bring flowers that you might enter – either 1 or 3 stems. Also welcome is a branch or vine in a vase. Caroline will use these items in her presentation.
Caroline Haywood is an accomplished gardener and is very involved in the gardening community. At home, she has created a delightful garden that has been featured in garden tours to raise funds for charity. Beyond home, she is a participating member of our View Royal Garden Club as well other garden clubs, plus the Victoria Floral Artists Guild. Caroline is also an official horticultural judge, spending much of her summer going to garden shows and competitions around the South Island and Gulf islands. Caroline is known for her beautiful floral arrangements and we are delighted to have her present on the subject of preparing entries for shows and mini-shows.
April 16, 2025
Bethany Couture
Bethany Couture ‘The Garden Alchemist’ will be teaching us how to use permaculture to increase yield of edibles and reduce water usage in our gardens.
Bethany is a certified horticulturalist, permaculturalist and herbalist who is passionate about sustainable gardening. She specializes in edible, medicinal, and native plant focused gardens which benefit people, wildlife, and the planet. In her practice, she emphasizes soil and water stewardship, biodiversity enhancement, as well as the protection or creation of habitats for vital wildlife such as pollinators.
Her presentations provide practical insights into sustainable gardening practices, helping gardeners create resilient, productive, and ecologically harmonious landscapes.
March 19, 2025
Jo-Ann Matiachuk
My Grandma Has Worms!! Worm Farming for Fun and Fertilizer!
Keeping a small worm farm in your porch, shed, garage or even in a closet or kitchen is an easy and fascinating hobby. Worm farming recycles food waste and benefits your garden or container plants while entertaining your family and friends! Meet some Red Wigglers and see the stages of vermicompost. Learn about the secret life of worms and their role in soil health!
Jo-Ann has been vegetable gardening as long as she has had a space to grow things! Her grandfather was a lifelong farmer, food gardener, naturalist, and recycler on a section of land in Saskatchewan. His love of the land and nature made a deep impression on her as a little girl; she remembers being a little tyke following him around while he picked raspberries for her, and showed her creatures large and small.
Now, several generations later Jo-Ann is doing the same thing for her grandchildren! In between she has taken the Master Gardener program and more recently become involved in the Victoria Horticultural Society. She is an avid worm farmer, composter, and fruit and veggies grower. Jo-Ann now lives and gardens on the Saanich Peninsula.
February 19, 2025
FireSmart presented by Ryan Eason of View Royal Fire Rescue
Mr Eason did an excellent presentation about Firesmart which is a provincial program based on national standards. The program teaches effective landscaping and building strategies to protect our homes and communities from wildfire. Afterward, he provided the following to be shared with the club.
View Royal FireSmart Program
If you would like more information on the View Royal FireSmart program, check out our webpage which has various helpful resources:
[Note: Garden club members live in various municipalities. The presenter mentioned that some other municipalities also have FireSmart programs, and if not, the provincial Firesmart program has a lot of information available.]
FireSmart Landscaping:
The following are helpful resources for FireSmart plants and landscaping:
FireSmart Construction:
The following are helpful resources for FireSmart home construction and renovations:
Wildfire Resilient Home Construction
Other FireSmart Resources:
The following are other helpful FireSmart resources:
FireSmart Begins at Home Guide
Emergency Wildfire Preparedness Checklist
October 23, 2024
Dr Rob Bennett, Research Associate, Royal BC Museum
Why did you want to become a spider biologist? Before I even started to crawl I was interested in animals and the natural world. This led to me study biology, especially entomology (the study of insects), as an undergraduate at university. Later, as a biology graduate student, I specialized in describing, naming, and classifying spiders (classic museum curatorial work!). Spiders attracted me because they do spectacularly interesting things in their day-to-day lives and are quite stunning to look at with a microscope.
How did you become a spider biologist? Mentors were, and remain, very important in my development as a spider biologist. Most of my mentors were established professional spider biologists but I have also found mentors among my fellow students and even among some of the students whom I have taught and to whom I have been a mentor. Knowledge and inspiration do not always come from those with more experience.
What do you do as a research associate with the Royal BC Museum? My fellow Royal BC Museum spider aficionados and I are documenting the many different types of spiders found in the province. Throughout the year, but especially in the summer months, we travel to interesting habitats around the province to collect spiders. During the fall, winter and early spring we focus on laboratory work identifying and cataloguing the thousands of mostly very tiny spiders that we have collected. The field work is always a great deal of fun (and always over too soon), but the lab work is hugely interesting and fun, too. Almost every day we identify spiders that have never been found before in British Columbia or Canada, or are entirely new to science.
The above info retrieved from https://learning.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/stories/spiders-of-british-columbia/
Oct. 5 View Royal Garden Club 75th Anniversary Celebration
Jeff de Jong -“Plants That Shine”
Historically the 75th Anniversary is celebrated with the diamond gemstone. The diamond gem is resilient, striking, tough, and very beautiful. What a perfect occasion for Jeff to speak on plants that make our gardens sparkle. The Garden is a celebration of beauty, and that beauty takes on many forms. Jeff de Jong will raise a glass to some of the living diamonds that sparkle. Every season has its magic and Jeff hopes to add a shine to celebrate the seasons of a PNW Garden.
BIO:
Jeff de Jong is a horticulturist living in Victoria, BC. He currently is an Instructor at UVIC in the Continuing Education Department. Jeff teaches a variety of courses including one he developed for the home gardener who is interested in Garden Design. He is a Garden Speaker and has spoken to numerous organizations and clubs across Canada and the USA. Jeff is an avid gardener and grows a wide variety of shrubs, perennials, and food crops. He hosted a Local Gardening Radio Program in Victoria for 9 years. He leads garden tours Internationally and will be leading his sixth tour to New Zealand on January 25. Jeff also enjoys painting watercolour botanical illustrations.
Gary Lewis M.SC-The Complete Talk on Ground Covers
Reduce maintenance, control erosion, improve the environment, and beautify the landscape with ground covers.
Gary will highlight the functional and aesthetic uses of ground covers in the landscape. Widely thought of as utilitarian, these plants offer a diverse range of beautiful and intriguing options with a variety of colors, textures, and forms. Gary will show how to use these plants to take your outdoor space to the next level and create a more sustainable garden. They can unify a landscape, knit together plantings and hardscape, and add extra layers of beauty, dynamism, and surprise. As a replacement for lawns, they can reduce our use of water, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, carbon-based fuels, and transform a yard into a diverse landscape of habitat and food for native insects, birds, and other wildlife.
Gary will provide copies of his book “The Complete Book of Ground Covers” for purchase and signing following his presentation.
BIO: Gary Lewis is the owner of Phoenix Perennials, an award-winning, cutting-edge, retail and mail-order nursery in Vancouver, and an expert on perennials and horticulture. He holds two degrees from UBC in Conservation Biology and Plant Ecology. He is one of Canada’s most knowledgeable plant experts with a deep and special interest in rare and unusual herbaceous perennials. He also recently published The Complete Book of Ground Covers. The book won the Gold Laurel Award from the Garden Communicators International. Gary is the Vice President of Planta. The Plantlife Conservation Society is an organization that works to conserve plants and their habitats in Cuba and other tropical regions. He is on the Advisory Committee for E-Flora BC, an online atlas of BC native plants. He serves on the Perennial and Bulb Selection Committee of Great Plant Picks, an educational awards program of the Miller Botanical Garden in Seattle that works to build a comprehensive palette of outstanding plants for BC and Pacific Northwest gardens. From 2009 to 2015 Gary was the Canada Region Director of the Perennial Plant Association.
May 22, 2024
Barry Willoughby
Gardening with Dahlias
Barry has been involved with gardening and dahlias for 40 plus years. He has experience with gardening in the interior as well on coastal areas since 1970. In the early 80’s Barry took a bigger interest in dahlias while living on the sunshine Coast by joining the Vancouver Dahlia Society and began to judge a few years later. We moved to Victoria in 1988 and joined the Victoria Dahlia Society. Barry has shown dahlias and judged in Victoria, Vancouver and Nanaimo as well as occasionally in the US.
Barry retired from the BC government in 2000 and started a small farm business, with his wife, in Central Saanich where we grew flower baskets and other bedding plants as well as dahlia cut flowers and some vegetables for sale onsite and at the Saanichton Farmers market. We retired from the farm in 2016 but have continued to grow a vegetable garden and some dahlias at our new location in North Saanich. He continues to grow dahlias from seed for many years seeking new varieties for enjoyment in his 2nd retirement.
April 24, 2024
Dr. Richard Hebda President of the BC Iris Society
The fascinating and colorful world of Irises
Dr. Richard Hebda was the curator (Botany and Earth History) at the Royal British Columbia Museum for 38 years and adjunct faculty at the University of Victoria for 33 years. He curated the Climate and Climate Change exhibit at the museum and was the first faculty coordinator of the Restoration of Natural Systems program at the University of Victoria. He studies vegetation and climate history of BC, climate change and its impacts, ecology, and origins of alpine ecosystems and botany of grasses. Richard is the co-author of 130+ scientific papers and 250+ popular articles on native plants and climate change, and he is co-author/editor of several books and major reports including reports on climate change for NGOs. He appears often on TV and radio, and in newspaper interviews. Richard has received the Queen’s Jubilee medal for his work in paleontology and the national Bruce Naylor Award for natural history curatorship in 2015.
March 27, 2024
How to Grow a Vegetable Garden with Bonita Elliott
Gardening has been a passion and life- long activity for Bonita. As a child her family had a vegetable garden that feed their family. This carried on to her own family and continues in retirement. As a Critical Care Nurse and Health Care Administrator, gardening was her stress management strategy. Going out to dig in the dirt at her Richmond home was calming and satisfying.
After retiring to North Sannich, Bonita completed a Landscape Design course at Camosum College, then restored her one- acre property that had been neglected for many years. Shortly after she joined the Peninsula Garden Club (PGC) and the Victoria Floral Artist Guild. Bonita has held executive positions in both organizations, continues to run the propagation group, and is a Director on the Board of the Canadian Western Association of Floral Artist Clubs (CWAFAC).
Today, she will present “How to Grow a Vegetable Garden”. Practical information to consider when starting out to grow vegetables. Hints and tips to remember and planting needs for a variety of vegetables. Whether you are starting out or continuing to learn how to grow vegetables, we all need to learn to grow sustainably, with bio diversity and eco- friendly practices.
FEBRUARY 28, 2024 – via Zoom
Tree and Shrub Pruning with Noah Alexander
Meet Noah Alexander, a seasoned arborist/horticulturist with an impressive 22-year career dedicated to the care and preservation of trees. Born with a deep-rooted passion for nature, Noah embarked on his journey as an arborist, blending his love for the outdoors with a commitment to environmental stewardship.
Noah’s expertise extends across both private and public sectors, showcasing a diverse range of experiences in the arboriculture industry. His early years were marked by hands-on work in private landscapes, where he honed his skills in tree maintenance, pruning, and disease management. Transitioning to the public sector, Noah took on the challenge of managing and
preserving urban forests. Working with the Township of Esquimalt, he played a vital role in ensuring the greenery of the township’s landscapes thrived. His commitment to sustainable practices and community education became evident as he engaged in public outreach programs, enlightening residents on the importance of trees in enhancing the quality of urban life.
Additionally, Noah has been teaching pruning, tree planting, arboriculture and many other topics for the Victoria Master Gardener Association, the Horticulture Center of the Pacific, local nurseries, and individual private courses for almost 20 years.
With 22 years of experience, Noah Alexander stands tall in the world of arboriculture, leaving a lasting impact on both the private estates and public spaces he has touched. His journey reflects not just a career but a lifelong dedication to the harmony between humanity and the natural world.
Topics to be discussed:
- What is the purpose of pruning?
- How woody plants function?
- Pruning techniques
- Timing
View Royal Garden Club 