This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
The Hendrie Gates at RBG have their own historical designation.


For two decades, from the mid-1920s through to his death in January of 1948, McQuesten worked tirelessly to create a world-class botanical garden in his home city of Hamilton. The roots of Royal Botanical Gardens can be found in at least three initiatives in the 1920s, although some of the same people were involved in each. The first initiative was, naturally


enough, the drive to build a major botanical garden in Hamilton. It’s possible this idea was in circulation as early as the early 1920s. McQuesten, his mother and sister traveled to England and Scotland in 1924 and visited both Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew south- west of London, and Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. McQuesten has been quoted as saying that every major city needs two things: a university and a botanical garden. Developing the new campus of McMaster University, which moved from Toronto to Hamilton in 1930, was part of the process that also gave rise to Royal Botanical Gardens. The second initiative was protection


An aerial of Hendrie Park RBG Centre looking north.


The winning 1928 landscape plan for the entrance to Hamilton by Wilson Bunnell and Borgstrom.


of Cootes Paradise Marsh, one of the last great remaining natural wetlands along the shore of Lake Ontario. Cootes Paradise was named for Captain Thomas Coote, an English army officer stationed at Niagara during the 1770s. He came to the wetland for hunting and fishing. Although urban develop- ment has changed the marsh over the past 200 years, it has long been valued as both bird and fish habitat. The wetland was protected for fish spawning in the 1880s, and as wildlife habitat in 1927. Thomas, his brother Calvin, local naturalists like R. Owen Merriman, and even luminaries like Jack Miner The beauty of fall at Hendrie Park.


localgardener.net Fall 2016 • 11


All photos courtesy of the Royal Botanical Gardens.


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