Donna and I along with Ken Salvail, Scott Austin and 50 other eager gardeners arrived home from the Northwest Flower and Garden Show Sunday night bursting with excitement for the up-coming spring gardening season. What a show it was and we are now planning next year鈥檚 trip as we speak. We never tire of this trip to the second largest home and garden show in North America.

I ended last week鈥檚 article with the 1940鈥檚 coming to an end in the Burnett family saga however I forgot one wonderful event and that was the birth of my sister Joan in 1946. Unfortunately, in 1949 a series of family tragedies challenged them and thinking back on this it was amazing they got through those years with their well-being intact as best it could be.

In 1949 dear Lynn was diagnosed with childhood Leukemia. In those days, this was an incurable condition and within a month or so of the diagnosis Lynn sadly passed away leaving mom and dad and 4-year-old Joan to grieve. It was at this time my Aunty Dorothy, dad鈥檚 sister, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was committed to Essondale Hospital in Coquitlam. This was very difficult for the family, and with grandma suffering a fatal stroke in 1951 times were indeed tough.

To make things even worse my grandpa was killed in a car accident near Princeton on the Hope-Princeton Highway in December 1952. He was on his way to visit with Dorothy at the coast when the accident happened. This was especially hard on my dad at the time and I realized this to its full extent when I lost him 50 years later in 2003. In 1954 my grandpa Henderson passed away in 琉璃神社 General Hospital thus ending a string of events which indeed was a lot to deal with in such a short period of time.

There was one happy event however in the midst of all this and that was in April of 1950 when I came into the world. Another happy event was shortly after grandpa H. died, my brother Al was born. I suppose in a small way having two new little lives in the family helped soften the pain of all the losses suffered over the previous five years. In the midst of all this dad kept working at building the greenhouse business and he and mom worked as a team.

In the spring of the year when mom and dad worked tirelessly from dawn to dusk Joan, Al and I would be looked after by house-keepers. Needless to say, they became part of the family and I remember all of them well. Not in any particular order they were: Mrs. Chaykowski, Mrs. Lang, Mrs. McClellan, and definitely my favourite, Mabel Ueda.

Up until 1957 dad heated the greenhouses with wood, using converted oil drums placed strategically throughout the houses and for the two more recent houses a large sawdust burner. He would have to tend these heaters in the months of January February and March by keeping a cot and an alarm clock in the attached shed, stoking the fires every couple of hours. It was indeed life changing for him when in 1957 Inland Natural Gas came to the valley and a gas line was installed down Ethel Street just to accommodate Burnett鈥檚 Greenhouses.

Next week I will continue with the conversion to a gas fired hot water system with pipe salvaged from the Hedley mine near Princeton, and on into the 1960鈥檚 when new modern greenhouses and flower shop were built.

Listen to Don Burnett and Ken Salvail every Saturday Morning from 8am to 10am presenting the Garden Show on AM 1150 now in its 34th year.