“It’s my happy place’: By giving back, Abkhazi Garden volunteer finds peace with change

Volunteers keep Abkhazi Garden running. Tess van Straaten introduces us to a docent, making a difference there for a decade. The post “It’s my happy place’: By giving back, Abkhazi Garden volunteer finds peace with change appeared first on CHEK .

Every Friday, you’ll find Lesley Wood at Abkhazi Garden , getting her post at the summer house ready for visitors. “This is the first building built on the property in 1946 when Peggy Pemberton, as she was then, bought the property,” Lesley Wood explains. It’s the same year Peggy Pemberton-Carter married Prince Nicholas Abkhazi after both were held captive during the Second World War.

Watch below: Loading the player... “The story they have of their lives almost sounds like it’s made up,” Lesley says. “It’s so much rags to riches and drama but we can document every bit of it.”

It’s a love story for the ages. Abkhazi is, after all, the garden that love built, and Lesley cherishes her time here. “One of the things that I think is important with volunteer work is that you find things that you really love to do,” she says.

“Leslie is amazing!” says Abkhazi Garden Site Manager & Volunteer Coordinator Cherie Miltimore. “She’s contributed to the garden for 10 years now in various ways. She’s the docent at the garden, so she welcomes people from all over the world and tells them the story, but she can also ID plants.

She helps with our ID books.” As a gardening enthusiast with a degree in botany, Lesley fell in love with the garden when a friend first brought her here a decade ago. “I was just absolutely blown away by the garden,” she says.

“I thought it was so beautiful, and it was so peaceful as well, and I signed up to volunteer that very day.” Lesley and her husband had just moved to Victoria from Vancouver, she’d just retired from her job, and she was at a turning point in her life. “In 2016 I turned 60 the day we sold our beloved house in New Westminster,” Lesley explains.

“Two weeks, later I retired from a job I really loved, and two weeks after that we were here living in Victoria, and I sort of thought everything would fall into place very nicely, but it didn’t. I found myself really unhappy at very loose ends.” But spending time volunteering in the garden helped Lesley figure out her next chapter “For me, it was a place of peace and a place of rediscovering myself and now I just say it’s my happy place,” Lesley says with a smile.

The world-renowned garden is celebrating 80 years this year, and it wouldn’t still be here without volunteers. “We have over 70 volunteers,” Cherie says. “It was the community that saved this garden, and it’s the community that helps keep it operating.”

For Lesley, who grew up in a family that volunteers and gives back, it’s the perfect spot to help make a difference. The post “It’s my happy place’: By giving back, Abkhazi Garden volunteer finds peace with change appeared first on CHEK .