Why Grow Here by Merrett Kathryn Chase;

Author:Merrett, Kathryn Chase;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

GLADIOLI had been George Shewchuk’s major floral interest and he had grown fields of them on his property in Lamont, the small town northeast of Edmonton to which he moved in 1957 when he took up a position there as district agriculturist. He decided to take on a new challenge. First-time failures with roses, combined with tentative successes and a dearth of how-to material on cultivation techniques, set Shewchuk on the path that led, eventually, to his becoming the acknowledged rose expert in the Edmonton area. In 1966, he moved from Lamont to Edmonton, commuting back and forth to work each day. In 1976, he retired to work in his garden and to write a succession of books on rose growing. Books on roses published by Shewchuk in 1981 and 1988 were followed in 1999 by Roses: A Gardener’s Guide for the Plains and Prairies, which Harry McGee, Ontario rose enthusiast and editor, was to call his magnum opus. In it he set out to show how roses, both hardy and tender, could be made to thrive in the Edmonton area. And Shewchuk practised what he preached. “My Edmonton garden,” he wrote in his “1998 Review of New Roses” for the Rosebank Letter, “represents what is possible for all Prairie gardeners.”1

Shewchuk fancied himself a pioneer in the field of rose growing, a groundbreaker. Only dimly perceived by him, because it had disappeared from public knowledge as fast as a flourishing garden declines into a condition of weedy neglect, or vanishes altogether under concrete, Edmonton already had a rose history. It was a history that began long before European settlement, when wild roses grew prolifically along riverbanks and in clearings. But it was also a history that reflected the fascination that so many of Edmonton’s early settlers had with the cultivated rose varieties they had come to know in their places of birth—towns and cities in England, France, and even Ontario. As with so much of Edmonton’s gardening history, it is a history involving a dismissal of the native in favour of the non-native. Rosa acicularis, the prickly wild rose with delicate pink spring blooms so favoured by bees, whose branches were said to have been strewn by Aboriginal people around the home of a recently deceased person to keep that person’s ghost from returning, was certainly not enough to make Edmonton a rose city, despite its being chosen in 1930 as Alberta’s floral emblem.2

Rosa acicularis, one of three wild rose species commonly found in the Edmonton area, was very likely the “wild rose” referred to in articles published in the Edmonton Bulletin in the 1880s and 1890s, articles written primarily to attract settlers.3 A deciduous shrub, it can grow up to five feet tall and its stems and branches, both of which are covered with prickles and thorns, have given rise to its common name, prickly rose. Fragrant pink single blooms, whose petals have many practical uses in both their fresh and dried forms, come out in May and June.

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