Deeply Rooted

Courageous flowering crab is another unknown and underrated tree. It offers pink spring bloom, summer interest and fall color. It is also a tidy tree – it produces virtually no fruit. You may find a handful of half inch fruit on the entire tree. Summer offers the landscape an upright candelabra-structured dark green tree. The fall conjures up a fairly solid orange color uncommon in our flowering crabs.

This tree was developed by Rick Durand of Portage la Prairie, thus its hardiness. There is a real story behind the discovery of this tree. Rick is a tree researcher. His neighbor had planted seeds of a royalty crab in his yard and one of those trees seemed to be fire blight resistant! When Rick learned the trees were to be removed he went out at -30 degrees celcius to pick some small apples that were still on the tree in the dead of winter. He still remembers how his hands were just as cold and hard as the frozen apples were before he even finished picking a half an ice cream pail of fruit. As it turns out both Gladiator and Courageous came out of that seed source as hardy, upright, uniform trees with good disease resistant to fire blight. Since I mentioned Gladiator in brief it has small fruits that fall in late October but is the most resilient purple leaf tree on the prairies.

The story of the name Courageous is actually honoring another man. Lawrence Aubin of Aubin Nurseries was a forerunner in the nursery industry. He developed one of the largest nurseries in the Prairie Provinces. His son, Jerry, still manages the same Nursery in Carman Manitoba. Rick honored Lawrence as he respected Lawrence’s work and his battles with health issues, including cancer in his later years.

The tree reflects beauty, resilience, and hardiness as it makes its stately presence known in our landscapes. We hope you enjoyed the backstory and possibly one of these trees in your own yard.