Kingsbrae Garden Wins Gold for Canada: GM earns TIAC Tourism Employee of the Year Delta Award
Kingsbrae Garden is enjoying a banner year-with national and provincial awards, Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary certification, the acquisition of a rare “Jurassic living fossil”, Canada’s first wollemi pine and featuring on the Recreating Eden TV show, an international showcase for exceptional gardeners and their passions.
Andreas Haun, General Manager of the 27-acre horticultural public garden, in the resort town of St Andrews by-the-Sea, New Brunswick, Canada, was declared Canada’s Tourism Employee of the Year by the Tourism Industry Association of Canada [TIAC] at the annual national awards. Delta Hotels sponsored the award, one of fourteen hotly contested 2006 TIAC Tourism Excellence Awards presented by The Globe and Mail, during Canada’s Tourism Leadership Summit in Jasper, Alberta on October 23rd, 2006.
Haun said, “Tremendous energy on the part of many, many people combines to make Kingsbrae Garden the wonderful place that it is... I am simply the conduit for the recognition they all deserve”.
Thirty-eight companies and individuals, representing the best of Canada’s tourism industry, were nominated for the various awards; New Brunswick led the pack with 8 nominations. Four of the fourteen awards were conferred on New Brunswick’s brightest stars in the tourism industry, the most of any province or territory.
One of those four, the Parks Canada Sustainable Tourism Award, was shared between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia by the outstanding Bay of Fundy Tourism Partnership, of which Kingsbrae Garden is a member. John & Lucinda Flemer, patrons of Kingsbrae Garden, were presented with the New Brunswick Tourism & Parks Minister’s Award for Tourism Excellence on June 7, 2006, at the Crowne Plaza Lord Beaverbrook Hotel, Fredericton, NB.
Kingsbrae Garden achieved “Certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary” designation in 2006, for ecological excellence in five areas: Environmental Planning, Wildlife Habitat Management, Resource Conservation, Waste Management and Outreach and Education, sheltering 65 species of birds in its eco-friendly grounds.
Earlier in the season, Kingsbrae Garden was again out in the vanguard, with the acquisition of one of the world’s oldest and rarest trees, the first wollemi pine in Canada—an astonishing botanical find from the Blue Mountains of Australia, previously thought extinct for 2 million years.
Offspring of these bisexual “Jurassic living fossils” exist in a just few public gardens around the world, each passionately involved in the worldwide conservation effort for the horticultural marvel. Fewer than 100 have been found in the wild, tucked into remote rainforest gorges of the Wollemi National Park, where their strong genetic code has allowed them to survive ice ages and dust storms for millennia. The genus is estimated to be 90 to 200 million years old; Cretaceous dinosaurs are presumed to have nibbled its branches. It belongs to the Araucariaceae Relatives Kauri, Norfolk Island, Hoop, Bunya and Monkey Puzzle pines.
To round off the exciting year, Kingsbrae’s 4th annual Garden of Lights & Festival of Trees begins on November 22nd, to benefit the local Volunteer Centre & Food Bank, as part of the St Andrews winter festival “A Season of Light & Wonder”.
Included in the festival is the Festive Dine Around—a popular progressive dinner—in association with The Fairmont Algonquin Hotel, Windsor House, Rossmount & Europa Inns--a highly convivial and delicious evening, culminating with home-made dessert and coffee/tea at the licensed Kingsbrae Garden Café, amidst the magical spectacle of over 35,000 lights.
