A Little Bit of History Repeating
Welcome,
It’s hard to believe now, but when my parents, Ted and Lois, first moved to our farm just north of St. Albert, Alberta, they hadn’t the first idea what they were going to do with it.
Dad had just completed his degree in agriculture but, as Mom often pointed out, that didn’t exactly make them farmers. Still, the day they stood together for the first time on our homestead’s gently sloping hillside, gazing down toward the Sturgeon River, they knew they had found a place to grow.
As the story goes, Dad reached down that day, and with little more than instinct and excitement to guide him, squeezed a fist of rich, black topsoil in his hand. One smell of the beautiful, damp earth and he knew they’d found their future.
That was 56 years ago.
A lot has changed since then. The farm grew into Hole’s Greenhouses and Gardens, my mother wrote 14 best-selling gardening books and, together, my parents fulfilled their dream of creating a little corner of the world that made a difference to people.
Last year on a bright February day, my brother Jim and I stood on a snowy field, not seven kilometres away from that same sloping hillside, and felt history repeating.
–Bill Hole
