16th Annual Steele Lectures

Jack Looye: “New Rhododendrons”

Tuesday, 1 October 2002, 7:30 p.m., Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History

Jack Looye is a District Director Alternate and a member of the RSC Niagara Region Chapter as well as the Toronto and Atlantic Chapters and the Great Lakes Chapter. He is a past president of the Great Lakes Chapter. He has also served in the RSC Niagara Region Chapter Board and as a Regional Director for the RSC. He has received the Hybridizer’s Award from the RSC and is a frequent panelist at the ARS Breeder’s Roundtables. In a word, his life is rhododendrons.

Jack has had a long involvement with rhododendrons. He and his wife Jackie run Rhodoland Nurseries in Niagara on the Lake, Ontario. From the Niagara Chapter website: “A staggering amount of new material goes through this nursery. Jack Looye is Niagara’s most active breeder of rhododendrons. Jack makes some 100 crosses each year and his goal is to develop hardy yellows, oranges and reds. He and his wife Jackie are currently evaluating 5000 hybrid seedlings. In 1995 they started their nursery on 14 acres of prime soil. They currently have 7 polyhouses filled with 15,000 cultivars of hardy rhododendrons.”

One person seems to have influenced Jack more so than others — the late Weldon Delp. Weldon did a dizzying number of crosses and Jack knew them all. Delp took Jack under his wing and shared his plants with him as a trusted confidant and equal. Jack’s hybridizing is based on many of Delp’s crosses but he has also gone off in his own direction. Or is it directions? His talk will cover many of the new plants from his work. In a recent conversation he said he has some very good dwarf dark purples based on Rhododendron aureum — dwarf compact elepidote plants. Hopefully we’ll see some of them during his lecture. Whatever we see, it will be riveting. Jack also has a secret passion for daylilies.