By Steve Whysall, Vancouver Sun
SURREY — If you think you have a big job every year to fill your flower beds, window boxes and patio planters with plants for great summer colour, then give a thought to Gerry Van Huizen.
As the horticulture manager of the 380-acre Northview Golf and Country Club in Surrey, Van Huizen has the daunting task of dressing up all the course’s key garden areas with the best and most reliable flowers for summer.
That includes the wedding garden area with its ponds, waterfalls and gazebo — the site of dozens of weddings, sometimes two a weekend, that are booked from spring to fall.
Van Huizen’s job also involves dressing up the entrance to the clubhouse and key garden areas around the restaurant, as well as the course’s main entrance boulevard, which is always lined with hanging baskets suspended from lampposts to create the all-important good first impression.
It all adds up to important work Van Huizen has to get right.
The biggest challenge is to make sure all the plant material performs perfectly. Van Huizen doesn’t have the time or budget for things to go wrong. Everything has to work like clockwork in order for this championship golf course to look as close to Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club as it can — Augusta being the zenith when it comes to immaculate garden-maintenance at any golf course.
(PICTURED: J.P. Naveri, left and horticultural manager Gerry Van Huizen, right are responsible for growing thousands of summer colour plants to decorate the Northview Golf Club in Surrey. Photo by Ric Ernst/PNG)
You might think that gardening on this scale is easier than for the average home gardener. The reality is that Van Huizen works pretty much alone — he has one full-time assistant, Peter Naveri, and two part-time helpers in summer — and all key decisions, about what plants to grow and how many and what colours and what combinations to put together, come down to him. If he messes up, the golf course can end up looking pretty shabby.
Fortunately, Van Huizen has years of experience. He did his horticultural training at Niagara College in Ontario and for five years in the 1990s he was the main grower for Mandeville Garden Centre in Burnaby, producing plants for all the hanging baskets and containers.
When he started at Northview four years ago, Van Huizen opted to grow everything he needed from scratch in a greenhouse with about 1,000 square feet of space. He also made another key decision that would have a major impact on his budget — he decided to collect seed every year at the end of summer and to grow a lot of his plant material from cuttings snipped from over-wintered stock plants.
This is how he manages to grow countless marigolds, forget-me-nots, cosmos, sweet peas and osteospermums for less.
“I was brought up in the business with the idea that you try to save money wherever you can and I manage to do that here by rigorous seed-collecting. I also have osteospermum stock plants that a neighbour gave me that I harvest for cuttings along with fuchsia plants that I also clip for cuttings every spring,” he says.
Van Huizen is a big fan of Proven Winners plants, particularly the Surfinia and Supertunia petunias, and he always finds room to plant Vancouver Sun Garden Collections, particularly ones that give him great colour year after year, such as the lily collections.
The business of growing thousands of plants to fill the golf course’s flower beds starts early in the year. Van Huizen keeps a detailed diary of every task and the date it needs to be completed by.
One of the most important jobs is to get hanging baskets planted. Van Huizen makes more than 85 moss baskets — super-sized 18-inch ones that will be hung in pairs along the main driveway, and dozens of smaller 14-inch ones for scattering around the club house and course.
“I like to pack my baskets with at least 25 plants per basket and with eight different colours. The plants are placed symmetrically in descending circles with pelargoniums as the top centrepiece,” Van Huizen says.
The result is that by midsummer, the large baskets turn into huge, hanging flower gardens with blooms and foliage that trail as much as 1.4 m (6 feet).
Van Huizen doesn’t take risks and all the material is selected for reliability. This means selecting the most dependable varieties of lobelia, plectranthus, fuchsia, bacopa, pelargonium and mimulus.
“The moss comes from New Zealand and it arrives already formed to fit perfectly into the wire baskets, so there is very little work to do,” he says.
For soil, he always uses the same formula — No. 4 Sunshine Mix — and waters with his favourite fertilizing agent, Nature’s Source plant food.
“I’ve had fantastic success with both these products. I mix three gallons of Nature’s Source with 10 gallons of water and have never used powdered fertilizers since. It’s a wonderful feed and I always end up with quality plants.”
Outside the clubhouse, next to the ponds with their fountains, there is a large “tree-stand” — a metal structure on which a dozen baskets are hung every May.
“These baskets eventually smother the whole frame and turn it into a massive pyramid of colour. It is a wonderful sight to see,” says Van Huizen.
Directly across from the clubhouse is the course’s wedding garden with its heart-shaped lawn, wooden gazebo and romantic waterfalls.
“It’s essential that we maintain it with great colour all summer. When anything starts to fade and look messy or untidy we have to quickly replace with fresh, new plants.”
The greatest challenge over the last few years has been watering during the drought days of summer. The clubhouse patio has at least 18 large concrete planters that occupy high-visibility locations. It is vital that they also look terrific all summer.
Northview consists of two golf courses — the 7,100-yard Canal Course and the 6,900-yard Ridge Course. They are connected by a bridge, around which there is yet another garden area that comes under Van Huizen’s responsibility.
Maintaining the greens and fairways is the job of course superintendent David Fair, who has a team helping him to take care of turf and irrigation systems. Fair says he’s glad that the job of giving the course its beautiful garden look is in the capable hands of Van Huizen.
“It sets a tone for the whole course. People immediately know they are in a place that is cared for the moment they drive in,” he says.
Van Huizen says it is his dream job.
“Who wouldn’t love being in this environment every day, with eagles and hawks flying over head, and people having fun playing a game they love. The gardens are the icing on the cake.”
