This article was originally published in the Passiflora Society International Journal,’ Fall 2020′.
By Robert Rice
It was sad, so soon after publishing Don Ellison’s article Let’s Breed a Cold Climate, Edible Passiflora as a Team! in our 2018 issue of Passiflora, to hear of his death at the age of 86 on 1st August 2020. You will find personal reminiscences from John Vanderplank and Angela Woolcott on the following pages; here are a few brief notes to round out the picture of this extraordinary man, of whom one might truly say “they don’t make them like that any more”.
According to an interview he gave to subTropical Gardening magazine in 2008, he first made his appearance on the horticultural stage at the age of 12, when he was voted “Australian Junior Farmer of the Year” by the Australian Women’s Weekly, for his part in exhibiting some carnations at the Royal Sydney Show. He later became involved in mail-order carnations, and then supplying them to Woolworths.
At the age of 21 he started Flamingo Florist, whose present owners still supply flowers and plants to the town of Nowra, where Don spent most of his life. There was no horticultural training in those days; Don had to teach himself but, as always, was happy to pass on his knowledge. He trained some of the first apprentices in New South Wales, which led to the establishment of a proper horticultural curriculum at Technical and Further Education colleges such as TAFE Nowra, where Don was also a teacher.
In 1969, now in his thirties, Don was asked by the US Army to research and then supply seeds and nursery plants that could be used to replant the soils of Vietnam contaminated by Agent Orange, so becoming Australia’s first registered exporter of nursery products. When international demand for the Kentia palm (Howea forsteriana) suddenly exploded, he was well placed to supply no less than 18.5 million specimens, up from just 1 million the year before. In 1979 he was named “Australian Exporter of the Year”. In 1982, he established Ellison Horticultural Pty, which remains Australia’s leading exporter of Palms and Cycads, now relocated from Nowra to Alstonville, but still in NSW, under the management of his daughter Rhonda LeBrocque and her husband David, .
As the seed business grew, Don was constantly asked by his customers what their seedlings would grow into. This gave rise to an illustrated catalogue, which in 1995 became his best selling Cultivated Plants of the World (in some editions named Garden Plants of the World); it was dedicated to his wife Lyn. It carries over 4,000 illustrations (49 of them Passiflora) and has sold 80,000 copies around the world. This was followed by Camellias: a Photographic Dictionary (1997) and, with his son Anthony, Cultivated Palms of the World (2001). He even found time in 1999 to contribute an authoritative article on Passiflora in Australia to this journal. (Ellison 1999)
To obtain the illustrations for his books, Don always had a camera with him and travelled all over the world, leading botanic expeditions, especially to Thailand, and attending trade shows. After the LeBrocques took over the business, he moved to Queensland where he maintained a small nursery on the Coomera River, inland from the Gold Coast, but returned to New South Wales in 2015, settling in Ballina.
Always keen to be involved, he served as member of a number of boards and as Alderman on the City Council of Shoalhaven (of which Nowra forms part) from 1980 to 1983, and was also Deputy Mayor, and had a street named after him; but it was only after his death that he received his final and greatest honour, the Order of Australia Medal, having been nominated by Angela Woolcott of ABCeeds, whose tribute to him follows.
REFERENCES IN THIS AND ACCOMPANYING ARTICLES
Ellison, Donald P. 1993. Passiflora in Australia. Passiflora 9(3): 21-23
Vanderplank, J. 2013 Passiflora foetida v. ellisonii Vanderpl. Curtis’s Botanical Magazine 30(4): 380-383
Vanderplank, J. 2015 A Revision of Passiflora Section Dysosmia. Passiflora Special Edition 1: 68-69
By Angela Woolcott
Worrigee, NSW, near Nowra, in the street named after him.
I met Don on August 10, 2018, while I was waiting in the mechanic’s office. He proceeded to tell me stories of his extraordinary life; travelling around the world, visiting different botanical gardens and running successful horticulture and seed businesses. I mentioned that I was a writer, and he proceeded to tell me how I would love the enormous book shows in the UK and how, once, he had even met J.K. Rowling. Don then asked me if I wanted to help him write a book on natural plant medicines, and we worked on that and other books over the next eighteen months before he sadly had a stroke.
Don helped my husband, Brad, and I set up a seed business. Don also helped another local man, Troy Clarke, to set up a seed business, which he runs with his mother, Lane Clarke. We all found Don to have an enormous amount of energy and zest for life. When he wasn’t at our house having long chats with a coffee, giving me letters to type up and a list of things to research, he was out in the car with Brad, showing him how to pick seeds to add to our growing seed list and introducing him to fellow nurserymen. He told Brad and I how to clean, store, sell and propagate seed successfully. He was a wealth of knowledge and we had a master sharing his passion with us. We wondered how he had the time to teach so many at the same time as travelling often himself to visit friends and driving around the area looking for seeds for his students.
Brad and I had the good fortune to travel back to his hometown to research a book and go seed hunting with him for four days. We met a long-term friend of his, Colleen Paslow, who he helped to launch a successful seed business and nursery over forty years prior.
Don wanted me to be the Passiflora lady; he used to love calling me that. He showed us how to hand-pollinate the flowers and how he went about grafting cuttings to create cultivars. He showed us the Passiflora plants that he was growing and the cold-hardy Passiflora that he was working on.
He had many Passiflora varieties growing on his large property before he moved to his retirement unit. He said he used to take a wheelbarrow to collect the fruit from the Passiflora quadrangularis because they were so large!
I gathered together all the information from his extensive contribution to the horticulture industry and nominated Don for an Order of Australia Medal. He was given that honour in the recent Queen’s Awards. Even though I would have loved him to have received it in person, I was happy that he was recognised for everything that he had done. We were both meant to have flat tyres that day, and I’m so grateful that we met
Memories of Don Ellison
By Penny and John Vanderplank
We were greatly saddened by the news that Don had died on the 1st August 2020. Perhaps we can take a small consolation from the fact that although Don dearly loved life and was a fighter in all he did, he wouldn’t have wanted to live without being able to do the things he loved so much; travel, writing, planning new ventures and scheming of a way to breed a gigantic, sweet, cold hardy edible passion fruit.
We first met Don when he was working on his book, Cultivated Plants of the World in the early 1990s. For those who have not read this work, it is mainly composed of more than four thousand photographs of cultivated plants with brief descriptions – a mammoth piece of work that was published in 1995.
When Don visited our collection, he was in a rush; he wanted to photograph every passionflower, clematis, jasminum and hebe we had, and was disappointed if any were not in flower. His enthusiasm was infectious, and his energy was limitless. He was one of those very few people who if they said “I’ll post that to you”, or “I’ll let you have that” it would arrive: he always was as good as his word. Over the years, we met Don several times and he was always a gentleman, courteous, very generous with his time and his new ideas on growing and promoting passionflowers or more often passion fruit. He always said, “If you ever come to Australia come and stay with me”. In 2018 we went to Australia and tried to get in touch, but sadly he was unwell at the time, so regrettably we didn’t get to visit him.
One evening he told us a story of how he started his seed business. He said when he was young and trying to start his business, he saw that there were wonderful plants growing all over Australia and he knew people wanted to buy their seed. He was trying to grow as many of them as he could on his land, but it was taking too long to grow the plants, and he didn’t have enough space and could not afford more land. So he came up with a brilliant solution: as he travelled around Australia, whenever he found a plant that was full of seed or would soon be so, he asked the owner for permission to harvest the crop for a modest reward and for future crops of seed. Soon he had, as he put it, the whole of Australia growing seed for him, and all he had to do was to remember to harvest them.
Amidst all his other activities, Don did much to promote the virtues of edible passionfruit and native Australian species around the world, and I was pleased in 2013 to have the opportunity to recognise this by naming a new variety, Passiflora foetida var. ellisonii, in his honour.
We miss you, Don.
