The Hole Family
Lois & Ted Hole - Lois Hole was born in Buchanan, Saskatchewan and moved to Edmonton while in her teens. She grew up to become one of Canada’s best known and loved gardening personalities.

Lois wrote fifteen best-selling, award-winning gardening books and published an annual Spring Gardening magazine; she also wrote regular columns for the Edmonton Sun, the Edmonton Journal and the Globe & Mail. During the late 1990s, Lois made regular appearances on CBC TV’s Canadian Gardener.

In 1952 Ted Hole purchased some land on the banks of St. Albert’s Sturgeon River. Lois and Ted faced some tough times in those early years as they experimented with many different types of farming.

Eventually Ted and Lois found a winning formula: vegetable gardening. They started selling fresh vegetables to passersby and eventually word of mouth spread far and wide, leaving Ted and Lois with a thriving business on their hands. It was an exciting and exhausting time, filled with long days of balancing farm work with raising two boys, Bill and Jim.

As the business grew and as Bill and Jim completed their university degrees, Ted recognized that Hole’s had to change if it was to enjoy continued success. When Bill and Jim suggested a major shift, from vegetable gardening to a greenhouse business, Lois and Ted supported the idea and handed management of the business over to them.

Lois and Ted always believed in giving back to the community, and through Hole’s they supported hundreds of local and national charities. Lois went on to serve as the University of Alberta’s chancellor from 1998–2000 and was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Alberta in February 2000.

Ted passed away peacefully on the evening of March 26, 2003, at 76 years of age. Lois passed away just a little under two years later, on January 6, 2005, during her term as Lieutenant Governor.

Jim Hole - Jim lives in Edmonton, Alberta and works nearby at the family’s greenhouse and garden centre in St. Albert, where he divides his time between writing about what he does and doing what he writes about. Explaining what makes plants tick is Jim’s specialty, and he does it without ever losing sight of the beauty and wonder that make gardening enjoyable. In addition to writing best-selling books, weekly newspaper columns and a twice-yearly magazine, Enjoy Gardening, Jim can be heard regularly on CBC radio and seen weekly on City TV’s Your City.

Bill Hole - Bill achieved his Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture from the University of Alberta in 1978. After graduation, Bill pursued his business and gardening interests, helping build his parents’ market gardening operation into a nationally known greenhouse and garden centre. Bill’s current challenge is the relocation of Hole’s Greenhouses to a new state-of-the-art, environmentally sensitive facility next to Lois Hole Centennial Provincial Park. This new building will be the first of its kind in North America.

Valerie Hole - Valerie, Bill’s wife, has been working at Hole’s since age 13. She now manages the huge and complex process of ordering bedding plants and bulbs, organizing each year’s plant trials and providing valuable research for the publishing department’s many book projects. Valerie has a B.Sc. (Agriculture) from the University of Alberta.