Hancock Woodlands

The Hancock Woodlands is a ten-acre property in Mississauga planted and maintained by generations of the Hancock family. Leslie and Dorothy Hancock created it in the 1930s when they launched a nursery to propagate ornamentals from South East Asia. Today, the Woodlands is a hidden jewel – a Carolinian forest of towering 150-year-old trees, whose thick canopy hangs over historical plantings of rhododendrons and azaleas. During the Second World War, Lesley Hancock converted the sheds into barracks to house Japanese Canadians to save them from internment camps. Today, the Woodlands is endangered by residential development, and is in transition, having recently been purchased by the City of Mississauga to become a public park and interpretive centre. I will be returning to this site regularly to add to my explorations of small tracts of land rich in history that have escaped development and are now being stewarded back to become ecological areas. Chromogenic panoramic images and three additional images of the potting sheds in limited editions of seven 24”x14” and an edition of three at 20”x35”