Transplanted on new and alien soil: a heritage garden
by Lois Klassen

When we first moved to Yarrow, nearly three decades ago, we purchased a small house on a large lot. At the back of the property was a modest, un-insulated barn which, we were told, had housed a Russian widow and her refugee children one bitterly cold winter in the early years of the settlement . The garden and small orchard surrounding the buildings included a collection of perennials, trees, and shrubs which had survived many changes of ownership.

Some of the plants I discovered in that garden were common enough -- plants such as Festiva Maxima peonies, (white, streaked with flecks of red), Queen Elizabeth roses, lilacs, hazelnuts, transparent apples and sour cherries for pie-making. There were, however, many rarer plants such as the wine-brown bearded irises whose colour recalled the plush upholstery of the 1953 Meteor in which my husband had taken me on our first date. There was an old pear tree which bore russet coloured winter fruit with a gritty rind. The fruit was crunchy inside, juicy, impossibly sweet, and excellent for baking. No one we asked could name the cultivar; no one we knew had a pear tree like it, and no pear has ever tasted as good since.

The most unusual and most beautiful plant in the garden was a flowering tree whose weeping branches erupted in a fountain of snowy blossoms in the spring . In the summer, it bore bushels of small red fruits resembling apples but growing in clusters like cherries. Since no one seemed to be able to tell us what the tree was, we didn’t dare harvest the fruits. Then, one year, a visiting relative identified the tree as a Siberian crabapple. As a child she had stuffed herself with the bitter fruit of this tree--the only fruit in the harsh Siberian environment of her childhood which her mother could spare for eating fresh. When we subsequently learned that the original owners of our little house had been three sisters from the Reimer nursery family we realized that the Siberian crabapple, the wine coloured irises, and perhaps even the russet pears were likely started from seeds, tubers and cuttings brought over from “the old country”.

Eventually we outgrew that small house and moved on to another Yarrow family home - the Funk house on Community Street; a home built and occupied by the Funk supermarket and feed mill family for over forty years before it passed to us . Along with a larger house we gained a larger garden.
As with the first property, this second home and garden resonated with memories of its original occupants. An old photo of the house shows Mrs. Funk standing on the front steps. In the foreground of the photo is a small rhododendron shrub next to the front sidewalk. In the 60 years since that photo was taken, the lower branches of the rhododendron have been pruned away to allow people to pass underneath . The friends and relatives helping us move in were forced to duck under those flower-laden branches to reach the front door.

We couldn’t take the pear tree with us but I carried divisions of the wine coloured irises to my new garden to plant beside some familiar favourites. Another Queen Elizabeth rose , several decades old, eight feet tall with a trunk as thick as my arm, shot its branches skyward that summer covering itself in pink blooms with three-foot-long stems. In the backyard, we found another transparent apple tree (apparently holding up the small garage) - a tree which it took us a few months to identify, so festooned was it with ivy and covered in lichen and mosses that it resembled an exotic broad-leafed evergreen. Ivy, moss and lichen notwithstanding, it dropped a bumper crop of yellow fruit onto the lawn and has continued to do so for nearly twenty years, in spite of infestations of tent caterpillars and a winter storm that broke off half of its main branches.

Like the venerable apple tree, remnants of long-ago Yarrow gardens in this former Mennonite settlement have survived the vagaries of insects, harsh winters and blistering summers. Shrubs of fragrant weigelia, electric blue hydrangeas and billowing bridal wreath spirea are often all that is left of the gardens that were the proud creations of women with last names like Martens, Funk, Friesen and Reimer in a time when lot sizes were larger, as were the families that lived in the modest houses that lined the streets.

Near the corner of Yarrow Central and Community Street is one such modest house, the former home of choir-director Reimer. His daughter Holda recalls that her mother’s garden was a showpiece among showpieces when flower gardening was akin to a competitive sport for the women of the town. Now a double row of spring bulbs -crocuses, snowdrops and grape hyacinths - are all that remain of that once proud accomplishment. They push their blooms up through the hard packed lawn, between the cars parked there, to mark the location of a long lost path to the front door.

Like the Russian widow and her family, many of the people who planted the gardens of Yarrow had survived war, famine, and displacement to be themselves transplanted on a new and alien soil. Yet they endured to bear families and leave a legacy that went beyond utility to beautifying their new surroundings. It is a fitting memorial to these pioneers that some of the fruit trees, shrubs and bulbs they tended have tenaciously survived to bring pleasure to successive generations.