In Memory of Rex Welland, Apple Elder, Victoria, BC

We lost one of our great Apple Elders on Wed, June 25, 2008 in Victoria when Rex Welland succumbed to leukemia.  We will all miss Rex for a multitude of reasons.

Rex was a very gently and caring man. He valued community and was instrumental in the creation and nurturing of Knockan Park, right across from his house, on Burnside Road in Victoria. As a diligent researcher and neighbourhood advocate, he intervened many times to do the right thing for that beloved park.

He had a vast knowledge of heritage apples and the location of heritage trees in the Victoria area. He was a leading expert on orchard bees and developed great methods of improving their numbers in an orchard to aid pollination. He researched the many different types of orchard bee and meticulously collected data on them.

Rex was a valuable resource at identifying apple varieties.

He was always patient and interested when anyone sought his advice. I was lucky enough to have requested Rex’s help with a mislabeled tree last November and sure enough, he came up with a variety name, Summer Bellflower. Not only that, he gave me a page of info on that variety. At that time I had assumed Rex was on the road to recovery and expected to see him at the Salt Spring Apple Festival in Sept 2008. He didn’t make it.

When we attended a memorial in Knockan Park, right across the road from his house, I walked through the park beforehand and I remembered walking through the park the last day I visited Rex. He had urged me to walk my dogs there to enjoy his park. On the day of his memorial, as I reached the top of the park, I saw a jogger passing in the distance with the same light blue ball cap that Rex used to wear. It was like a little glimpse of Rex. After the memorial, we walked over to Rex’s house to enjoy his yard. It was obviously a much loved yard, with lots of well labeled fruit trees everywhere, but due to Rex’s illness, for the last year, it had lacked the care he usually gave it. In the middle of the yard were the orchard bee boxes. In that hot July sun, much to my surprise, there was incredible bee activity around the 1/8 inch nest holes, the berry bees. They seemed at their peak. I had never seen so many and marveled at the tiny nesting hole they used. It was also significant in that all my mason bees had died off about 6 weeks before that. Like all elders, he was a link to knowledge, to the past and to community