Don Timlin taps a tree at Sandy Flat Sugarbush near Warkworth. (Charles Summers photo)

Maple syrup evangelists

George and Chris created enchantment in a storybook sugar bush where 20,000 people are about to descend

Nestled in the rolling hills of Northumberland County is a unique geological, biological and social phenomenon: a spot where soils, plants and people meet to create something special. They come back every year to gather, in a protected glade amongst the sugar maples. Syrup is made, songs are sung. Pancakes are devoured, new friendships are formed and lifelong relationships are rekindled. A cornerstone of its community, Sandy Flat Sugarbush, just outside of Warkworth is a storybook example of what Ontario rural culture can be.

Sandy Flat was developed by legendary, long time Warkworthian, George Potter. A local merchant and pillar of the community, he was also a prolific musician and leader of Potter’s Danceland Band: a big band style orchestra that played every dance, wedding and shindig in the area for decades. Down the road from the farm he grew up on, George and his wife Alice started tapping with buckets back in the 1960s. As time went on, he built a road into the property, and because fun and frolic followed George wherever he went, it wasn’t long before a pancake house was built and the sugarbush became host to a happening every spring.

“You could shoot a rifle straight across the whole 160 acres,” current owner operator Chris Clark chuckles. Despite being surrounded by a rugged land of glacial hills, the site sits serenely flat: thus its name. It’s unusual to see a bush so lush. The trees are tall, thick, healthy and vigorous. A good understory of young maples waits to replace their elders: it looks like a garden. But this sort of level, well-drained juicy ground — as much as the maples like it — makes harvesting sap via a modern line system kind of difficult.

But Chris is a millwright. (I get a headache when I need to fix something, but I think Chris might have been born to solve problems.) Before he took over Sandy Flat, he was head of maintenance at the Cascades paper mill in nearby Trenton, so after years of looking after millions of dollars of giant machinery, you can detect that the relatively quaint mechanical problems of a commercial sugarbush are a welcome relief.

It all started with George Potter tapping a few trees in the 1960s. Out of this humble beginning grew the Sandy Flat Sugarbush, which welcomes 20,000 visitors each spring.

Now, most sugarmakers have a technical knack, but many choose a life in the woods because they want to be as far away from humanity as possible. Chris is quite different in this regard. The son of a preacher, Chris comes by his charisma and way with words honestly. And although you can see the spark of the Spirit in his eyes, he himself is an evangelist for all things maple. The history, the science, the business and the social aspects of syrup all roll off his tongue. George Potter left quite the shoes to fill, but nevertheless Chris relishes being at the centre of something bigger than himself.

Every spring, 20,000 people make the pilgrimage to Sandy Flat: a tradition that has only grown as the decades roll on. It kicks off in early March with the Warkworth Maple Syrup Festival. With more guests than the camp could ever accommodate to park, six buses run steady all weekend, trucking guests to and fro from downtown Warkworth. Teams of horses pull them through the woods, they’re entertained by live music, exposed to traditional and modern sugarmaking in action, and — lest we forget the pancakes — they’re wined and dined for the event by Warkworth’s finest: The Community Service Club. A sort of Kinsmen type group, they’ve been serving their neighbours since 1947 and the pancake dollars generated go directly to the organizations and efforts that need it most.

Once the Syrup Festival winds down comes another two months of visitors. School groups make taffy on the snow, learn how syrup is made, and get exposed to a real working forest. The general public floods the grounds and the pancakes and music just keep flowing.

“The vision and foresight that George had for this place is really astounding,” Chris relates.

Carrying on the Potter family traditions and adding some of their own, are current owners Chris and Robin Clark along with their daughter.

After 93 years, in 2023, George went to the great sugar shack in the sky. He was happy to see the operation get left in such capable hands. With 4,200 taps, although Sandy Flat is a going concern in maple terms, it’s quite shy of being full-time income based on syrup alone, which is why the social aspect of the business is so significant to its operation.

Chris and his wife Robin bought the place in 2017, and rocked steady through 2018 and 2019. In 2020 the oh-so important social aspect of the business got thrown in the dumpster. You may remember that lockdowns and sugaring coincided that year. Sitting on thousands of dollars of sausages, pancake mix and juice boxes, Chris and Robin kept their shirts on by portioning the goods and selling them via a contactless pick-up at the pancake house around the time everyone started hoarding toilet paper. 2020 was a write off and 2021 wasn’t much better. 2022 was an awkward version of what everyone had remembered, but by 2023 things were back on track. 2024 was their biggest year yet.

And so, the Clarks are only leaning harder than ever into the people portion of Sandy Flat. Their daughter Hannah has come on board, and the property now plays host to gatherings year-round. Catered special events, and corporate retreats are all part of the program at Sandy Flat. Weddings are hosted between some of the rows of maples that George planted a generation ago, and you can even Air BnB a cabin next to the sugarhouse.

The Clarks also squeeze every penny they can from their crop. Maple cream, candy, sugar, infusions and spice rubs all come out of their commercial kitchen. It’s a lot more complicated than rolling barrels of syrup, but Sandy Flat is a social enterprise as much as an agricultural one.

But the agriculture must go on. When Chris left Cascades (the paper company) he brought a couple of co-conspirators from the mill with him. “They’re sort of a dream team,” Chris winks as Don Timlin and Charlie Jones venture out to the woods to start tapping for 2025 in knee deep powder. They look like commandos, armed with drills instead of rifles and every tool you can use in the bush dangling somewhere from their person. Instead of ammunition, their vests are bulging with the half dozen different little bits of plastic you need to build and maintain a tubing system.

Mechanical whizzes in their own rite, Don and Charlie free up Chris to manage the joyful chaos of the ongoing onslaught from the public in season. Charlie fires the evaporator and Don is the leak detective. A lot of innovative things are happening at Sandy Flat: the aeration and controlled fermentation of sap to develop specific flavours in the syrup was a new one to me. Once they achieve the proper balance of sugars, they concentrate and cool it to below freezing so that they can boil on schedule for public viewing.

“I need to make a flavourful syrup that stands up against a pancake.”

Sandy Flat Sugarbush founder, George Potter was musician and leader of Potter’s Danceland Band — a big band style orchestra that played in the Warkworth area for many years. Potter died in 2023 at age 93.

The immutable flatness of the site remains a perennial challenge. Even with three gearheads on staff, getting sap to flow downhill — when there is no hill for it to flow down — is a tough nut to crack. Looking down, far above me on a ladder, Don is tapping 10 feet up a tree. “We used to do the whole bush this way,” he grimaces. They’re now employing various newfangled methods to move the maple blood despite the lack of grade. I should be thankful for this because it was me selling Chris a sap lifter that led to our introduction.

Regardless of the challenges: whether it be terrain, weather, or the latest social experiment, the Clarks’ have put all of their chips on the table at Sandy Flat. And as sure as the sap will flow this spring, the trees will still be there well after all of us are gone. Barring a ‘Derecho’ (doubtful, the site is extremely sheltered), or some sort of Dutch Elm or Emerald Ash Borer event (something that haunts the back of every sugarmakers mind), the trees at Sandy Flat will still be there growing, strong and free, longing for the hand of man to cultivate them and a community to celebrate it.

Trees — and such a “long game” enterprise like syrup making — remind us that our lives are very short. That we occupy a place rather than own it. The real question is: what kind of legacy can we leave? The maples and people at Sandy Flat point the way.

Charles Summers owns Salt of the Earth Farm, a direct-to-consumer operation selling vegetables at the roadside, near Lyndhurst, Ontario.