Roses for Canadian Gardens: A Practical Guide to Varieties and Techniques

Pleasance Crawford, a Canadian landscape and garden history researcher
and writer, is the editor of Landscape Architectural Review.

This book’s title seems somewhat misleading. Roses for Canadian
Gardens is about climbers and shrub roses that are hardy in USDA zones 2
to 5: at Ottawa and points north, south, east, and west. It is not about
hybrid tea roses—which are more or less hardy mainly in Canada’s
banana belts and la-la lands. But since the hardy climbers and shrubs
are the best roses for landscape use, this truly is a book for all
Canadian gardens.

The author, a New Brunswick horticulturist and nursery operator, has
divided the text into two sections. Part 1 provides detailed advice on
growing and propagating hardy roses. Part 2 provides detailed
descriptions of his selection of hardy rose cultivars: five climbers,
eighteen tall shrubs, fifteen semi-vigorous shrubs, eight low shrubs,
and three ground covers. One of Beth Powning’s sumptuous color
photographs illustrates each selection.

With its range of forms, of old favorite and newer cultivars, of
single- and multipetalled flowers, and of flower colors, Part 2 should
match at least one rose with any rose-seeker. But if not, the following
eighteen pages chart these and many more hardy roses according to
species, horticultural attributes, and breeding history. As an added
benefit, this chart makes clear the role Canadian
plant-breeders—Bugnet, Collicutt, Eddie, Marshall, Skinner, Svejda,
Wallace, and Wright, plus unnamed others at Agriculture Canada—have
played since the early twentieth century in selecting choice roses for
northern gardens.

This is a useful and beautiful book. Since, according to its title, it
is aimed at the Canadian market, one wonders why the author has not used
Agriculture Canada’s system of plant-hardiness zoning and mapping,
which would have provided more detailed and localized
geographic/climatic information than the USDA system.