The Best Canadian Rose Breeder

In most regions of Canada, roses used to be humorously referred to as "annual shrubs".  There were a few cold tolerant roses among heirloom varieties (such as 'Stanwell Perpetual'), and especially among the Rugosas, but the vast majority of cultivars, including all hybrid teas, required gardeners to take drastic measures to protect them against the winter cold and these measures only worked sometimes.

Then came Felicitas Svejda (pronounced SWAYda) who was born in Vienna in 1920 and passed away on January 19, 2016. For 33 years, she worked at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa where she developed hardy shrubs, especially the "Explorer" series of roses which are now grown in many countries with cold winters.

Henry Kelsey, an Explorer rose

Wintering Roses - The Canadian Way

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Because the earth bulges at the Equator and is flattened at the Poles, the halfway point between the Equator and the North Pole is actually 16.2 kilometres north of the 45th parallel. This means that the garden here is just about at that halfway point. It also means that we are roughly at the same latitude as Grenoble, Turin, Simferopol in Crimea, Xinjiang in China, Hokkaidō in Japan, Michigan and Wisconsin in the United States. However, our climate here in Ontario and that of the two northern states is, to say the least, very different from that of Grenoble or Turin. Only now is the last snow  melting as you can see below.

Some berries will have to wait

Fortunately our black currants are still not ripe. The white currants and the gooseberries are almost ripe. However, ready or not, a few of them will have to wait as some birds, some kind of native sparrow, have decided to build their nest right in the middle of the berry patch. They are not interested in the berries, just in the extra protection afforded by a thorny gooseberry bush in the middle of an enclosed garden.

'Pink Champagne' white currants

Rose in a cold climate

Whoever was the garden writer who quipped that for Canada and the northern US, hybrid tea roses are annual shrubs, was quite right. In our climate, when it comes to selecting roses, the first consideration has to be hardiness.  In many ways, this simplifies your choice as most roses are not very hardy. Here is a review of some of the roses that are grown at Roche Fleurie.

John Davis rose on a trellis

A Workhorse of a Rose

We grow several roses, and they are just about at their best right now. Some I like for their hardiness (in a Canadian climate, that matters a lot). Others like Celsiana have a perfume out of this world. Some do a job particularly well (see, on the left, how Dortmund covers an  arch or, on the right, Nearly Wild looks against a fence). This post is about one particular rose I almost discarded, but which turned out to be my very best.

Dortmund

Nearly Wild

Pruning Roses

This last week, I finished pruning my roses. Pruning a rose bush is a job that requires a bi-polar mind. On the one hand you do not want to remove too many of the healthy canes that are ready to bloom. On the other,  you know the bush will look much better if you prune a fair bit of wood. The secret to success is a balancing act between keeping and discarding enough.