Donald Robert Mitchell: Music lover. Father. Gardener. Artist. Born Nov. 5, 1949, in Comox, B.C.; died Sept. 4, 2025, in Courtenay, B.C., of cancer; aged 75.
Donald Mitchell liked to grow vegetables in his garden, but he wasn’t too precious about them. His kids have fond memories of batting practice on the lawn with giant, overgrown radishes.
He was that kind of father – coming home from work, quietly working in the garden and then pulling out a misshapen kohlrabi to look at together and deciding we could try grilling zucchini on the barbecue.
Don grew up in the bush in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, in a small wooden house, where the trees threatened to crowd out his mother’s flower garden at the back and his father’s vegetable garden at the front.
On cold winter mornings, “Donnie” and his two younger brothers would shoot out of bed to get dressed by the kitchen woodstove. When it snowed, they would gather up friends and toboggan down Hardy Hill until it was time to come back in for dinner.
Like his parents, Don loved to read. He was the first in his family to go to university. He attended the University of Victoria and later the University of British Columbia to study mining engineering. Although he didn’t become a mining engineer, Don always loved rocks. Don even bought a small rock polisher that would turn stones into what his daughter thought looked like polished jewels.
At UBC, Don met Hilda Meynert. Soon, they moved away from the big city to work in Williams Lake and then to Haida Gwaii. It was there that Don learned more about Haida art, and started carving his own vases and sculptures, inspired by their lines and stories.
Don and Hilda eventually moved back to Comox and had their first child, Stephanie. When she was a toddler, they moved to Kelowna, where they had their second child, Andy. Don tried to make a living as a wood and soapstone artist in Kelowna, but couldn’t make a go of it. Living in the dry Okanagan Valley, he learned the irrigation trade and eventually started his own business. He loved coming up with plans, solving problems, meeting customers, and – most of all – touring their gardens.
Don grew peaches, cherries, plums, apples and almost every orchard fruit you could cram into a city lot in Kelowna, not to mention his two vegetable gardens.
Don also volunteered at the Kelowna Folk Club and helped form the band Blithely Reekin’, where he played harmonica and washboard (he used his grandmother’s).
Later, after he and Hilda had parted ways, Don moved back to the Comox Valley, again setting up his irrigation business.
In his own vegetable garden, Don identified a gap in the market: a sturdy tomato cage. As an amateur welder, he set to work and was soon making “the best tomato cages in the world,” as his daughter always suggested he market them. This grew to making peony cages, trellises and obelisks, which he proudly sold at the Gumboot Market in Merville.
Don also found more time to make musical instruments, including kazoos and a wooden cajon, a rectangular box-shaped drum. He played regularly with Fiddlejam, where musicians get together to play Canadian fiddle music.
Every Thanksgiving, Christmas and Canada Day, Don went back to Kelowna to play music with old friends and see his beloved girlfriend, Betty Gordon. Betty was a potter, and Don was fascinated with the intricacies of making and firing pottery.
As his friends and family knew well, Don could not be rushed. When Stephanie was 17, he promised he’d make her a music box when he saw that Lee Valley was selling the music mechanism. When it came in the mail, Don said he didn’t have the right tool to make the box but he’d figure it out eventually. Every couple of years after that, Stephanie would ask him about it, and he’d say he was working on it. In 2015, Stephanie opened up her birthday parcel. Inside, carefully wrapped, was her music box. She was turning 37.
Don always seemed content in his quiet way. An avid reader, he was working his way through the Courtenay library fiction shelves. He started at the letter “A” (reading only books he was interested in). He made it to “T.” The cancer that killed Don came suddenly in August with no chance of treatment. He died in his sleep at home, with Betty at his side.
Stephanie Mitchell is Don Mitchell’s daughter.
To submit a Lives Lived: lives@globeandmail.com
Lives Lived celebrates the everyday, extraordinary, unheralded lives of Canadians who have recently passed. To learn how to share the story of a family member or friend, go to tgam.ca/livesguide.
