Northern Gulf Island the perfect place to leave it all behind
By Will Ferguson
Published in Zummer Travel
September 16, 2025
I’ve come to Denman Island on false pretenses. Although ostensibly here for the annual writers festival, I am in fact on a scouting mission. As the last of our children prepares to move out, my wife and I are facing an empty nest in Calgary. Wistful thoughts turn to retiring somewhere warm. Somewhere green.
Located in the traditional territory of the K’ómoks Nation, Denman is moored off the east coast of Vancouver Island like a giant nurse log, a temperate rainforest festooned with ferns and towering stands of Douglas fir. Of B.C.’s Northern Gulf Islands, Denman, at only 51 square kilometres, is perhaps the best-kept secret, largely undiscovered and underdeveloped when compared to Salt Spring or Galiano or even nearby tourist-friendly Hornby, the next island in the chain. In the heat of summer, there are still shaded pockets to explore on Denman. The cedar-chest scent of old-growth forest: spiced air and the wet aroma of mulch, that eternal cycle of decay and rebirth. Sea and forest, the call and reply of birdsong in the trees.
I’m staying at the tranquil home of Susanne and Pablo Beauchemin who first came to Denman in 1973. Born in British Guiana, (now Guyana since it became independent in 1966), to an English mother and French-Canadian father, Pablo, an environmental engineer, met Susanne in Calgary where she was studying nursing. They were later visiting friends on Vancouver Island when they were told that the town of Comox Valley, on the island’s southern shore, needed a bookstore. “I quit my job by noon,” says Pablo with a laugh. Together with another couple, they opened the Laughing Oyster Bookstore in Courtenay and built a cabin in Denman, commuting to work by ferry.
They were living in their cabin when their daughter Andriana was born.
“Susanne went into labour in the middle of night,” Pablo recalls. The hospital was on the other side, in Comox. “So I phoned the ferry. Everyone was in bed, but the captain said, ‘No problem, just come on down to the dock and we will take you across.’ Sure enough, there was the ferry, all lit up and running, with the crew waiting and a cup of coffee for the nervous dad. I have always had a soft spot in my heart for good old BC Ferries after that.”
The family later moved to the B.C. mainland, where Pablo started his own environmental consulting company. They kept the cabin, which is still there down by the water, still warm and comforting. They’ve since retired back to Denman, building a new glass-fronted house of light on the cliff above their original cabin, bringing their journey full circle. Denman has that pull on people.
In the evening, they take me through the feathered forests of the small provincial Fillongley Park, a tunnel of trees that opens onto a hidden meadow, where Susanne points out the stone ruins of a fountain, long overgrown. “This was once a grand estate,” she says.
In 1888, a 19-year-old named George Beadnell chanced upon Denman and was immediately enamoured. He sent word to his father in England, a doctor, who uprooted his family and moved to the island where they purchased a swath of forested land, 300 acres worth (roughly 120 hectares), with beachfront and a stream running through. They named it after their ancestral home in England, and Dr. Beadnell’s Fillongley estate grew to include an English garden, greenhouses, a bowling green, the first piano on Denman and that handsome stone fountain, now in ruins. In a quiet corner of the park, a solitary headstone marks the final resting place of George Beadnell.
“Before he died, he left his family’s property to the province – for the price of one dollar,” says Susanne. “They still have the dollar on display in the museum.”
Logging and farming, cattle and sheep, apple orchards and oyster beds: Denman bustled over the years, though the population was always small. To this mix, a new element was added in the 1970s: hippies. Or, more accurately, back-to-the-landers.
Clockwise from top left: Chrome Island Lighthouse sits off Denman Island; a purple starfish on one of Denman’s sandstone beaches; migrating Canadian Geese flying over the island; a Pacific Great Blue Heron perches in a tree on Denman. Photography: Tynan Phillips/500px/Getty Images; Laura Brambilla/Getty Images
Denman activist, author and gardener Des Kennedy and his partner Sandy were among the first back-to-the-landers, likened (tongue only slightly in cheek) to royalty on Denman, though Sandy and Des scoff at this when I tell them. The Victoria Times-Colonist, meanwhile, referred to Des as a “green-thumb philosopher” and “high priest of the soil.”
The comparison is apt. Des is of Irish-Catholic descent (he was born in Liverpool in 1945, his family emigrated to Canada in 1955) and spent eight years in a seminary in New York studying to be a priest before drifting west, ending up in Vancouver. That’s where he met and married Sandy, who’d come to the West Coast from a largely rural Ukrainian community in Alberta.
“I had to leave. If I’d stayed, I would have just ended up getting pregnant,” she says.
They arrived on Denman in 1972. “We had no idea what we were doing,” Sandy laughs. They learned how to smoke salmon; change a car battery; buck hay and build homes.
“It was intensely collective and energetic,” says Des, referring to the volunteer spirit of the times. “Comes with youth, I suppose. This sense of bonding still exists, though on a broader scale.”
Volunteerism remains a big component of life on Denman, and the island still retains, in Des’ words, “a blessed amount of characters.”
Des and Sandy’s garden is a celebrity in its own right, having been featured in glossy magazines and TV gardening programs. Imagine a homestead that is both surrounded by and submerged within its garden – but even better. Layered walks and stonework walls, rich arrays of ornamentals, shrubbery and trees, both exotic and familiar, vines and perennials flowering amid towering stands of red cedar. The very air is heady. If you could bottle and sell the taste of their garden, you’d be a wealthy soul.
Two people who have, indeed, bottled the essence of Denman are Pat and Selwyn Jones. They cleared land 18 years ago to plant a commercial winery, Corlan Vineyard. Selwyn, originally from Wales, met Pat later in life and the two of them–in her words – “sailed off into the sunset.”
Pat had lived on other Gulf Islands: Hornby, Salt Spring, Galiano. “We wanted to get back into the countryside.” And the vineyard? “Oh, that just happened.” Pat operated the woodmill when they were cutting lumber to build the winery, and – because this is Denman and everyone has multiple talents – she’s also a Tartan weaver of note.
“Our wines are all 100 percent organic,” she says. “We use sheep rather than chemicals to manage the weeds. There are no additives, no sulphides or other preservatives.” In fact, the winery’s name – Corlan – means sheepfold in Welsh.
No irrigation either, meaning their grapes are dry-farmed to avoid putting a strain on Denman’s freshwater supply (always a concern on islands). And every fall the grapes are harvested by volunteers who then share a dinner to celebrate. Pablo and Susanne helped last year alongside other locals who came out to lend a hand.
“It was very sociable,” Pablo recalls. “We got to meet our neighbours as we moved down either side, chatting as we went.”
Visitors can try their winery’s Chrome Island Red, its Sandy Island White – which is as crisp as biting into an apple, and which I heartily recommend – and their famed blackberry dessert wine, made partly with Denman’s own wild berries, which have all won top medals at international wine awards.
In the golden sunlight of a fading day, Selwyn sits in his backyard, wine glass in hand, looking very content. When I ask him if he can define Denman in a single word, he says “laid-back.” Selwyn, in his 90s now, is going sailing the next day, and will be at a farmer’s market after that. A strange sort of laid-back.
For people who like to describe themselves as relaxed, Denman islanders are surprisingly busy. Events are happening all year. This is a population of nearly 1,500 who support no fewer than three separate community newspapers, plus online sites.
The main crossroad, which residents un-ironically call “downtown,” is an eclectic arrangement with a picturesque little church up the hill from the ferry terminal and barely bigger than a cabin; the Abraxas Bookstore, celebrating 30 years on Denman; the much-photographed Denman Island General Store, built in 1908, which also houses the local post office; a volunteer-run community library and full theatrical stage; a medical centre; a school; a museum and an arts centre/gallery located in a house with a wrap-around verandah and sprays of daisies and driftwood sculptures out front.
The Denman Island Craft Centre is a women-led arts collective, which is where I met jeweller and candlemaker Megan Rose. She grew up on Denman in a home without an indoor toilet or shower, a child of idealistic back-to-the-landers whom she refers to affectionately as “real hippies.” Her father was American, avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War, and Megan herself has travelled far and wide – a long-distance cyclist who lived in Montreal and London before returning to Denman with her husband Eli, a DJ from Chicago, in tow. “It was an adjustment for him, for sure!” she says.
Megan is a proponent of the Work Less Movement, a philosophy that came out of Vancouver (naturally). “If you work less, you consume less and enjoy life more,” she says.
Did I mention she is also a musician and performer? And is involved in improv? And that she volunteers at the craft centre, or that she was a member of a chicken co-op and a shared boat program, or that she founded an annual outdoor music festival with her partner?
“For someone who espouses a ‘work less’ philosophy, you seem very active,” I say.
She beams. “Oh, but it doesn’t feel like work.”
It’s the difference between being as busy as you have to be vs. being as busy as you want to be. Like Megan – like Selwyn and Pat, like Sandy and Des – Denman leans in to the latter.
Denman is very much a grassroots, solutions-focused community. A “pull together” place as Susanne put it. Where some towns have mayors, Denman has volunteer committees. Everyone gets involved in some way.
Retire to Denman? I’m not sure if I can take the excitement! But one can still dream.
THE WRITERS of Denman
Among its painters, potters, driftwood sculptors, weavers and ceramics artists, Denman Island is also home to many acclaimed authors, among them:
Emily St. John Mandel is the international bestselling author of The Glass Hotel (2020) and Station Eleven (2014), which was translated into more than 30 languages and adapted into a critically acclaimed Netflix series. Emily grew up on Denman Island before moving to Toronto to study dance, and now lives in New York. The Vancouver Island area has figured prominently in her fiction.
Matsuki Masutani, a renowned poet and translator, who is originally from Tokyo. He moved to Denman in the 1980s with his wife Jane, where they raised their three children. His poetry collection, I Will Be More Myself in the Next World (2021), is celebrated for its understated elegance. Their daughter Hanako Masutani also authored the delightful children’s story Emi and Mini (2023).
Des Kennedy, one of Denman Island’s original back-to-the-landers, is a well-known and highly regarded author, gardener and environmental activist whose works include The Way of the Gardener (2020); Heart & Soil (2014) and, most recently, a comedic novel Commune (2023), inspired by his own time as an idealistic young man on Denman.
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