REPLANTING A GRANDMOTHER'S GARDEN TO CELEBRATE A 100TH BIRTHDAY
The years of working on the 'fish boat project' naturally led Linda to the other side to this story. Linda was awarded the Heritage Award by the CIty of RIchmond for this project.
In the late 1990's, Ohama became personally involved in the city of Richmond's reconstruction of her grandparent`s original home and grandfather's boatworks, now called the Murakami Centre. These buildings were part of a designated national historic site, the Britannia Heritage Shipyards, on the banks of the Fraser Riveri n the town of Steveston.
Before the reconstruction, these buildings were derelict amd barely standing, and the garden was just an overgrown tangle of weeds and blackberries.
Stirred by her own inherited passion for growing flowers and the memory of her grandmother's wonderful gardens on the prairie that she grew up with, Linda organized the re-planting of this former Steveston garden, her grandmother Asayo Murakami`s first flower garden in Canada. The flowers were planted following instructions from her grandmother who lived in a nursing home in Calgary, Alberta at the time, and from the research of old photographs. Over a period of five years, Ohama documented and archived the restoration of these buildings and the replanting/growing of the flower garden, on film and in written material. The process is now part of the story that is told in her feature length documentary film, "Obaachan's Garden". Today, Asayo`s garden continues to grow and bloom, and has become a popular attraction for local people and tourists (see Britannia Heritage Shipyard's website).
In 1999, at the age of 101 years old, Linda's grandmother (obaachan) traveled from Calgary, Alberta to visit the garden for the first time since she left it behind in 1942.
