Park & Tilford Gardens is a story of extraordinary vision and a legacy unlike any other on the North Shore. The story began in 1964, when the managers at Park & Tilford Distillery (bourbon whiskey) approached Harry Webb of Justice and Webb Landscape Architects with a request to improve the office entrance drive and an idea to design a garden for staff to use during their lunch.

Harry Webb, circa 1964, when he started the design of Park & Tilford Gardens. Photo courtesy of Adrienne Brown.

However, they began to talk about popular public display gardens in other cities that were promoting companies like the Anheuser-Busch breweries in the USA and suddenly, the Park and Tilford project morphed into a 2 acre public display garden. When Harry Webb presented the concept plan, the executives were convinced. This set off an intense period of design, construction and installation that culminated in the official dedication of the Gardens in January 1969 and the completion of the last section, the Native Wood Garden, in 1971.

The Colonnade Garden Under Construction. Photo courtesy of Adrienne Brown.

Recently, I was lucky enough to connect with Adrienne Brown whose life is inextricably linked to Park & Tilford Gardens. You could say the Gardens are in her blood, as her father was none other than Harry Webb. She was just a girl of 7 years when her father started working on the design. She remembers that “in 1968, when the original gardens were being built, my father would often take me over there after dinner on spring and summer evenings so we could look at what had been done that day”.

From left to right: Adrienne (Webb) Brown, Susan Spencer, Glady Starratt in the Oriental Garden. Photo courtesy of Adrienne Brown.

Adrienne also remembers the day the Dawn Redwood arrived from a nursery in Oregon and was planted with the use of a crane. That same Dawn Redwood is now 80 feet in height and is just one of many mature trees that create a wonderful tree canopy at the site today.

Dawn Redwood tree towering over the Colonnade Garden today.

Not surprisingly, Adrienne followed in her father’s footsteps and became a landscape architect herself, was married in the Gardens in 1984 and has sat on the Park & Tilford Garden Review Board since 2017.

In discussing the design of the Gardens, Adrienne informed me that her father came up with the design, which resembles cogs in a machine, as a clever way to achieve the goal of having separate but interconnected areas, in a relatively small 2-acre area.

Artistic rendering of the Cog Design of the Gardens. Image courtesy of MONOVA.

Each area was dedicated to a different theme or garden style. The final original design included a Colonnade Garden, Shade House, Oriental Garden, Flower Garden, Rose Garden, Native Wood Garden and Rhododendron Garden.

Aerial shot of the Distillery and Gardens. Photo courtesy of MONOVA.

In a recent trip to the Archives (MONOVA), I came across some fabulous hand-painted mock-ups of the proposed design which are beautiful works of art on their own. Those mock-ups are notable in that, although many of the sections ended up exactly as they were originally conceived, some of them are quite different (e.g. Native Wood Garden) and some didn’t make the final cut (e.g. Games Garden).

Artistic rendering of the Games Garden. Image courtesy of MONOVA.

The Gardens were a remarkable success, attracting 100,000 visitors each year throughout the 1970’s. Unfortunately, the Distillery closed in 1984 and the Gardens fell into disrepair.

Gardens in a state of disrepair after the Distillery closed. Photo courtesy of Park & Tilford Gardens.

However, in 1986, after significant lobbying by the Cloverley Resident’s Association, and with the leadership of Councillor Stella Jo Dean, a protective covenant was placed on the Gardens, in return for rezoning of the adjacent land from industrial to commercial to allow for the development of the Park & Tilford Mall. The story goes that on the night of the Council Meeting which would decide the fate of the Gardens, Councillor Stella Jo Dean checked herself out of hospital with a broken ankle in order to cast the deciding vote in favour of the re-zoning and protective covenant. She is honoured by a bronze plaque in the Gardens today.

Park & Tilford Gardens celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019 and lives on today, creating wedding and grad picture memories for many a North Vancouver citizen and offering a place of respite for others. However, like anything that is 50 years old, it is starting to show its age. The Gardens already have the support of a lovely group of volunteers called Friends of the Gardens (FOGs), who do maintenance and raise funds through plant sales. However, many of the buildings, built features and plants (especially the trees) require maintenance and restoration. Bentall Greenoaks, the property management company, is currently working with the Garden Review Board to source materials for the turquoise ‘Kawara’ roof tile in the Oriental Garden and the brick structures for the Rose Garden planting beds are undergoing an extensive restoration.

Brick walls being repaired in June 2021. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Clay.

It is clear from a heritage standpoint that Park & Tilford Gardens uniquely represents all three types of heritage; built, landscape and cultural. Its cultural heritage is visible in both the Indigenous and Japanese sections of the garden but extends to the organizations which influenced its development and the people who ensured its survival, namely Park & Tilford Distilleries (George Kuhn and Don McNaughton), Justice and Webb Landscape Architects (Harry Webb) and Councillor Stella Jo Dean. Its landscape and built heritage continue to be visible in the mature plantings, original built elements and buildings still present on the site.

It is also clear that the original goal of Park & Tilford Distilleries (as stated in their commemorative booklet on the Gardens) has been met.

“The Park and Tilford Gardens were planned to be shared with as many people as possible. It is our hope that in the years to come, they will continue to be a source of pleasure to many people”

FUN FACTS

The Gardens contain over 150 trees on just over 2 acres or .85 hectares.
The original garden included 2 aviaries. The Colonnade Garden featured tropical birds, including cockatoos and parakeets and there were finches, budgies, and canaries in the Flower Garden during the summer seasons.
Park & Tilford Distillery spent $1 million in 1960’s dollars to design and build the garden.
A 5-foot-tall verdigris statue of Neptune had a prominent place in the original fountain in the Colonnade Garden but was lost during the years the gardens were closed. Since that time a putto or cherub riding a dolphin occupied the pool in the 1990s, and more recently a group of three bronze frogs. The frogs were stolen in 2018 and restoration of this fountain is now a priority for the Garden Review Board.

Harry Webb with Neptune. Photo courtesy of Adrienne Brown.

· Four Japanese Cutleaf maple trees were donated by the CNV sister city, Chiba in Japan and were planted in 1970

· There used to be a tea service, Shoji screens and other furnishings in the Tea House located in the Oriental Garden

· The original bronze busts of botanist Carl Linnaeus and plant explorers David Douglas and Archibald Menzies were given to Van Dusen Gardens for safekeeping when the distillery closed, and although there have been discussions about their possible return, they remain in the Rose Garden at VanDusen today.

· In the early years, visitors threw a coin over their shoulders off the bridge into the pond in the Oriental Garden for good luck, with proceeds donated to Cerebral Palsy. However with the introduction of Koi to the pool, this tradition was ended.