Scientist, horticulturist.
Born at Abbotsford, British Columbia on 19 May 1942, son of Frederick Robert Healey and Ethel Delia Almgren, in 1960 he enrolled in an undergraduate honours program in Botany at the University of British Columbia. After graduating in 1964, he moved to California where he was in a doctoral program in algal physiology at the University of California (San Diego) and also worked at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla. His thesis, completed in 1969, was entitled “The mechanism of hydrogen evolution by algae”. It appears that he then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin until 1971 when he moved to Winnipeg to join the scientific staff of the newly-opened Freshwater Institute of the Canada Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked as an algal physiologist, publishing numerous papers based on laboratory and field samples of algae from lakes in Manitoba and Ontario. He maintained pure cultures of several dozen algal species for use in laboratory experiments. He retired in the late 1980s.
He was an active horticulturist at his property near St. Norbert, and continued his breeding work with perennials, shrubs, and trees after moving to a farm near Belmont. Through the 1980s and 1990s, he wrote numerous articles for The Prairie Garden on irises, peonies, daylilies, and other plants. In the early 1980s, he served briefly as Vice-President of the Manitoba Lily Society.
He died on 29 October 2023.
See also:
Historic Sites of Manitoba: Healey Conservation Monument (RM of Prairie Lakes)
Obituary, Jamieson's Funeral Service.
We thank Linda Dietrick, Mike Stainton, Len Hendzel, Lynn Collicutt, and Alex Salki for providing additional information used here.
This page was prepared by Gordon Goldsborough.
Page revised: 11 November 2023
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