Canada’s new rose is ‘one tough plant’
Talk about good timing.
Canada Blooms has picked a rose as its Flower of the Year for 2017, just when roses are coming back into fashion. A coincidence? Not really. “I went to the Chelsea Flower Show last year with Denis Flanagan of Landscape Ontario and everyone was talking about roses — how hot they are becoming again with garden designers in the U.K.,” explains Terry Caddo, boss of Blooms.
That prompted an identical thought in both men: Why not jump aboard this growing trend and celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary with a brand new red rose?
So it’s happening. Nearly a year later, a captivating cultivar named Canadian Shield is about to make its debut at our annual flowerfest.
It looks promising, too. Canadian Shield is a shrub rose with very elegant blooms. They are a rich, silky-textured red (more, to my eyes, like a plush Victorian sofa than the scarlet of our maple leaf, but still). They’ll also keep coming along all summer, provided the bush gets full sun.
This is no wimpy European hybrid, either. Hardy to minus 35 C, it was bred especially for our difficult climate. Another plus? Hardly any black spot. The disfiguring (and seemingly inescapable) disease, which plagues roses everywhere, apparently doesn’t affect our homegrown toughie much.
With so many things going for it, Canadian Shield certainly pushes all the right buttons with me. (I confess to being tired of finicky imported David Austins, which look lovely for a couple of seasons, but then succumb to winter die-back.)
So a bit of background: our brand new beauty started life in the bonechilling, snowswept environs of Morden, Man., as part of a federal breeding program called Explorer, designed to produce rose varieties that can cope with extreme weather. Then, along with a bunch of other experimental cultivars, it was yanked away to the balmy climes of Niagara when Vineland Research Station took over the rose program in 2011. But it didn’t mind. “We literally dug this rose out of the ground in Morden and brought it here with no problems,” explains Daryl Somers, an applied genomics expert who works closely with scientist Parminder Sandhu on the rose-breeding team at Vineland. “And we’re excited with how it’s turned out. This is one tough plant.”
Look for Canadian Shield in two display gardens at Blooms. Vineland has produced some especially for the show (raised in a greenhouse, so they won’t necessarily look their best under artificial lights) yet we have to wait until late April or May to buy them.
Then we’re likely to see Canadian Shield from coast to coast. This hot-to-trot introduction, which grows about a metre high and wide, has been licensed to 20 nurseries across Canada. They’re raising 50,000 baby bushes in pots right now — and given the surprising trend back to roses across the Atlantic, municipalities and home gardeners are expected to snap them up.
But let’s all embrace this rosy celebration of our 150th anniversary and go for a sneak peek at Blooms.
Canada Blooms, part of the Home Show, runs Friday, March 10 through Sunday, March 19 at the EnerCare Centre in Exhibition Place. Opening times are mostly 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. (but check the website) and evenings are best, to beat the crowds.
I always love the floral arrangements; expect plenty of red and white this year, in keeping with the anniversary theme. But you can also rubberneck at the increased number of display gardens. According to Terry Caddo, who has breathed new life into this long-running show, there will be “12 small-space gardens — a record — because that’s what people want to see now.” Tickets: $17 at the door, or in advance at canadablooms.com
Note: the new clematis cultivar Polish Spirit was bred by a monk named Brother Stefan Franczak, not Szczepan Marczynski as stated in last week’s column. soniaday.com