In celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday, the Citizen is rolling out one fact each day for 150 days until July 1, highlighting the odd, the fascinating and the important bits of Ottawa history you might not know about.
Ottawa was almost the crabapple capital but it turned out to be a messy business. Literally. As Carleton University’s Joanna Dean writes in Urban Forests, Trees, and Greenspace: A Political Ecology Perspective, work by Canadian hybridizers created a truly made-in-Canada ornamental tree, tough as nails but with gorgeous spring flowers.
One cultivar, the Almey, was picked as Canada’s centennial tree. It was widely planted across the country in 1966 and 1967 but nowhere more than in Ottawa, where the city gave homeowners 18,000 saplings and the federal government planted thousands more. A second cultivar, the Royalty, had to be added to plantings due to popular demand. The aim was to make Ottawa as famous for its crabapple blossoms as Washington D.C. is for its springtime cherry blossom show.
Trouble is, the trees are disease prone and “the abundant red crab apples became a messy nuisance underfoot on city sidewalks,” Dean writes. “By the time the trees had reached their full commemorative glory, opinion had shifted.” The curator of the Central Experimental Farm ultimately warned people to “steer clear” of a half-dozen different crabapples – including the two centennial picks.