09/12/2026
Felicitas Svejda came to Canada in 1953 to breed cereal crops. Her supervisors wouldn't put a woman in that role, so they made her a statistician instead.
A few years later, they handed her a job no one else wanted: a rose-breeding program that had sat dormant for decades. She later said that knowing nothing about roses turned out to be a blessing — she had no preconceived notions, so she just learned.
And she was relentless about it. She tested her roses across Canada with no winter protection, no fertilizer, sometimes not even regular watering. Whatever made it through survived because it was genuinely tough, not because anyone coddled it. She named the ones that lasted after Canada's explorers — Champlain, John Cabot, Henry Kelsey, William Baffin — and today she's remembered as the mother of the Explorer roses.
That toughness is why I keep so many Canadian roses in our catalog. Morden Sunrise, out of the Parkland program in Manitoba, is still one of the roses we ship most. If you garden somewhere with a real winter, these were bred for exactly your conditions.
Svejda is just one chapter. The whole story runs from Dr. William Saunders making the first crosses around 1900, through independent breeders working alone on the prairie, to the roses we still grow today. I wrote it all up on the blog:
https://www.highcountryroses.com/the-history-of-roses-in-canada/
— Matt Douglas, High Country Roses
