EDITOR’S NOTE: For the next several weeks, this column will feature this year’s recipients of the Order of Collingwood and the Companion to the Order of Collingwood.
The couple that gardens together, stays together.
For this week’s edition of People of Collingwood we spoke with Barbara (B) and David (D) Collinson, recipients of the Order of Collingwood.
Q: For how long have you lived in Collingwood? If you weren't born in Collingwood, when did you move here and why?
B/D: We lived in Newmarket for 34 years and moved to Collingwood in October 2013 after Barb retired, so nine and a half years, give or take, but David had been skiing up here since the 1960s.
B: About eight months before I retired, we looked around and realized that apart from great neighbours and a few friends, we had spent so much time and effort working that we didn't really know the Town of Newmarket and there wasn't anything tethering us to the community.
D: We had a rough list of criteria to be met in a new community, including good housing at an affordable price, the ability to age in place in our new home, walkability, a hospital, transit, good shopping, good restaurants, recreational possibilities, and it couldn't be more than two hours from Pearson Airport for vacations.
B: So we looked around for places that might fit including Wasaga Beach, Midland, towns in Prince Edward County, Thornbury, Meaford and a few others, visited all those communities and looked at houses. But it quickly became apparent that Collingwood was the best fit for us based on the criteria.
It also didn't hurt that we were reasonably familiar with the community from skiing with our children and lastly a new home builder – Reid Heritage Homes – that we had been admiring for probably 10 years before retirement, was building here.
Q: Where did you each go to school?
B/D: We grew up in Erindale (before it became Mississauga), not too far from each other.
We went to different public schools, then the same high school: Streetsville, and then the University of Waterloo.
B: He was on the football team and I was a cheerleader. Is that a cliche?
Q: How did you meet, and when?
B: We met in 1960 in Erindale. I was a Brownie, David was a Cub. The two groups used to meet on the same nights in the same community hall.
But growing up in a small town in the '60s, we had many of the same friends and hung out at the same places.
Q: Did you both always have green thumbs?
D: I grew up on a farm: Oughtred Orchards in Erindale. Besides apples, we grew and sold all sorts of in-season fruits and vegetables from a farm stand. My father also had a huge vegetable garden that supported our family.
Our own gardening happened because we had neighbours behind us who had a messy yard. So that led to us building a solid board fence, which looked ugly, which lead to developing a deep perennial border in front of the fence and borders on all sides, and so on and so on. We found there was personal satisfaction and stress relief in working in our garden and seeing plants grow.
When we moved from Newmarket to Collingwood, we dug up and fostered out many of our plants so we could recreate our gardens in our new house.
Q: Are you retired? What did/do you do as a career?
B: Yes, we are both very happily retired. David retired in 2008 after 34 years in urban and regional planning, the last 30 of which were with the Town of Richmond Hill. I retired in 2013 after 40 years in urban and regional planning, with the last 25 years with the Region of York.
Q: Can you please outline your volunteer efforts, and your role within those efforts.
B: We joined the Collingwood Garden Club the year after we moved here. The club was looking for volunteers for their board, so based on our previous experience and our skill sets, we volunteered. I initially put together the newsletter and I volunteered David to work with the treasurer.
It went on from there to becoming board members and figuring out how to raise the club profile in the community and increase the membership. Those first couple of years we did cold calls to new home developments in the community with club information and flower seed packets. We worked with other members to put together and man a booth at the Downtown Farmers Market and from there it was an easy jump to working on booking speakers and organizing outreach to other community groups with some gardening projects.
Once the club gained some profile, it attracted new members, and they in turn brought new energy and ideas to the table that we could pursue as a club. Now, along with our other members we do all sorts of gardening, offer workshops on things like winter sowing, sprouting and microgreens and pruning. We bring in terrific speakers and events monthly for our meetings.
We are so fortunate to have this amazing group of member volunteers to work with on an ongoing basis and a town that supports the work that we do.
Q: What made you choose to lend your time to these causes in particular? Why are they important to you?
B: There is personal satisfaction in seeing plants grow and our work with other Garden Club members, whether on community projects or in the Collingwood Arboretum, is an extension of this.
Our work in the Collingwood Arboretum in planting and maintaining new trees and gardens is particularly meaningful, as we are contributing to the environmental health of our community – and that helps everyone
It’s gratifying to see so many residents and visitors enjoying the Arboretum on an ongoing basis.
Q: How did you learn you had been chosen as a recipient of the Companion to the Order of Collingwood? How did you feel when you heard you had been chosen?
B: I saw an email from the Office of the Mayor in my inbox, and my first reaction was, what have we done wrong?
As civil servants, we were used to working in the background and not being singled out for attention. I was stunned to find out we had not only been nominated by our own board of directors, I found out later, but had been awarded the Order of Collingwood.
I know I teared up at this honour, because the work that we and our other Collingwood Garden Club member volunteers do is not to garner awards, but to give back to the community.
Q: Do you have other hobbies outside of your volunteer efforts, and what are they?
D: I ski a bit, but had an accident in 2020, so I'm not sure how successful getting back to it is going to be.
I also do some woodworking and the ‘honey-do’ list here at home and at our camp in Northern Ontario is pretty long.
Barb sews and thinks up things for me to do, but we're both really focused on gardening for most of the year. We both like to travel, with our next trip being Costa Rica for four weeks.
Q: What does the future hold for you?
B: Hopefully, we'll stay healthy to allow us to continue gardening and travelling and our first grand-child is debuting in August, so that will be exciting. But other than that, who knows? We can be flexible.
For our feature People of Collingwood, we speak with interesting people who are either from or are contributing to the Collingwood community in some way, letting them tell their own stories in their own words. This feature runs on CollingwoodToday every weekend. If you’d like to nominate or suggest someone to be featured in People of Collingwood, email [email protected].
