Building contractor, horticulturist.
Born at Neepawa on 12 August 1930 to Mary Margaret Barrie Fleming (1902-1964) and George Raymond Strohman (1903-1983), he developed an interest in horticulture beginning when he was tending the family garden as child. His grandmother Strohman educated him on the names of trees and wildflowers and domestic plants, and he recalled her particularly admonishing him not to pick the wild prairie lily when he was gathering flowers for bouquets.
As an adult, he became a builder of houses and farm buildings, and a contractor. In 1972, he and his wife bought his grandparents’ house, moved it to a six-acre rural property near Neepawa, and named the new home The Nook. There he began to follow his passion for flowers by growing lilies. Having taken a genetics course at the University of Manitoba in his younger years allowed him to cultivate Asiatic hybrids, even before he knew what they really were in terms of classification. Around 1982-1983, lily fancier Ed Robinson, owner of Gaybird Nursery at Wawanesa, introduced him to the species L. martagon. Another Manitoba martagon fancier, Alice Moger, had been hybridizing with ‘Black Prince’ and ‘Rosalinda’ varieties. She became a source of inspiration for Strohman and propelled him into further hybridization efforts with lilies.
He retired from his work as a contractor in 1992, and besides the usual vegetables and fruits, his home garden eventually included over 1000 lily varieties and species. Every year, he made scores of planned pollinations and then carefully collected the seeds every fall. He specialized in Asiatic species, martagons, and polyploids, and also explored flowering Orientals and their hybrids. He described his goals as being: to create fragrant lilies in the Asiatic hybrid lines; to produce prairie-hardy trumpet and Oriental lilies; and to produce outfacing and upfacing hybrid martagon lilies. Over the years, he displayed his flowers at regional shows, and won many awards at the international level at North American Lily Society events (NALS).
His mentor, Ed Robinson, at the age of around 90, gave him permission to rescue several hundred martagon hybrids from the by then overgrown beds at his Wawanesa nursery. Strohman set to work extracting between 400 and 600 martagon bulbs in various sizes and in various states of health, followed up by the enormous project of identifying and organizing them.
Over the years, he registered a few seedlings of his own, among them ‘Mary Margaret’, ‘Plum Blossom’, ‘Alice Moger’, ‘Rosemary Margaret’, ‘Frances Ann’, and ‘Something Else’. His gardens were also visited by many horticulture-minded tourists. In 1995, his son, Nigel Strohman, who had developed an interest in lilies along with his father, established a mail-order lily-bulb business called the Lily Nook, based in his father’s gardens and greenhouses. This retail business was an immediate success, with varieties numbering upward of 2000. In the first year, the Lily Nook shipped to every province and territory in Canada and every state in the USA. Tourism increased as well. Local activist Eleanor Nicholson spearheaded a movement to encourage Neepawa to adopt the lily as its town flower and host an annual lily festival, the first of which took place in July 1997.
With his wife Joyce, he had four children. He died at Neepawa on 23 July 2010.
“Neepawa mourns loss of lily lover, festival founder,” Winnipeg Free Press, 26 July 2010.
“Manitoba Lily Fancier Barrie Strohman,” Manitoba Regional Lily Society newsletter.
“The Lily King, Barrie Strohman,” History, The Lily Nook.
Richard ‘Barrie’ Strohman,” Strohman/Gabler Family Tree, Ancestry.
“The Lily Nook,” Local Attractions, Town of Neepawa.
This page was prepared by Lois Braun.
Page revised: 29 November 2025
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