In memory of my friend Umberto Garbuio

My friend Umberto (Bert) Garbuio died Friday, March 13 at his home on Cambridge Street in North Burnaby. He was 90.

Born in the Veneto region of Italy, he came to Canada on a ship with other young Italians in the 1950s. (You can see a photo of him below on that ship.)

He learned how to be a tiler in Montreal and then came to Vancouver where he eventually started his own business, settling down in North Burnaby, where he and his lovely wife, Cecilia, raised their family. 

News of his passing brought tears to my eyes. Bert and I had been friends for almost 20 years, ever since I first interviewed him about his beautiful garden for The Vancouver Sun back in August, 2001.

Over the years, I wrote many stories and blog posts about him and his garden successes. 

He was a brilliant grower of fuchsias, begonias and pelargoniums, but he also had a soft spot for rare and exotic plants, particularly scented specialties such as Angel’s Trumpet (brugmansia) and the Queen of the Night (Epiphyllum oxypetalum). 

He won countless ribbons and trophies at shows, mostly put on by his beloved gardening club. Every year he and his good fuchsia-growing buddy, Otto Zanatta, would enter their prize plants in the show and they always cleaned up and came home with tons of ribbons and trophies.

Bert’s basement overflowed with awards – ribbons, plaques, trophies, pressing clippings and various other tributes.

Not all of these awards were for horticultural excellence. Many were for his formidable talent as a wine maker. Bert made wonderful wine, both red and white.

Along with gardening, winemaking was a lifelong passion. He had an impressive micro-winery in his basement with rows of giant fermenting jars continually on the go in what was a cool wine cellar tucked under his front porch with long racks of bottled treasured vintages lining the walls. It was an impressive sight, but apparently not that unusual among the Italian community where many homeowners have their own private stash of homemade wine in the basement.

It was always a pleasure to visit Bert. I even ended up taking my grandchildren with me on more than one occasion to visit .

They loved being shown around the garden and also marvelled at the treasure trove that was Bert’s trophy room where they couldn’t believe the piles of ribbons and the number of cups and trophies. We all loved the aromatic wine room with its quirky bottling, labelling and corking apparatus.

In one sense, I got to know Bert long before I actually met him.

The first time I called on him he was out, so I ended up wandering into the backyard to see if he was there.

I didn’t know what he looked like or anything about his personality but I could tell a lot about him just by wandering around his garden. “Show me your garden, ” said poet Alfred Austin, “and I will tell you what you are.” That was true of Bert.

On Cambridge Street, outside his house, the first thing I saw was a row of clerodendrum trees. I later discovered Bert had planted them.

It was one of the best planting of clerodendrum in the city, a spectacular sight in July when the trees were in full bloom.

I wandered through the front white wrought iron gate with its arch of jasmine and hibiscus and noticed a huge stand of towering hardy banana trees to the left and a lush grouping of brugmansia (angel’s trumpet) on the right, dangling enormous yellow super-fragrant blooms over the fence.

This, Bert later told me, was a deliberate ploy to stop passersby in their tracks with the heavy scent. It was his idea of horticultural evangelism. 

Steps to the front door were filled with pots of pelargoniums, some of them very unusual varieties, such as Appleblossom, one of Bert’s favourites.

On the verandah, there were more pelargoniums plus exquisite hanging baskets of begonias and pots of unusual and beautifully espaliered and standardized fuchsias.

When I rang the bell, nobody came to the door, so I wandered around to the backyard, passing a large Carolina spice bush and hydrangeas and various exotic plants such as the Congo Cockatoo and donkey tail sedum, tumbling out of hanging pots.

In the backyard, I found a little orchard of fruit trees along with mature grape and kiwi vines growing against the house.

Pretty much every inch of space was occupied by spectacular fuchsias and other unusual exotic specimens: Queen of the Night, tiger flowers, Australian mimosa and Italian oleander.

It was a veritable jungle of foliage and flowers. My first impression was to feel slightly overwhelmed by the sheer abundance and lushness of it all. Clearly, this was the private paradise of a dedicated greenthumb.

This was also the first time I saw Bert’s magnificent and enormous Italian fig tree, something I would later proclaim to be the biggest and best in Canada (no one ever disputed this or disagreed).

It had such huge limbs and powerful branches stretching high at side of the garage and towered massively over it. 

The roof of the garage was smothered by fig leaves. Every July-August, Bert would harvest the fruit. Once, he came to my house without warning, walked up the back steps and onto the deck carrying a plate full of sweet honey figs.

It was a wonderful sight. His smiling face made the delivery all the sweeter. They say the way to touch a person’s heart is with an unexpected gift at an unexpected moment. Bert clearly understood this and touched our hearts that day when he appeared with his plate of delicious figs.

On my first visit to his garden, I wandered around in silence, looking to see if Bert was perhaps working in the greenhouse or was down on his knees somewhere, planting or weeding, but he was nowhere to be found.

In the process of looking around, I felt I got to know him, just as you might feel you knew someone if you were to walk into their home when they were out and observed the art on the walls, style of the furnishings, music by the record player and food on the kitchen counter.

I could tell immediately Bert was a gifted, eclectic gardener. The quality, variety and healthiness of all the plants in his garden was top notch. I knew, even before we had spoken a word to one another that I liked him and that he had a great eye for colour and a discerning taste for the exotic, rare and unusual. 

Eventually I met Bert in person. I came back a week later and he turned out to be all I imagined and more. I discovered he also had a wonderful sense of humour and a very playful outlook on life.

He was wearing a T-shirt when we met. It said, “life is too short to drink bad wine” (it was a new saying at that time). When I asked him how old he was he said “around 70, but I’m far too busy to die”. I laughed.

Bert was indeed a busy man. He was always going somewhere or working on some new project. He didn’t spend a lot of time sitting on his hands, watching TV. He was always doing some kind of gardening, propagating this, planting that, attending this meeting, visiting friends, entertaining neighbours. His life was a blur of activity, but he always slyly joked, “Ah but Steve, I know you are very busy.” No, Bert, never as busy and gregarious as you, my friend.

And he didn’t just grow plants for his own garden. He also grew plants to sell to other keen gardeners who dropped by and wanted something usual, perhaps some brugmansia or a ginger plant. He also supplied local nurseries with a few specialties.

His son, Ronny, had a superb collection of carnivorous plants – pitchers and sundews – which he kept on the roof above the kitchen at the back of the house. Bert was very proud of Ronny’s collection and never failed to point it out to me whenever I visited.

However, his greatest pride was his collection of fuchsias, many of which were prize-winners that netted him dozens of awards over the years. 

Bert’s wife, Cecilia, was also a wonderful, charming, gregarious person, always quick to invite me in for a coffee or glass of wine and a bite to eat. She was always vastly entertaining and a lesson in hospitality and good humour.

Never short of a funny story, she spoke with a delightful Italian-English accent., which I loved, especially when she was berating Bert for not offering me more wine or a top up of coffee. It was funny.

We often sat together at the kitchen table and as Bert poured a few glasses of wine, Cecilia would regale us with stories and opinions about all the latest goings on in the world. It was a treat. They were always both very sweet, kind and entertaining.

What I wasn’t expecting when I met Bert was that we would become such good friends or that he would continually invite me to go with him to see other neighbour’s gardens, quite a few of which I ended up writing about for the newspaper or featuring on my blog.

Bert always made a point of phoning me at Christmas and Easter to wish me the season’s greetings. In return, I gave him tickets to the Home Show and he always came with his friend, Otto.

When I had books published, Bert was always the first there to support me and to say a few words of encouragement.

He quickly became a friend, someone I never tired of seeing and who knew very well how to sustain friendship – perhaps the most valuable lesson I tried to learn from him.

Our garden times together were always enjoyable. I intended to visit for an hour . . . and ended up staying two.

In fact, a year after meeting Bert, I persuaded him to allow me to bring a whole group of friends to his garden.

He and Cecilia entertained us with special treats – homemade wines, Italian cheeses, delicious slices of panettone. 

It was his habit to give more than he received. I can’t recall a time that I visited him without coming away loaded with gifts – bottles of wine, fresh vegetables from the garden, even toys for my grandkids, and always figs fresh off the tree.

I remember driving home on numerous occasions with a brown bag full of figs on the passenger seat and never being able to go too far without dipping into the bag to eat one or two.  Bert’s soft green Italian honey figs were irresistible.

For me, Umberto was the epitome of a good friend. Kind, always generous with his time, always happy to share knowledge – though he was never happy with my attempts to speak Italian – and he was always quick to contribute plants to my garden. That’s how I got my first white-flowered brugmansia. The Caroline spice bush he gave me is now 10 feet tall in my backyard.

In July, when his giant Queen of the Night was at its peak and in full bloom, he would invite my wife, Loraine, and I to join him and other friends to witness these super-fragrant, angelic-white flowers at their most beautiful.

When Cecilia died in September, 2017, I was devastated. I couldn’t believe it for the longest time. She was such an important person in Bert’s life. We all loved her.

I visited him after the funeral. He was sad and looked alone and a little fragile, but he refused to leave his home and continued to work in the garden.

I never noticed a decline in quality in the garden over the years as Bert aged, although I saw that the banana trees had not been wrapped for winter this year, something he always did assiduously so I guess he had accepted that as he neared his ninth decade he would have to give up a few of the more challenging gardening chores.  

The last time we were together in February, after his 90th birthday on January 9,  he showed me the large, silver balloons spelling out the number 90 in his living room.

We sat again at his kitchen table and talked about gardens and Italy and life in general and drank a small glass of wine.

I said, “When I was in Umbria, I saw some beautiful gardens around Perugia.”

With a twinkle in his eye, Bert looked at me and said: “They have beautiful gardens in Italy? No.”

We laughed. I could see no fault. I loved the guy.

I will miss him. I will miss his calls to wish me Merry Christmas, his reminders that the fuchsia show was coming up, his invitations to share a bottle of wine, his request for me to go with him on his annual bus tour to Seattle for the garden show there, but mostly I will miss his enthusiasm for life, his never-faltering joy for the beauty of plants and flowers and his pleasure at having so many wonderful plant treasures around him.

And I will very deeply miss sitting with him at his kitchen table and at the little wooden picnic table in his back yard under the canopy of apple trees and surrounded by fuchsias and pelargoniums.

I’ll never forget him and I am eternally grateful for the time we had together as pals.

Rest in peace my friend and I do hope you find the garden of your dreams on that side.

swhysall@hotmail.com