Post by Flytrap on Jul 16, 2007 14:28:58 GMT -5
Jack Wootton, Owner of Hawaiian Botanicals in Richmond, BC was featured in the local papers last week. Thanks to one of my keen eyed friends for alerting the article for me. Here is the link to the article: www.richmondreview.com/
David
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Weekend Profile: Jack Wootton
Mark Patrick photo
Somewhere amongst bromeliads, bougainvilleas and bladderworts, Jack Wootton has found his calling.
By Matthew Hoekstra, Staff Reporter
Jul 07 2007
It’s not everyone who can lay claim to selling a plant capable of eating a small mammal.
The nepenthes rajah is one of many exotic plants Jack Wootton deals at his No. 7 Road nursery, Hawaiian Botanicals and Water Gardens.
The longtime Richmond resident opened his first retail greenhouse on No. 5 Road in 1993. Two years later, he and his wife Jeanie moved to the current location, with a focus on water gardening while still selling some tropical plants.
Spending summers with a bag lunch exploring woods and ponds near his rural home outside Hamilton, Ont. first raised Wootton’s interest in water gardening.
But it wasn’t a career he dove right into. In 1981 he started a career on Sea Island as an aircraft mechanic with CP Air.
With flying benefits, he took his love of hiking to the tropics and explored plants of the jungles.
In Canada, he noticed many tropical plants weren’t available to Canadians because of a tricky importing process, so he started a mail-order business, importing plants from Hawaii and Brazil.
He left the airline industry in 2000 to work full-time at his greenhouse business. His wife joined him full-time a few years later.
Today the 51-year-old sells carnivorous, exotic, tropical and pond plants, along with fish. He is also a passionate defender of agricultural land.
Wootton believes people need to understand how important farmland is, and how small land parcels—his is a half-acre—can be viable with a little ingenuity.
What’s the most difficult plant to grow?
“We carry a lot of tropical insect eating plants (nepenthes). That’s what we call the Rolls Royce of carnivorous plants we’re carrying... The difficulty is they generally like high humidity.”
What’s the appeal in growing exotic plants?
“For a lot of people it reminds them of a tropical holiday. For example, we sell a lot of plumeria, which is the flower that they made the Hawaiian lei out of. And because of the cost of owning a yard now, a lot of people like plants but they may be living in a condo...so they want to bring plants inside, but they don’t want a run-of-the-mill terrarium. They want something exotic and unusual.”
What should happen to the Garden City lands?
“It should be run as a trial for allotment gardens, because the city’s stated policy is to densify central Richmond, and the people moving into these condos may well have families. That would give them a chance to introduce their children to gardening...and to where their food comes from.”
Why is that important?
“Oil resources will eventually run out, and here in the Lower Mainland we’re importing a lot of our food. I could see in the future for coming generations, it may become very costly to continue to import food. People have to be introduced to the concept early of retaining agricultural land, and one of the best ways to convince them of that is if they start young.”
Do you ever talk or sing to your plants? “Oh no, not at all. I may yell at the fish when they splash me when I’m feeding them, but that’s about it.”
David
---
Weekend Profile: Jack Wootton
Mark Patrick photo
Somewhere amongst bromeliads, bougainvilleas and bladderworts, Jack Wootton has found his calling.
By Matthew Hoekstra, Staff Reporter
Jul 07 2007
It’s not everyone who can lay claim to selling a plant capable of eating a small mammal.
The nepenthes rajah is one of many exotic plants Jack Wootton deals at his No. 7 Road nursery, Hawaiian Botanicals and Water Gardens.
The longtime Richmond resident opened his first retail greenhouse on No. 5 Road in 1993. Two years later, he and his wife Jeanie moved to the current location, with a focus on water gardening while still selling some tropical plants.
Spending summers with a bag lunch exploring woods and ponds near his rural home outside Hamilton, Ont. first raised Wootton’s interest in water gardening.
But it wasn’t a career he dove right into. In 1981 he started a career on Sea Island as an aircraft mechanic with CP Air.
With flying benefits, he took his love of hiking to the tropics and explored plants of the jungles.
In Canada, he noticed many tropical plants weren’t available to Canadians because of a tricky importing process, so he started a mail-order business, importing plants from Hawaii and Brazil.
He left the airline industry in 2000 to work full-time at his greenhouse business. His wife joined him full-time a few years later.
Today the 51-year-old sells carnivorous, exotic, tropical and pond plants, along with fish. He is also a passionate defender of agricultural land.
Wootton believes people need to understand how important farmland is, and how small land parcels—his is a half-acre—can be viable with a little ingenuity.
What’s the most difficult plant to grow?
“We carry a lot of tropical insect eating plants (nepenthes). That’s what we call the Rolls Royce of carnivorous plants we’re carrying... The difficulty is they generally like high humidity.”
What’s the appeal in growing exotic plants?
“For a lot of people it reminds them of a tropical holiday. For example, we sell a lot of plumeria, which is the flower that they made the Hawaiian lei out of. And because of the cost of owning a yard now, a lot of people like plants but they may be living in a condo...so they want to bring plants inside, but they don’t want a run-of-the-mill terrarium. They want something exotic and unusual.”
What should happen to the Garden City lands?
“It should be run as a trial for allotment gardens, because the city’s stated policy is to densify central Richmond, and the people moving into these condos may well have families. That would give them a chance to introduce their children to gardening...and to where their food comes from.”
Why is that important?
“Oil resources will eventually run out, and here in the Lower Mainland we’re importing a lot of our food. I could see in the future for coming generations, it may become very costly to continue to import food. People have to be introduced to the concept early of retaining agricultural land, and one of the best ways to convince them of that is if they start young.”
Do you ever talk or sing to your plants? “Oh no, not at all. I may yell at the fish when they splash me when I’m feeding them, but that’s about it.”