Claude LeDoux has spent a lifetime building community – one plant at a time.
LeDoux recently retired as the City of New Westminster’s horticulture manager, but if you think he’s turning in his gardening gloves, you’d be wrong. LeDoux’s love of gardening bloomed early, as a youngster growing up on a 27-acre property in DeRidder, Louisiana.
“I was born in it. It came to me naturally,” he says of gardening. “I have pictures when I was like six years old – sitting on a step and watching my beans grow.”
Neither of LeDoux’s parents or three siblings gardened, but his father’s friends liked gardening and passed along watermelon, cantaloupe and other plants. By the time he was 10, the family had moved to a different home – one where LeDoux single-handedly tended to a massive garden, where he grew everything from okra to turnips, and shared the bounty with neighbours.
LeDoux was planning to go into veterinary medicine, but an acquaintance suggested he take a course with a particular horticulture professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana at Lafayette).
“He said to me, ‘if you can pass it and you love it, you will love horticulture,’” LeDoux says. “I took this one course and I was so taken by this man and his passion. I always took that from him and others.”
Coming to Canada
Soon after obtaining a degree in agriculture and horticulture in 1979, LeDoux moved to Calgary, having married a Canadian woman in 1977 whom he’d met while attending summer school in Quebec. When the frost came in September, he headed west to stay with some friends of his wife’s family and to look for work.
LeDoux soon landed a job as the assistant manager of a new garden attraction in Richmond – Bota Gardens (short for botanical). A few years later, future premier Bill Vander Zalm and his wife Lillian purchased the garden, renamed it Fantasy Gardens and built a European village with different shops amid the gardens.
Putting down roots in the Royal City
On a snowy day in March 1990, LeDoux started work as a gardener with the City of New Westminster. Within six months, he’d moved into the newly created position of horticulture manager.
“The rose garden was my first project,” he says. “The old rose garden – oh god.”
Now a popular venue for weddings – the rose garden was in sad shape in 1990. Drug paraphernalia was left under a bridge leading into the nearby arena and the rose garden was filled with half-dead roses.
“I love taking something old and building it back into something,” he says of the project that included levelling the site, laying out the new gardens and building a gazebo.
When LeDoux took on the job as the city’s horticulture manager, he had a vision of building community through the city’s greenspaces and gardens – whether it was by connecting people and places through pathways or community gardens.
“The vision was to change the city from a brown situation to a green situation,” he says. “If it’s flowers, if it’s trees, if it’s building the community and getting them more involved in community gardens – all of those things.”
As horticulture manager, LeDoux says he sought to ensure his department was staffed by folks who were passionate about gardening and to give them the freedom to experiment in city gardens. He also focused on modernizing the city’s greenhouse operation.
“That that is the heart of the operation,” he says. “Without that, you don’t have any diversity and you can’t really control what you are doing.”
Mr. Hanging Basket
To some folks around town, LeDoux is known as Mr. Hanging Basket – having launched and hosted the city’s popular hanging basket program more than two decades ago. A rite of spring for many local residents, the program has grown from two classes in its first year to a wide array of classes for beginners, returning gardeners (so many attend that one session is held in Queen’s Park Arena) and speciality classes led by LeDoux and his team.
“Anything I did in the parks was just to push the envelope and see something different,” he says. “The city was really stuck on a visual level. To me, that’s all about tourism.”
In addition to beautifying residential areas by helping attendees making about 700 baskets annually, the city make about 400 baskets annually, some for civic facilities and some that are purchased by local businesses.
“My concept of what I was doing was business and tourism, building beauty in the city,” he explains. “What we want is people to come to the city, or you to go out to dinner and say, ‘Wow this is so cool’ and start promoting our economy. I would say the most rewarding comments I’ve heard, not by one but by numerous people – is ‘When you drive into New West, there is something different. I couldn’t figure it out,’ they said, but then all of a sudden they recognize it’s the plantings.”
Career highlights
When the B.C. Buildings Corporation decided to sell off the former Woodlands School property, the city helped develop a master plan for the site. Now known as Victoria Hill, LeDoux is proud that the city pressed for pathways through the parklike setting and connections to other greenways – and the protection and retention of heritage trees on the property that was the second (behind Riverview) botanical garden in B.C.
“There is so much research that speaks to being in a forest, being with trees, how it calms you down and how this area – that is what we wanted, we did not want to lose that,” he says. “These trees gave significance to the area. Today, people are buying to be in that setting.”
With Port Royal in Queensborough, LeDoux enjoyed the opportunity to help transform the former MacMillan Bloedel mill site from an “industrial wasteland” into a thriving community by creating pathways, planting trees and a insisting the developer construct a community garden – something he felt was “critical” to the development.
“Gardening also makes community and draws people together,” he says. “You start to communicate and talk to people. You connect to people. It’s from the heart. It’s from the earth. It’s your hands. It’s your passion. You start to see it. You have food to eat. Your stomach is full, it tastes good. It just builds. That’s why it’s always been a passion to me.”
Giving back
LeDoux’s home’s garden, as one might expect, is stunning.
Vegetables, fruits, perennials, succulents, shrubs and other plants fill the New West property he’s called home with partner since 1995.
Instead of grass, vegetables of all sorts grow in the boulevard in front of his West End residence, many of them donated to the Plant a Row-Grow a program. Outside of his work with the city, LeDoux launched the Plant a Row-Grow a Row program, which gets local gardeners to grow extra plants to donate to the program, which passes the fruits and vegetables along to food banks or missions feeding those in need.
“That is why I still have such a closeness to Plant a Row Grow a Row. I am still getting people to grow,” says LeDoux, who continues to coordinate the program. “You are connected to nature, you are connected to the earth.”
Flower power
When LeDoux started working for the New Westminster, the city had a bit of a bad reputation in the region. He felt he could help improve the city’s image and tourism potential by prettying up its public areas and gardens.
“I’ll tell you it was the hardest 10 years,” he says of his first decade on the job. “My first 10 years – you are turning around a huge ship. You had people who had no interest. They’d say ‘flower boy, all you care about is a marigold’ – that isn’t what I cared about. I wanted to create something for the community.”
