NANTON, Alta. — The prairies are a living landscape for Jim Coutts.
An avid art collector whose personal gallery celebrates the western landscape in oils and water colour, Coutts also developed a passion to preserve the prairie on his quarter section of land down a country road east of Nanton.
At 73, the former secretary and adviser to prime ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau had a vision to preserve that unique landscape and has donated his family’s homestead and 200 pieces from his private art collection to the University of Lethbridge.
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The donation is worth more than $2 million and will be used by the university for research and as a living laboratory.
Coutts may continue living on the property as long as he chooses and chairs an advisory group to oversee and maintain the extensive gardens and native grasslands.
Named the Coutts Centre for Western Canadian Heritage, it is the first donation of its kind to the southern Alberta university.
Coutts’ grandfather, Bill Allan, homesteaded the property more than 100 years ago but lost it in 1922 and moved to Nanton to run the local train station.
Coutts was able to buy back the land in 1988 and started a major restoration project that included rebuilding the original house and restoring outbuildings that included renovating a chicken coop into a guest house and artists’ studio.
He also added gardens that included hardy southern Alberta trees, flowers, shrubs and native grasses. He has ongoing partnerships with local gardeners, who helped him learn what might grow and thrive in the Chinook climate.
“I’ll tell you it is very hard to create a meadow with a mix of plants,” he said.
Coutts started with the same flowers his grandmother grew, such as hollyhocks, bachelor buttons and lilacs.
His vision grew when he started working with a landscape architect who taught him that the property should be treated like different rooms, where less decoration is better while preserving the view of the flowing grasses that stretch to the foothills.
Nanton is mixed grass prairie, and Coutts has gathered a variety of native prairie plants. He was told to get seed from within 80 kilometres of the farm, but he prevailed and established the meadows with a wide diversity of plants started from seed and plant plugs from a number of sources.
The farm includes 32 trial plots with 32 native grasses such as June grass, three fescues and wheat grasses.
He has maintained extensive growing records over the last 20 years that the university hopes to incorporate into its new digital herbarium.
The wild grasses have been mowed, burned off and grazed by sheep or goats to keep them healthy.
The gardens are lush this year thanks to above average rain, but sloughs are everywhere and the farm lost a number of trees when some parts of the property turned to marsh.
However, Coutts said it is not all bad.
“You experiment, you change and you move things around,” he said.
He approached several potential recipients about a land gift and the university expressed the most interest.
Chris Horbachewski, vice-president of advancement at the U of L, said this was the university’s first land donation. It has big plans and each of the five faculties will be invited to use the site.
“We want to make sure faculty members and researchers are thinking about ways they could incorporate it into their individual programs. We want to be as unintrusive as possible to the community and maintain it,” he said.
“The value to us is the work that has gone into it. We don’t want farm property, to be quite honest. We want to see it continue to develop.”
He said the university also wants to work with other institutions.
“From our perspective, we are not in the business of becoming landowners unless there is a solid academic research reason within the programs at the university,” said Horbachewski.
University provost Andy Hakin said the site offers potential science programs, social history and landscape.
“We can do so many things at one time,” he said.
“We are just at the start of programming for students and graduate students. We don’t want it to be an institutional type facility.”
The donation also eases fears that the gardens and history would be lost to a housing development or be plowed under if the quarter was sold.
