by Tom Mason

It’s a color passion play that Captain Dick Steele has eagerly awaited for nearly all of his 87 springs. The first act comes in February, when the deep winter green leaves of the Hinoki false cypress (Chamaecyparis obtuse) yield the stage to the white buds of the Japanese pieris as they add their brilliance to the fading snow. The snow melts and heath blooms speckle the garden floor along Rhododendron Lane, followed soon after by witch hazel and the early dogwoods. By May, the stars of the garden have dressed for the show – the magnolias and dwarf rhododendrons, to be joined in June by a chorus of large rhododendrons, azaleas, lilacs and a brace of Chinese dogwoods. It’s summer again in Bayport, Nova Scotia.

The love this annual performance developed early in Captain Steele. His first garden was natural and untended – the woodland that sprawled around his family summer home in Kingston, New Brunswick. Dick was four or five when he started his botany lessons, instructed by his grandmother, his mother and the old family cook, he learned to recognize the plants of the forest – wild hops, trilliums and Jack-in-the-pulpit. As soon as he was old enough to hold a paddle, he traveled by canoe with his father down the Saint John River, getting to know species like the eastern North American skunk cabbage, the pickerel weed, water lilies and fragrant bushes. In his teens, he took his canoe for weeks at a times, exploring the forests – the beginnings of a journey that would one day take him to the world’s most famous botanical gardens and to the barrenlands of Labrador.

Today the “captain” moniker that everyone uses to address Steele seems entirely appropriate for this genteel octogenarian. It’s also well deserved. He saw action in two wars – he was under fire during the Battle of the Atlantic, on D-Day and as commanding officer of the destroyer H.M.C.S. Nootka during the Korean War. The long separations from his Halifax home shaped Steele’s gardening philosophy: his gardens had to be hardy, long-lived and extremely low-maintenance. He could plant the beds, but the gardens, once set in motion, has to grow and prosper unguided by any human hand. In the Maritimes, with their harsh winters and acidic soil, there was one plant above all others that fit the bill – the rhododendron.

But good rhododendrons were hard to come by in the 1940s. The best collection of species rhododendrons in the world was in Windsor Great Park in England. Steele used his naval connections to cultivate a friendship with Windsor Great Park’s head gardener, who supplied him with a steady stream of seeds, pollen and cuttings for more than 20 years. If formed the core of his collection. He observed other plants in his stopovers around the world – at the magnificent botanical garden in the British colony of Ceylon, in Hong Kong, Malaysia and the southern United States. At home he explored the wilds of Canada, looking for indigenous rhododendrons, heaths and heathers to introduce hardy genetic stock into his hybrids.

In the early 1970s, Steele retired from the navy and bought an old farm just outside the town of Lunenburg, christening it the “Bayport Plant Farm.” The farm has been his base of operations and a mecca for Nova Scotian gardeners for 30 years. Today Steele is recognized as on of the best hybridizers of rhododendrons in North America, with hundreds of new cultivars to his credit. He was consulted on the design of Pine Grove Park, a public rhododendron garden in a woodland park in Milton, Nova Scotia. He is also a long-time member of the exclusive International Plant Propagators’ Society.

A modest man, Steele grudgingly acknowledges his expertise, but he also admits that his love for rhododendrons is sometimes fickle. The magnolia, for instance, often turns his head and tugs at his heartstrings. Like the rhododendron, it is long-lived and exquisitely suited to Nova Scotia’s climate. He also breeds heaths, heathers, azaleas, Japanese maples and other trees and shrubs.

Although the color of blossoms is important to Steele as a focal point of his garden canvases, color is not the main object of his breeding efforts. “We breed for form and texture,” he says. “If you have backdrops of greens and grays, they will set off the yellows, apricots and reds of the blooms and make them dominant. With a lot of plants, the shape and texture of the foliage is the most important aspect. The foliage is with you for a good part of the year, whereas the bloom may only be on the plant for a short time.”

Anticipating the trend toward larger botanical parks and gardens, Steele has developed a rhododendron 20 feet (six meters) tall. Another favorite – a soft yellow hybrid created 15 years ago and known only as Bayport AD-5 – will be named this year. But to date, his proudest achievement is a cross between the low-bush subarctic R. lapponicum and the delicate Southeast Asian R. dauricum, which grow have a world apart. The result is “Spring Brites”, a rhodo with the beauty of a tropical but the ability to thrive in harsh climates and poor soil.

Steele’s energy is legendary for a man nearly 90. He’s in his propagating house most days before dawn, working all day on his hybrids, pausing only to talk to customers and visiting gardeners. Even in winter he drives the 30 kilometers from his home to the farm daily, often braving snowstorms that keep most drivers off the road. He also still makes his yearly drips to Labrador and northern Newfoundland with other collectors, slogging across tundra and scaling cliffs in search of the best plants.

Like old Captain Ahab, Steele also has his own “white whale”: a North American rhodo known to gardeners as rosebay (R. maximum). Called “the green tree” by the Mi’kmaq, R. maximum was last identified growing wild in the province around the time of Confederation. Steele has been searching for a wild specimen for more than half a century. A Mi’kmaq friend once told him that an elder had seen the green tree still growing in the upper reaches of Nova Scotia’s Musquodoboit Valley. So one warm March day before his naval career ended, Steele commandeered a helicopter and flew low along the valley, looking for the rosebay’s uncurled leaves against the backdrop of melting snow.

Four decades later, he’s still looking.

UPDATE: This story originally ran in Gardening Life magazine in 2003. I was interviewing Captain Steele the day before New Year’s when an old friend from out of town unexpectedly dropped into Bayport Plant Farm. We made arrangements to pick up the interview a few days later, but the appointed day saw a vicious January blizzard sweep through Lunenburg County. I called Captain Steele about 8:00 a.m. to give my regrets, but he said not to worry, he would come to me. “It’s too dangerous,” I said trying to talk him out of the 10 kilometer drive to my house. “Besides, I don’t think your car would make it down my road. It hasn’t been plowed yet.”

“Can you walk to the post office?” he asked. When I replied that I could, that it was only a few hundred meters from my house he said: “Good. I’ll meet you there in 45 minutes. If I’m not there, you’ll know I’ve driven into the bay.” He was there, of course.

I interviewed Dick Steele twice more. The last time was for a piece I wrote on the 100th anniversary of the Canadian navy in 2010. Captain Steele started the conversation by deadpanning that he was there on Day 1 — 100 years ago — and then proceeded to tell me about his adventures in World War II on the Murmansk Run, in the South Atlantic and in the Korean War.  A few weeks after that interview I was saddened to learn that my friend had died. He was 94 years old.