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History
Seeking the plants of the past
Bred in 1916 by Isabella Preston, Canada’s first female horticulturist, the Creelman lily sits among other lost and found plants at Ontario’s Royal Botanical Gardens
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Driving through the bucolic sweep of rugged lakefront and rolling fields that is southern Ontario’s Bruce County, a flicker of pale purple catches the eye. It’s a lilac blooming in the middle of a hayfield alongside the crumbling foundation of an abandoned homestead, its stone walls softened by moss and time. Suddenly, the lilac’s presence here makes sense: early settlers often planted the hardy shrub near doorways for shelter and to mark a place of belonging.
Throughout southern Ontario’s ghost towns and forgotten places, plants are the living stories of those who once lived there. Daylilies, for example, travelled from Asia to Europe in the 16th century and reached North America with settlers in the 19th. Beloved for their resilience and ease of propagation — characteristics that have now landed the plant on the invasive species list in Ontario — they were readily shared among neighbours. The orange or “ditch lily” (Hemerocallis fulva) remains a familiar sight along Ontario’s roadsides, in abandoned farmyards and gardens, clumped along hedgerows, and permeating nearby forests.
This plant, along with over 1,400 others that capture the spirit of late 19th- and early 20th-century Ontario gardens, are preserved as part of the Barbara Laking heritage plant collection at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ont. Among the collection is another, showier lily, rescued from obscurity through the botanical sleuthing of Alex Henderson, former curator of living collections at the gardens.
The flower’s endurance mirrors the determination of the woman who created it. In 1912, when women were expected to marry and raise a family, 31-year-old Isabella Preston enrolled in the Ontario Agricultural College (now part of the University of Guelph) against the advice of friends, but fuelled by a passion for plants. During the First World War, as Ontario women filled factory lines, worked on farms, picked fruit and struggled financially to navigate life as single mothers while their husbands fought overseas, Preston worked alongside male colleagues at the Ontario Agricultural Greenhouse to breed faster-growing fruits and vegetables. During her time there, she also indulged her passion for lilies, hoping to create a plant hardy enough for Canada’s climate and beautiful enough to rival any exotic bloom.
Her triumph, Lilium × imperiale (also known as Lilium × princeps): a plant almost two metres tall with fragrant white flowers the size of a large hand. Named George C. Creelman after the college’s president, an advocate for women’s education, the plant’s debut left a lasting impression; Howard L. Hutt, professor emeritus of horticulture at the college, is purported to have said when he first saw the lily in bloom, “I felt like taking off my hat, even if I did not throw it up in the air.”
The lily was grown throughout Canada and as far away as Australia, and its success propelled Preston to the top of her profession, earning her multiple honours, including in 1956 the North American Lily Society establishing the Isabella Preston trophy in recognition of her horticultural contributions. Whether being heralded as Canada’s first female professional plant hybridist mattered to her as much as the 200-plus species of lilies, lilacs and roses she hybridized throughout her career is hard to say. Even in retirement, her Georgetown, Ont., garden was an enduring passion until she died in 1965.
Sadly for the Creelman lily, it fell out of favour with gardeners as newer, more appealing varieties became available. Without a market for the lily, suppliers stopped offering it. And though it was crossbred with other varieties, the original Creelman lily fell into obscurity.
It took half a century and a decade of searching for Henderson, former Curator of Living Collections at Royal Botanical Garden, to find it again.
“In 2007, my boss walked into my office with a napkin he’d gotten from the cocktail party he’d attended the night before,” Henderson recalls. The scribble on it referred to George C. Creelman. Henderson was asked to see if the plant was mentioned in the Royal Botanical Gardens database; it had been, but dropped off the radar in 1979.
Henderson’s search went cold, and he had nearly given up hope, until the summer of 2017. “It was July 17, 2017, and I got a telephone message from my colleague Dr. David Galbraith, head of science at RBG,” Henderson recalls. He’d been listening to the gardening segment of CBC Ontario Today, and someone from Alma, Ont., had called to say they had Creelman lilies growing in their garden. Henderson was ecstatic. The bulbs were planted, and he held his breath. In 2022, using Preston’s handwritten description of the lily housed in the Royal Botanical Gardens archives, botanists confirmed the plant’s authenticity.
A year later, Isabella Preston was posthumously inducted into Canada’s Garden Hall of Fame. Now her lily blooms as part of a living gene bank at the Royal Botanical Gardens, helping new generations of horticulturists to breed plants resilient to disease and more adaptable to our changing climate.
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