Antigonish County Christmas tree operator puts bow on career

ASHDALE, N.S. — On Saturday, 80-year-old Henry Van Berkel will cut 900 Christmas trees with his son.

“I’ve cut 600 trees in a day, but I’m getting older and I don’t know if I can do that anymore,” said Van Berkel on Tuesday.

He and David will stop their chattering saws at 11 a.m. The young fellows hired to haul out the trees will gather around, and Van Berkel will read John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields.

They’ll all share some quiet and then a few stories.

Then they’ll get back to work.

This will be Van Berkel’s last Remembrance Day running a power saw.

“This is it. If I don’t quit now, I won’t have a marriage,” he said with a grin.

These 12 hectares of tidy trails and balsam fir represent a life of memories to Van Berkel. It’s the faces and characters he knew here, sweated with here on chill fall mornings, whom he cherishes and whom he’s learning to carry with him without the constant reminders from the land itself.

When Henry and Elaine bought this place in 1984, it represented an unlikely return to agriculture.

Having survived being captured by Nazi troops and having their farmhouse damaged, his parents, Adrian and Johanna Van Berkel, didn’t see a future for their growing family in the war-ravaged and densely populated Netherlands.

In 1951, they joined the large post-war Dutch migration that revitalized Nova Scotia agriculture.

They found land they never would have been able to afford back home on the Glen Road in Antigonish County. They grew a mixed farm of cattle, chickens and field crops.

Then, just before Christmas, with the barns full of animals and feed for the winter, there was a spark. The fire leapt from barn to barn.

“It was a tragedy,” said Van Berkel.

“I saw those cattle burn in their stalls.”

Heartbroken, Adrian (known locally as Eddie) and Johanna turned their 11 children to starting again.

They poured immense labour into returning a farm in Salt Springs to productive agriculture, clearing long fallow fields, repairing barns, planting and raising new herds.

“As the oldest son, I guess they expected that I would take over, but I’d gotten pretty sick of farming,” said Van Berkel.

So it was off to St. Francis Xavier University to become a teacher. He and Elaine married and moved to Alberta. They had a daughter, adopted a son and, after eight years, moved home for a teaching job in Antigonish County.

They might have been done with farming, but it wasn’t done with them.

A farm in Ashdale that had been abandoned so long its acidic fields had grown up in softwood and been cut came up for sale. They bought it in 1986.

Amongst the stumps, balsam fir were seeding in.

Prices were strong, about $12 per tree.

What he would soon learn was that Christmas tree farming is as much about the people it brings through your life as it is about business.

One of the first was then-15-year-old Steven Gray, who would bicycle from Addington Forks to Antigonish each morning to meet Van Berkel for 6 a.m. Then they’d run power saws together all day, spacing the firs.

He wasn’t surprised to see Gray found a successful nursery, Gray’s Greenhouses.

There was Sterling Teasdale, who built the network of roads between tree lots with an old bulldozer; Rosalie Vincent, who’d come late each fall to cut brush for wreaths; and former owner Goodwill Cameron, who shared stories of the families who farmed the same land before. The tidy trails bear their names on now fading signs.

There’s also Tara Lane, named after a girl Elaine and Henry fostered for nine years; Logan’s Loop, for a grandson; and David Lane, for their son.

The Van Berkels kept a list of people who worked with them on the property over some four decades that now bears over 300 names.

“Everywhere I look here are memories,” said Henry.

Those memories of the people who worked this land, both with and before the Van Berkels, are contained in Walks by Big Alex’s Pond. As the past became a greater ingredient in the present during his 70s, Van Berkel wrote the book that tells of the Klondike king Big Alex MacDonald, who began his life’s journey on this Ashdale farm and the lives and memories that have followed.

The farm is sold now. Its hills will form memories for someone else.

On Remembrance Day, Henry and David will cut and haul balsam firs one last time.

“You can’t take it with you when you go,” said Henry.

Then quietly, as if to himself, “You have to reconcile yourself to that.”