Gardening
hanging with
Hobbs Lifetime had the pleasure of visiting master gardener, author and former florist Thomas Hobbs one rare sunny March afternoon at Southlands Nursery, which he’s owned with business and life partner Brent Beattie since 1991. Between greeting customers, creating an instant container garden for our camera and offering glimpses of his sardonic sense of humour, Hobbs shared stories about his love of plants and Morgan cars and his distaste for certain colour combinations. “I hate red and yellow together,” Hobbs admitted. “It’s so gas station.” What Hobbs is loving this year is a combination of grey and silver foliage combined with “acid green” plants. “Succulents are very practical for droughts, but they’re also very architectural,” he says. Hobbs, who opened his first flower shop in 1972, believes his obsession with plants began at birth.
photos: Dan Toulgoet
“I remember ‘planty’ things from before grade one, trying to make cuttings and stealing plants from the neighbours in Winnipeg,” he says. “I didn’t start with flowers until after I opened a shop in 1972/1973, when I was 19. I thought, to make money, I had to sell more than houseplants, so I took a two-month course in flower arranging at Kwantlen College in Richmond. It turns out I was good at it and it took over my life.”
6
In fact, Hobbs turned out to be so good at it he’s been featured on Martha Stewart Living TV, on the TV show Recreating Eden and many magazines, including Gardens Illustrated, Garden Design, Martha Stewart, House Beautiful, Traditional Home, House and Garden, Horticulture, the New Zealand Gardener and many more local and international print publications, including the Daily Telegraph. Hobbs then opened what was once his flagship store in Kerrisdale in 1989. In 2012, Hobbs sold the flower shop that still bears his name and closed the gift store he also owned so he and Beattie could concentrate on Southlands