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No one need remind Joel Schraven to stop
and smell the roses. For this third-generation rose grower, it’s all
in a day’s work.
He runs the burgeoning family
business, Pickering Nurseries, now located on County Road 2 west of
Welcome in the Municipality of Port Hope. The esteemed Canadian Rose
Society has called it "one of the best-known rose nurseries in North
America." |
"You might say I was born into it,"
Mr.Schraven says. His grandfather ran a rose and apple growing
business in Holland.
His father, Joseph Schraven, "planted
the first few thousand rose understocks in the spring of 1951," just
after arriving in Canada. The location was then in the heart of Durham
Region’s agricultural area and the new business was christened
"Pickering Nurseries". |
Over the decades, urban sprawl, strip
malls and fast food restaurants gradually ate up farmland around
Pickering and the nursery was soon surrounded by a bustling city.
"Not only was it not conducive to
farming," Mr. Schraven says, "it wasn’t conducive to running a garden
centre."
When the family went looking for a
new location, Northumberland County proved ideal.
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