Maze honours late teen Pitre
Cornfield creation features tribute to ‘Butterfly Boy’
A Kemptville-area orchard has carved a tribute to Jonathan Pitre into one of its cornfields.
Mountain Orchards, a 50-acre pick-your-own apple orchard, has created a cornfield maze to honour Pitre, the Russell teenager who died in April from complications of a stem call transplant that he hoped would halt the advance of his skin disease, epidermolysis bullosa.
Phil Lyall, co-owner of the orchard, said he has been working on the maze for three months.
It features a butterfly and spells out Jonathan’s name and nickname, Butterfly Boy, derived from the fragility of his skin.
A smaller maze includes the name of Canada’s EB charity, DEBRA, and another butterfly.
“I’ve been following his story — he’s a local kid — and I just felt a lot of sympathy for him,” said Lyall, 69. “We’re going to put up some donation boxes, and people going through the maze can donate to DEBRA Canada if they want.”
The orchard opens to the public Aug. 25.
Lyall normally creates a maze related to his family — the name of a new grandchild or an anniversary date — but this year he thought about Pitre, who was 17 when he died.
“I thought maybe we could turn this into something useful,” he said.
“I just identified with the struggles he went through: He was a big hockey fan, but was never allowed to have a normal childhood.”
Lyall began working on the maze when the cornfield was still just 15 centimetres high so that he could see how his design unfolded. “That’s how I do it; I’m old school,” he said. “Some people do it with satellite-guided tractors now.”
He mowed the pattern four times during the growing season.
Jonathan’s mother, Tina Boileau, retweeted an aerial map of the maze Thursday, saying, “Thank you Mountain Orchards for the beautiful artwork in memory of my son Jonathan, and the EB community.”
Other public memorials for Pitre remain in the planning stages, Boileau said, including a butterfly garden inside Navan’s Memorial Forest.
The French-language Catholic school board in Eastern Ontario is also considering the possibility of naming a school in Pitre’s honour.
The Ottawa Senators have already recognized the hockey-loving Russell teen by creating the Jonathan Pitre Memorial Trophy for the hardest-working player at the team’s development camp.
Pitre became the international face of EB after he decided to reveal his ravaged body for the world to see as part of a story published in the Citizen in November 2014.