Old Rose Nursery

Island Pearl

Island Pearl

~ ROSE NEWS ~

The Old Rose Nursery is for sale

The Quins are planning to retire soon but are keeping the nursery
and rose garden going until they find someone who would like to
purchase their nursery, land and a heritage home on Hornby Island.

MORE NURSERY SALE INFORMATION & PHOTOS

Our 1000 Plant Rose Display Garden
Is Now Open to The Public
~
We are now members of
The Vancouver Island Gardens Association
(VIGA)

Our cottage garden-style display garden, now containing more than 1000 rambling, climbing and shrub roses which are the "mother plants" from which we take cuttings for the "own-root" roses we sell in our nursery. However, since we were invited to join the new Vancouver Island Gardens Association (VIGA), we have expanded the rose garden and hired more help to maintain it for public viewing. We are also on the VIGA website (VancouverIslandGardenTrail.com) and in the new "Garden Trail" Tourism British Columbia publication showing all 20 Vancouver Island gardens which are open to the general public.

We are therefore welcoming travellers coming to Hornby Island, which is located in the Georgia Strait about half way up the east Coast of Vancouver Island, to visit our rose garden during its blooming period to enjoy the fragrance and splendour of the roses and setting as we do every day.

Our summer hours are Wednesday to Sunday from 1 to 4 pm or by appointment. However, as our hours and days of opening may vary and it becomes hot and dry, if you are making the ferry trip over just to visit our garden and nursery, please phone ahead to confirm our days and hours of opening. (250-335-2603) .

At the recommendation of VIGA, in order to cover the additional costs of maintenance and expansion of the garden for public access, we will be asking for a small entrance fee this summer, but this will be refunded with your rose purchase (one admission per rose). We hope you will enjoy wandering through the garden (most plants are labelled) and viewing the waterlily pond, surrounded by tall gunneras and iris. (Sorry we cannot accommodate dogs, and small children must stay in the company of their parents.)

The peak period for our garden is from mid-May through mid-July. Unfortunately, if we experience a drought in July and August, as we have for the last two years, we may have to close the garden in late summer as we have limited well water and cannot sufficiently irrigate it. The nursery will remain open however, as we do concentrate our limited water resource on the thousands of potted rose plants available

Rose Climbers in our Display Garden

Fragrant Old Favourites and Classic Favourites

This year we are well stocked with classic and modern climbers "Mme Alfred Carriere," "Compassion", "Constance Spry", "Breath of Life", "Penny Lane", "New Dawn", "Leaping Salmon" and "Mme Isaac Perriere" and "Spectacular" - wonderful older repeat flowering fragrant roses. We also carry many antique wonderfullly fragrant old garden roses - Gallicas, Albas, Damasks, etc., and the healthy newer and very fragrant David Austin Enblish Roses.

Roses out of stock for the season (Sorry!)

Regretfully, many of the roses listed as "sold out" are not available at this time (perhaps they will return in fall or next spring). We regret that we sometimes underestimated quantities to propagate, and some varieties, such as "Mermaid","Sweet Juliet",, "Erfurt,"Zephirin Droughin" and "Lady Hillingdon" etc. are difficult to propagate. We're working to do better for next year. Please check our web site periodically and if we have what you are looking for then we can reserve plants for you for fall or next spring. Keep asking!

Ordering and Pricing

To order roses for shipping, please see 'How to Order' in the left-hand menu and visit our catalogue or availability list on this site.

Thanks and happy rose growing! ........Carol and Tony Quin

"Dear Carol and Tony,

I want you to know how pleased I am with the roses, thirty-eight altogether, that I bought from you this spring. I did exactly what you suggested I dug big holes with a lot of compost added to the soil and I have been watering a lot (one deep soaking every three days). By the early summer they had doubled their size and had such fragrant and huge flower heads that I thought they had gone mad! By now, the shrub roses are 3'-5' tall, and the climbers are around 8'. The non-stop bloomers are La France, Francine Austin, Graham Thomas, The Alexander Rose, Wenlock, etc. Others also bloomed for me nicely this first summer.

I also bought some roses from several other places; some of them are grafted on expensive root stocks R. laxa from England. I find that all the grafted roses in my garden started much slower {varying from weeks to months} and have been blooming much less profusely than the ones on their own roots. For instance, roses grafted on the laxa roots started their growth more than a month behind own root roses, and they have been blooming noticeably less than own root Austin Roses and Old Garden Roses."

Yixi Zhang
Victoria BC

Updated May 2008

Home