It is with great sadness that I share news that my dear friend Ron Rule FCSLA LMBCSLA died on Tuesday, November 26, in Vancouver, BC.
Ron was very special not only to me, but to his family, friends, and colleagues. He has been instrumental in shaping landscape architecture in Vancouver, British Columbia since the 1970s. He was British Columbia Society of Landscape Architects licence number 49—and that says it all—registered in 1975 in BC, 1978 in Washington, and 2002 in California. After completing a five-year Bachelor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon, he practiced briefly in Portland, Oregon, before joining Don Vaughan’s office from 1973 until 1975. He often spoke about how influential his time was at Don’s office before he opened his own firm in 1975, which he ran until his passing.
Over 50-plus years of practice, Ron worked on nearly 2,000 projects, including some of the most prestigious estate gardens, his niche, on the West Coast, and a select few internationally. He was a pioneer in elevating high-end residential garden design, recognizing early on that this field deserved more rigorous attention. Ron not only felt at home designing gardens but also excelled in the craft, often creating masterpieces without fully realizing it due to his modest nature. He worked quietly for prominent and famous clients, allowing his work to speak for itself.
Ron didn’t just design gardens locally, he immersed himself in them internationally. In the 1990s, he spent time in England working in the renowned gardens of Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter and Rosemary Verey at Barnsley House, where he delved into horticulture and hands-on gardening. Along with his wife, Carolann, Ron organized and led 16 garden design history tours to England and France, visiting historically important private gardens, many never open to the public. These tours were legendary, well-attended, and offered him an opportunity to study great garden design from the inside out. Ron was constantly learning through his extensive travels and avid reading. We often spent hours talking about the books he had recently read.
Ron was also an excellent speaker and teacher. His lectures at VanDusen Botanical Garden and UBC in the early 1990s led to the establishment of the UBC Continuing Studies Garden Design Certificate Program, which he ran successfully as director for 17 summers. It was here that I met Ron through an introduction by my colleague, former Chair and Professor Cynthia Girling, in 2006. Ron needed someone to provide lectures on Chinese and Japanese garden design. I agreed and taught this sequence until the certificate program was sadly phased out by UBC in 2015. The course often acted as a feeder program for students entering the MLA program. Many garden designers in the city not only speak highly about their experience taking the program, but have also become strong designers, helping to raise the bar of garden design and landscape architecture in Vancouver.
Ron’s work has been published extensively over the years in newspapers and magazines, including Azure, BC Home And Garden, Canadian Living, Garden Design, GardenWise, Horticulture, House And Home, Landscape Architecture Magazine, The Globe And Mail, Vancouver Sun, and Western Living to name a few.
In 2011, Ron Rule, Jane Durante (succeeded in 2019 by Margot Long), and I established the UBC Garden Design Lecture Series. Aligned with SALA in 2015, this annual event has since brought 13 world-class garden designers and landscape architects to Vancouver to celebrate their work at a public lecture. During their visits, the committee, along with expert guides, hosted tours for them around the city and UBC campus, highlighting local landscape architectural projects. Ron was the lead in establishing this series, driven by his passion to educate the public, students and design professionals.
Ron was my best friend since I arrived in Vancouver; we met regularly over the years eating mostly mussels in different restaurants, as we both liked seafood, discussing cooking, and valuing it as a strong design skill. Ron was a patient listener, mentor, and advisor. He was passionate about his work, and he loved his family dearly. He was proud of his children and wife and expressed often that he was so lucky. It goes without saying that Vancouver has lost one of the best and finest designers in landscape architecture. He was a true design leader, an outstanding plant expert, and he had a multisensory skill set seeing what a site and its context needs. Ron was and will always be part of the design community in BC, though now in a more spiritual way. His projects will live on, and it is now up to the owners to provide the same tender care for the gardens that he provided when designing them.
In honour of Ron’s outstanding career and achievements the SALA Outreach Committee has decided to do one more Garden Design Lecture in the fall of 2025, but this time to honour Ron for not only creating the series but to also remember him as an outstanding leader in developing the practice of landscape architecture on the West Coast.
Daniel Roehr BCSLA CSLA AKB
Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture / Landscape Architect