Rustling for plants

by Lois Klassen

I spend too much money in garden centers --what gardener doesn’t? -- yet the plants I treasure most are those that cost me nothing but time and patience; they were   gleaned from other people’s old, established gardens.

One of these is a small lilac bush that started as a sucker dug out of the ground at the base of an ancient shrub in a friend’s garden. Hoping that my sucker would
bloom true to type, I nursed it along in a pot for a year. It was two more years before my patience was rewarded with a highly scented cluster of creamy blossoms
exactly like those of the parent bush. The flowers appear white, but white does not describe their luscious depth of colour. Reminiscent of clotted cream or the warm
colour of antique linen sheets, the blossoms of this shrub combine amicably with every other plant in my garden.

Near the small lilac, there is a clump of bearded iris which blooms a very peculiar shade of maroon; a color that recalls the velvety upholstery of a 1940’s era
overstuffed couch. Unlike the companionable lilac, this plant is not a social success in the garden. If this iris were a student her report card would say, “must learn to get
along with others,” yet I love her for her odd, compelling colour. This plant began as a small rhizome, carried from my first house, an old cottage in Yarrow that had
once belonged to the “nursery Reimers”, themselves trans-planted from their home in Russia. For all I know, clumps of this odd iris may be common as borscht in every babushka’s garden in Eastern Europe
but to me it is a plant of rare beauty. Planted near flowers more ordinary in colour, my unnamed iris is an aristocrat among the peasants. The only places in which I’ve ever seen this plant growing are the
gardens of my friends who have received rhizomes as a gift from me. By giving away pieces of my garden to my friends, I hope they will be reminded of our friendship as I am each time I pass the plants that
others have given  me.

Some years ago, a gardening friend and neighbor died of cancer. Before her old house was sold, her son gave me permission to retrieve a few gallica-type roses growing in among the waist high weeds of
the vegetable beds. I planted them in a temporary nursery bed in my own vegetable garden where they proved to be terrible mildew magnets and did not produce a single bloom for the first few years. My
neighbour had thought enough of that particular variety to go to the trouble of rooting a whole row of them , I reasoned, so I ought to allow them bed-room in my garden in honour of her. When, eventually
they bloomed, I discovered they were one of my favourite varieties - the “Charles de Mills” rose - ancient in heritage, deep magenta in colour with abundant, perfectly swirled petals around a central eye, and
fragrant enough to give a person a headache. I also discovered the probable reason this rose has survived through the ages - - its prodigious ability to sucker into neighbouring beds which also explained its
presence in my neighbour’s vegetable beds.

Another fragrant old rose I am nursing along is one which I call the Mrs. Tjart Rose.  It came as a cutting from one of my school friends who inherited her parents’ Clearbrook garden. This rose, whose
true name I don’t know, is red, highly scented, and has an old fashioned muddled form. Mrs. Tjart rooted her plant from a cutting. Her daughter, like her mother before her, is doing her part to ensure the
survival of this mysterious rose by sharing cuttings with friends.

Friends aren’t the only source of plant material. The American Pillar and a Chevy Chase which are rambling over a rustic arbour in my back garden were acquired when I “helped myself’ to a few cuttings from the roadside fence of a nearby army base.

Helping oneself to cuttings is known in some gardening circles as plant rustling and has been legitimized through nonprofit societies such as the Rose Rustlers in Texas who make a mission of finding and propagating old varieties of roses by visiting abandoned farms and old graveyards. (It bears mentioning, of course, that the original plants are left in the ground unharmed and only small “slips” are carefully taken with sharp pruners for propagation purposes.) In this way, I also helped myself to a beautiful
crimson polyantha climber - probably Crimson Showers - that was growing in a thicket of blackberries near the Vedder River. The rose has lived up to its name, showering blossoms generously along the length of a cedar fence.

The amount of effort and patience required to produce plants in this way doesn’t seem very worthwhile by today’s standards of efficiency, yet, thrift aside, it provides a link to old gardens and old friends which is priceless. The sharing of plant “slips” is something I remember my grandmother and mother doing.
In my garden the “army base roses” bloom alongside plants which were acquired more legitimately: Mrs. Tjart’s rose, Rebecca’s lilac, Elizabeth’s lemon lilies, Charla’s hardy geraniums and the wine coloured irises from the Reimer sisters’ garden.

This year, I planted a pale pink, climbing rose that was given to me by a friend who lives on Sumas mountain. She found the parent plant growing up a tree in the forest near the Straiton Community Hall. I imagine a settler planted that rose. Soon it will festoon Mrs. Funk’s old apple tree in the Klassen’s garden in Yarrow.