JARS v64n2 - In Memoriam: Joseph Becales

In Memoriam: Joseph Becales
Karel F. Bernady

Joseph Becales passed away May 23, 2009, at the age 82. He was a member of the Greater Philadelphia Chapter and an avid hybridizer.

Joe grew up in Pennsylvania. Underage, he joined the Navy during World War II and served aboard the equipment transport ship USAT Lakehurst. Afterwards, he worked for Jack Frost Sugar Company as their senior sales representative.

He married Doris Webb and together they lived and developed their garden in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. They had no children. They enjoyed gardening, raising koi, breeding dogs and collecting rhododendrons and dwarf conifers. Doris was the love of his life and Joe missed her sorely when she passed on in 1999.

Joe and Doris began developing their garden in the early 1960s. It was featured on tour at the 1976 Annual Meeting in Valley Forge. Billed as one of the most extraordinary gardens of the Philadelphia area, it lived up to its reputation as conference attendees attest today. The garden contained hundreds of rhododendrons and dwarf conifers. Just three years earlier Francis W. Mosher, Jr., writing in the Quarterly Bulletin included the garden for honors on his mythical All-American Rhododendron Gardens roster of family gardens.

His passion was to develop hardy yellow-flowered elepidotes. Towards this end Joe began hybridizing using Joseph Gable's cultivars and rhododendrons with richly yellowed flowers. He sought pollen from other hybridizers and purchased tender budded plants from the West Coast. The latter he kept alive in pots that he protected through our eastern winters. He succeeded with a plant he named 'Fashion Plate' that bears 5” flowers. He continued making crosses up to last year, when illness began to take its toll. Other yellow rhododendrons he named were 'Bob Hickey,' 'Yellow Frills,' 'Yellow Tassels,' 'Big Yellow' and 'Floodlight'.

Although he never registered any cultivar himself, a fellow member, Charles Herbert, did so for one of Joe's hybrids, 'Antigua'. Joe did produce other plants that he named including the lepidote 'M.L. Webb', evergreen azaleas 'Amelia Becales' and 'Avalon Beauty', and a red-flowered elepidote 'Antoinette Janus'.

Joe was a quiet and cautious man but once you gained his trust he was extremely generous with cuttings for propagation, pollen and seeds. Several chapters' Plants for Members Programs benefited from his generosity. Last year Joe contributed cuttings of several of his best cultivars for propagation for the 2009 Eastern Regional Conference. The resulting plants were offered at the conference Plant Sale. We are quite fortunate that his plants were available, since the expectations for preserving his garden and plants therein are low. Joe's legacy is worthy of saving.