Evans cherries have roots in Alberta soil
Story by Marilynn McAra I
f you’ve met Ieuan Evans or heard him speak, you’ll recall his rapid- fire speech, subtle sense of humour,
earthy honesty, enthusiasm for garden- ing and exhortations to garden “outside the box” of zone “limitations”. “We can’t grow artichokes here? Of
course we can!” says Evans. “We can’t grow grapes here? Of course we can! We can’t tap maple trees for syrup? No, but we can tap syrup from birches,” he says, delighted to produce the proof for skep- tical gardeners. “We don’t have pink cherry blos-
soms like B.C., but we have a pink- blossoming Ethel Mayday that looks just as stunning. We can’t grow bing cherries, but we have Evans cherry trees that can produce hundreds of pounds of sour cherries, excellent for pies and preserves.” You guessed it: if you have an Evans
cherry tree, Ieuan Evans is the man it’s named after. Without his persistence, that tree would not be in your garden. When he came across the unnamed tree in an Edmonton garden in the late seventies, he tracked it back to a tree nursery in Horse Hills. There, he got some suckers, which grew into a hedge of prolific cherry trees which “suckered like mad”, and Evans gave away thou- sands. He promoted the tree incessantly, but
growers weren’t interested until D&A Gardens began to produce it through tissue culture. Along the way, Kevin Toomey, owner of T&T Nurseries in Winnipeg, named it the Evans cherry. Sales took off after CBC broadcast
an interview with Evans, and over two million trees have been sold in Canada. “Now there are more Evans cherry trees than Macintosh apple trees,” he says with pride, adding that Evans cherry trees do exceptionally well in southern Alberta and Manitoba. Evans has continued to hunt down
the origins of this wild tree, and now thinks it may have originally come from Russia, going then to Alaska in the early twenties and into Alberta by 1923. x Marilynn McAra is a garden writer and professional photographer in Edmonton.
50 • Fall 2016
Once almost forgotten, the Evans cherry (Prunus ‘Evans’) is now one of the most popular fruit trees in Canadian gardens.
An Evan’s cherry full of ripening fruit (covered by a mesh to keep the birds away).
localgardener.net
Photo by Montanabw.
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