Human Flower Project

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

The Flowers that Settled Western Canada

Many thanks to Oana Capota of Vancouver, for this fascinating slice of Canadian gardening history. I had known flowers were part of the westward expansion in North America but, until now, hadn’t realized that flower gardening spurred that expansion.

Capota is a curatorial assistant at the Port Moody Station Museum, also a gardener and, quite obviously, a writer. 

May the force—and spring temperatures—be with you, Oana.

Canadian Pacific Railway train west of Glacier, B.C.,
circa 1886
Photo: Canadian Pacific Railway, the O. Lavallee collection

By

Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) stations across Canada once boasted gardens alongside the tracks, growing both vegetables and flowers.

The vegetables had an easy explanation: produce from the gardens went to the stationmaster’s table, fed the railway men and sometimes even the passengers in dining cars.

The abundant flowers in these gardens made sense, too.  They were a marketing ploy:

When the CPR was incorporated in 1881, it received 25 million acres from the federal government and then sold much of this land to settlers over the next five decades. Vegetables were part of the railroad’s effort to sell land—as in 1884 when the CPR transported vegetables from experimental prairie farms to the east to show off productivity— but flowers demonstrated fecundity even better. Lush railway gardens attracted tourists and, in the eyes of immigrants traveling across Canada, promised fertile farmland, prompting them to buy acreage from the company.

One of the founders of the railway gardens and later superintendent of gardens across western Canada, David Hysop, lay down the guidelines for making them profitable.  Rail workers tended to the gardens, with seeds, bulbs and shrubs provided free from plant companies.  Steam locomotives discharged water for the gardens in barrels along the tracks; laundry steam heated some greenhouses.

The gardens’ success led to the formation of a forestry department within the CPR in 1907, and by 1912 there were nurseries across western Canada supplying almost 1500 railway gardens.

The last vestige of these original gardens lies in Banff, though it grows only flowers today.  At other locations, like the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel in Cranbrook, gardens are being restored, and still others, like the Port Moody Station Museum, are creating new gardens.

Port Moody Station Museum gardens, summer 2004
Photo: Jim Millar, courtesy of Port Moody Station Museum

The Port Moody Station Museum’s garden, near Vancouver, Canada, is based on the 1910-1912 style. In 2000, a curator led community volunteers in conjuring up the garden from scratch, using mostly heritage seeds and many flowers that were popular in the early Twentieth Century: Crystal Palace lobelia, Golden Gem marigolds, petunias, bachelor buttons, sweet william, red hollyhock and lupines.

The Port Moody Heritage Society, which runs the museum, is part of Seeds of Diversity Canada, a group dedicated to preserving, studying and encouraging the cultivation of heirloom and endangered plants, including ornamentals.

The Museum’s volunteer gardeners meet once a month to work on the garden, and some volunteers come every week.

These flowers not only decorate the museum grounds and the former live-in station where the Port Moody Station Museum is housed, they are also used in floral arrangements at the local public library and at special events.