Kentville Greenhouse

Kentville Greenhouse

The DAR operated a greenhouse in Kentville from 1920 to 1958 to provide flowers to the Grand Pre Park, station gardens and grow pine seedlings for windbreaks. It was built in 1920 after the DAR bought the Grand Pre park. The greenhouses was located just north of the Kentville Station between the British Canadian fruit warehouse and the DAR employee tennis courts. It was 75 feet long and included an attached potting shed facing River Street.(1)

By the late 1930s, it was producing 20,615 plants a year in 81 varieties, supplying the Grand Pre park and ten station gardens.(2) The DAR's Gardener in the 1940s, Roscoe Fillmore, became a regional celebrity hosting a CBC Radio show called "The Maritime Gardener". However after the DAR sold the Grand Pre park and downgraded its stations in the face of dwindling passenger traffic, there was less justification for flowers and plants. The greenhouse was demolished and replaced by a parking lot in 1959 two years after the DAR sold the Grand Pre Park to the federal government.(3)

References and Footnotes

(1) Dimensions and construction from the 1951 Kentville Fire Insurance Plan, Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management

(2) Kentville Advertiser, "Railway News", September 29, 1938

(3) Devil's Half Acre, Mabel Nichols, Kentville Centenniel Committee (1986), page 47