Hill's Florist

If for a slight change of events, Hill’s Florist and Fruit Baskets could have had a very different fate.

“My grandparents had an ice cream and chocolate shop. Yeah, why couldn’t they have kept that?” reminisces Lisa Hill with a laugh. She’s the third generation owner of Hill’s Florist, and tells us that her grandmother Mabel had owned several Toronto properties and businesses which were consolidated when the Great Depression hit.

During that time, her grandparents leased out a shop front to a florist who was unable to make rent a year and a half into the depression. “He literally said ‘Mabel, here’s the keys. I’m walking away from this. It’s yours.’ So she basically had this store fall into her lap.” Since then, Hill’s Florist was passed onto Lisa’s father George Hill in 1961 and onto Lisa in 2001.