Kay Gee, co-founder and contributing editor of this Global Garden website, and my darling wife & life companion has passed away. I can’t believe that I am writing these words. Kay died of breast cancer. It was a particularly devious presentation of cancer called lobular cancer which is near to impossible to detect before it has spread.

The journey through life is, at least partly, a random walk. On that random walk chance events do happen. The most wonderful thing that has happened on my walk was meeting Kay. A chance meeting through a mutual friend grew into almost 40 years of love, beautiful companionship and a warm family. 

Born in 1952 Kay grew up on a dairy farm at Calliope near Gladstone in Central Queensland, Australia (very close to the Tropic of Capricorn). Her frequent ambles along the creek that ran through this farm started her life long love of flora & fauna.
She loved growing up on that farm (and loved revisiting it in later years) but a small town was never going to hold the adult Kay. It was the 60’s and, with The Animals hit tune “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” as their theme song, Kay & her high school mates planned their escape to the bright lights of Brisbane, the state capital.  

Kay won a university scholarship and completed a Bachelor of Arts degree followed by a Graduate Diploma in Education at the University of Queensland. Kay & I meet when she was at university and we have been inseparable ever since. We married in 1972.
Kay was a high school teacher in Brisbane for the next ten years.
During the 1970’s the world was shrinking and the arrival of the jumbo jet brought with it affordable air travel - even from Australia. With Frommer’s “Europe on $10 Dollars a Day” and the Eurail timetable tucked under our arms we joined the throngs of young Aussies experiencing Europe & Asia for the first time. Almost a third of a century later Kay still drew regular delight from those memories of our first overseas adventure. We had no idea that the internet would soon shrink the world even further.

But it was difficult for anything up to that point to compare with the delight of the arrival of our first baby in 1982. She came into the world on the day the Commonwealth Games started in Brisbane.
The front page of the local paper The Courier Mail had a photo of the games mascot – a winking kangaroo. The accompanying headline “With a Wink and a Nod Our Games Begin” applied so appropriately to our new circumstances.

In 1984 my employer transferred us to Melbourne, Victoria. Kay loved Melbourne from the very beginning. It was hard being separated from friends & family but Melbourne’s beautiful gardens, art, dining and live comedy scene had Kay hooked right from the start. Our second darling daughter was born soon after in 1985.
This completed what, to us, was a divinely warm family unit. 

Kay was always a gifted writer, as attested to by her academic performance. When the girls were small she combined this ability with her love of flora and started to write freelance magazine articles – predominately gardening related. A talented artist she frequently illustrated her articles with drawings of flora or insects. Gardening, writing, and family were her passions. Around 1986 Kay became editor at “Australian Better Gardens & Home Ideas” a publication distributed through nurseries. She remained editor until her death. 

The girls went to the local kindergarten & primary school and Kay became involved in their organization. She was President of the local kindergarten when asbestos was found in the ceiling of its building. The asbestos threatened the very existence of the kinder and the decades of community work that developed its infrastructure. Kay organized an alternative short term premises at little cost while the kinder was made safe. That kinder still exists today.

Kay was a calm personality but also very passionate about things that she held dear.  When the local primary school community found their wonderful school environment under threat from the state government TV News sent a reporter to the school and Kay, as a member of the School Council, presented a fiery, on camera case for the school remaining open.

Fortunately the efforts of the whole school community did enable it to remain open. Kay’s love of gardening made her a natural to run the plant store for many years at the primary school fete. Kay loved her involvement in that delightful local Primary School community. 

To consolidate her already significant plant knowledge Kay enrolled in a post-graduate horticulture course at the University of Melbourne, Burnley College after the kids started school. Kay was always academically bright so it was no surprise to me that she graduated as Dux of her course. But there was something more significant than that – she absolutely loved the course. Kay really knew that she had found her tribe! 

In 1996, when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was barely one year old, most people did not have an internet connection, few companies had a website and Google was yet to arrive  Kay & I founded Global Garden. It was one of the world’s first gardening web sites. It was unique in Australia in being updated monthly (just like a magazine) and was possibly unique in the world in this regard. It went on to win several awards and remains extremely popular. I did the geeky bits while Kay did what really mattered – the content. Global Garden won the inaugural Australian Horticultural Media Award for communicating via a website or CD.

Kay, the quiet achiever, has built up a very loyal & very appreciative, worldwide readership. The many items without an author attributed to it which have appeared within Global Garden over the last 12 years were written by Kay. A truly enormous achievement. Kay also continued to write freelance articles, provide advice via a telephone hotline for a horticultural company and produce horticultural writing (including website writing) for horticultural companies.