Musical flowers a beaut

Making the Bulkley Valley more beautiful may seem like a daunting task, however it’s one that John Koller has taken to heart over the years with his much sought after hanging baskets.

“Flowers are a necessity for me — buy the flowers first and the bread after,” Koller said.

Koeller first moved to Canada in 1979 from Switzerland with some friends. He first had the idea to leave his small mountainside town when, during his horticulture apprenticeship, he would listen to some exchange students talk about their home lives. With his newly-recognized travel lust, he eagerly agreed to move to Vancouver with some friends whose family lived there.

“I decided to cross the great divide and to see some of the world for myself,” Koller said. “People don’t realize what they have in the valley.”

A couple of years after moving to Vancouver, Koller decided to move out on his own, to try his own hand at things, and eventually settled in Smithers, where he began putting together flower baskets and such in his 500 square foot greenhouse.

“It was a city life or country life question,” Koller said. “I remember the first time we came through here was like a trip through time, there was no hydro, so from Vancouver it was quite the trip.”

Koller, who has since mastered the Farmers’ Market scene, including helping to bring the joy of organic, locally grown produce and artisan crafts to Terrace, went to his first market in the 80s, when they first started beside where the Smithers Home Hardware is now.

In fact, the farmers market in Terrace soon grew beyond its bounds, Koeller said, and there was talk of keeping it locals only, and omitting those like Koeller, who had to get up at 5 a.m. each Saturday morning in order to attend.

“They wanted to keep people who lived out of town out,” Koller said. “But they couldn’t have disposed of me so easily.”

Soon, Koller and his wife faced the question of expanding into a more automated system, or sticking with the market they currently held, which nowadays includes the flower baskets at the Aspen as well as lining the streets of New Hazelton. An opportunity he said no to.

“We liked the contact with the people, to talk flowers with the locals,” Koller said, who added that in order to go bigger there was quite an investment in technology needed.

Living up here isn’t something he’d trade for anything, he said, with the only drawback being the short growing season. Even so, he’s amazed at the number of people who attempt to grow things out of their season, such as peach trees, which he said without fail get wiped out by the rough northern climate.

“Hope lives eternal,” he remarked.

The culture shock, and perhaps a little homesickness, has been alleviated in a large part to the large number of Swiss he found here from earlier settlements, and Koller was overjoyed to discover and to become part of the Swiss Singers group with his accordion.

While the group has since disbanded, Koller still enjoys playing every now and again, and has since joined Just Us, a band from Telkwa which plays international music.

“It gets you around and nice entertainment and it makes a lot of people happy, including ourselves,” Koller said.

As the years pass, Koller has stopped selling his wares at the Smithers farmers’ market, deciding to take some time to smell the flowers himself.

It’s often tempting to go back, however, as the market is like a second home to him.

“It seems like my second family, with many of the same people there every time,” Koller said.

His new found partial retirement from the farmers market is also allowing him to focus more on exotics, such as Tibetan poppies, which are very hard to produce, however their rich colours, once they bloom, more than make up for the time spent in tending them. He is still tending to his greenhouses for hanging baskets and others for people to purchase from May until June.

“I was born with a green thumb and I still have it,” Koller said.

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