Memories of a Dear Friend
by Diane Whitehead
"The first word that pops up when I think of Joyce is "choice". It was a word she used often, and she also constantly made choices - she was
not a person who drifted through life.
She maintained a set of standards at variance with popular culture in
1960s British Columbia. My polyanthus were bright Pacific Giants, but
hers were small, pale, named, and thrums of course. Her bonsai were
the tiny Mame that required constant care. She haunted thrift stores
and auctions - her spoons were Georgian, her furniture antique, her
carpets hand-knotted. I machine-sewed quilts from polyester scraps,
but Joyce hand-stitched patches of antique silk around pieces of
notepaper.
She gleaned fruit and nuts from park trees, carrying on what her
mother in Wales had taught her four daughters during the war. I was
startled to see a pheasant hanging in the basement, attaining a
suitable degree of maturity. She dispatched my excess roosters right
away, but decided to fatten up one of my young goats for a while. The
neighbourhood children named him William, and picketed with pleading
signs when Joyce decided his time had come. She capitulated and drove
him to a farm in Sooke to live out his days.
Joyce lived in areas of Victoria that had been settled first. I
couldn't understand anyone choosing to live in an old area, but she
explained that she and the children were within walking distance of
the beach, the park, and downtown, while I had to walk an hour to the
closest bus. She befriended elderly neighbours, and distributed
plants they gave her. Patches of her vigorous Galanthus woronowii
bloom for me every January. She believed that every garden has weeds,
so one should make sure they are good ones. The weed she chose for me
was a white mallow, which surprisingly has not spread as much as the
snowdrop.
Joyce enjoyed natural areas. Sometimes she would move the family to a
campsite for the summer and rent out her house to teachers attending
summer school. It meant she'd need to drive back weekly to water
those bonsai and auriculas.
One year she planned a trip to Forbidden Plateau. She assured me we'd
be able to rent packhorses so I made up the bedrolls with that in
mind. When I arrived, there were no horses, and Joyce and her three
children had gone on ahead. I tied the supplies around me and my
three year old and we trudged up the mountain, looking for the
Carruthers. We slept on bare rock and searched again for Joyce the
next day. We got snippets of information from other hikers - Joyce's
tent had been flooded and they were on their way home. Fortunately,
subsequent trips there were much more pleasant.
The family sold their house and Lester rented a room while he finished
his teaching contract. Joyce and the children moved to Wales. It was
no longer the country of her childhood, though. It was a time of
Celtic fervour, and rather than change languages, they were all back
in Victoria by the summer.
It was good to have them back. They bought an old farmhouse which
they began remodelling. There was a big rock garden under an apple
tree, and chickens in the far corner. Everyone dropped in for tea,
and every afternoon was a gardening seminar. Lester's North England
family had been hotel keepers, so he was quite used to having a
kitchen full of people when he got home from work.
After Lester died, Joyce began working. She did not much enjoy her
stint at a golf course - she expected protective clothing and a shower
after spraying toxic chemicals, but the male gardeners laughed at
her. Being a caregiver to a longtime rock gardener was much more to
her liking, and she was able to work in the seaside garden as well as
care for the invalid.
Joyce sat in a lucky seat when she and a daughter flew to the U.K.,
and she was given a pass to go anywhere the airline went. I can't
remember whether she decided on the Czech Republic before we went to
the 1992 Western Winter Study Weekend, ‘From the Carpathians to the
Caucasus’, in Oregon. However, after hearing the talks by Josef Halda,
Fritz Kummert and Zdenek Zvolanek, she chatted with them and came back
all excited to tell me she had been invited to join a seed collecting
trip to Turkey.
The rest is well-known.
Joyce was the most vivid person I have met."
DW
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
