Gardens
One of the most distinctive features of Canada’s station landscapes, and one of the least remembered, were the station gardens. The early stations, with their piles of cordwood and muddy grounds, were unkempt and ugly. To soften the unsightliness, the railways began to supply agents with flowers to add to their own vegetable gardens.
Long a practice of station agents in England, the station gardens first appeared in Canada along the Grand Trunk Railway between Toronto and Montreal and along the Ontario Simcoe and Lake Huron (later the Northern) Railway between Toronto and Collingwood. The man who started it all was Fred Cumberland. An engineer from England hired by the OH and S, Cumberland was meticulous in the running of the railway. It was he who insisted that his railway have the best station gardens, and many attribute to him the initial impetus for Canada’s station gardens. Bolstered by the unexpected popularity of the gardens, Cumberland hired a gardener at Couchiching Point to set up a permanent green house. In 1868, two of the more popular station gardens, those at Sunnidale and Stayner, cost $436 and $401 respectively.
A now-forgotten feature of the station landscape was the popular station garden, as seen in this extensive garden at Chelsea, Quebec. Photo courtesy of CPR Archives, 13469.
Collingwood and Allandale, however, were the most important points on the line, and Cumberland gave them the best gardens. Within two decades of the opening of the Northern Railway, Collingwood had become an important tourist destination. Passengers disembarked here to transfer to Georgian Bay steamers. While waiting for their connections they admired the large gardens or listened to the music from its bandshell. Allandale, an important divisional point on the Northern Railway, boasted a particularly large and attractive garden. Although the fountain and the flowers have gone, a bust of Cumberland still gazes soberly from what is now a neatly trimmed parkette.
If the Northern Railway was the first to establish station gardens, the CPR was the most ambitious. Like the Northern, the CPR had an economic motive for its gardens. One of Western Canada’s pre-eminent developers, the CPR wanted to attract settlers. Promotional literature that featured a photo of a lush station garden made an otherwise arid Canadian West look more fertile than was usually the case. David Hysop, a real estate agent and claims adjuster for the railway, urged, “If you want to show how good the soil is why not have gardens at the railway stations in which flowers and vegetables can be grown?”
For his initiative, Hysop was promptly put in charge of forty-four gardens between Brandon and Golden. Even the surly and cynical CPR president, William Van Horne, caught the garden fever and declared “the station agent with a nice garden is the agent who has a clean station, has a flower in buttonhole, wears his coat, and has well-brushed boots.”
Uniformed staff stands in front of the restaurant at the Grand Trunk’s Allandale Station (now part of Barrie, Ontario). Thanks to Fred Cumberland, whose bust rests in a nearby park, the station garden movement began here. Photo courtesy of CNR Archives, 79095.
Although hugely unpopular for its monopolistic practices and its community insensitivity, the CPR gained many supporters for its gardens. Magazines such as the Canadian Horticulturist and the Canadian Municipal Journal praised the CPR for its work on station beautification. “The man who has a nice garden,” swooned the Municipal Journal, “is not the man who spends his time in the nearest saloon, nor the man who has to be discharged for beating his wife. [He is] a decent industrious man who will bring up his children to be the best kind of citizens.”
Station gardens were often a town’s only parkland and became the focus of the community. Those at Red Deer and Fort McLeod boasted a circular arrangement dominated by a bandshell or a fountain. Broadview, Regina, and Kenora also contained magnificent station gardens. By contrast, simpler gardens might only have the town name spelled out in whitewashed boulders.
To encourage agents to plant gardens, the railways set up nurseries, usually under the auspices of a Forestry Department to manage nurseries.
As shown in this 1920s view of the garden at Red Deer, Alberta, the CPR was moving into a less formal style of station garden. Photo courtesy of Archives of Alberta, A-6251.
Those of the CPR were at Wolseley (Saskatchewan), Springfield (Manitoba), Fort William, Kenora, Winnipeg, Moose Jaw, Calgary, Revelstoke, and Vancouver. The CNR administered nurseries in Winnipeg and Stratford, Ontario. The forestry departments also oversaw the design and the planting of the station grounds themselves. They established design criteria, circulated catalogues, and subjected the gardens to formal inspection. They also initiated a competition for the best garden, awarding $50 to the winner in each district or division.
The First World War brought with it a temporary lull in CPR’s garden beautification program. Hearkening to the federal government’s plea for more domestic food production, the CPR ploughed under many of the flower beds and replaced them with less attractive but more essential potatoes.
The end of the war, however, not only brought more gardens but also more bureaucracy. The CPR’s main competitors, the CNoR and the GTP, had just completed their lines when the war broke out. The crippling financial restrictions of the war drove them both into bankruptcy and the Canadian government set up the Canadian National Railway to assume these and other bankrupt lines. Anxious to capture some of the CPR’s business, the new CNR also set up a Forestry Department and launched a garden program of its own.
In an effort to stay ahead of the CNR and modernize its gardens, the CPR established a floral committee, and encouraged the agents to replace the earlier more formal gardens with a more current concept. The tradition-minded agents, however, largely ignored the new styles and kept to their familiar gardens, formal and usually fenced.
If the end of the First World War fostered station gardens, the end of the Second World War finished them. As cars replaced the passenger train, and modern technology reduced the community’s reliance upon its stations, the railways paid less and less attention to the gardens.
ABOVE: A modern municipal garden graces the landscape at VIA Rail’s Brantford, Ontario, station. Photo by author. BOTTOM: Canada’s best known railway hotel is arguably Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York built across Front Street, from the then-new Union Station. Photo by author.
Flower beds were replaced by lawns and surrounded by hardy and protective caragana hedges. Then, in response to the greater demand for parking, the lawns were in turn paved with asphalt. Finally, the stations themselves were demolished by the thousands — to be replaced by junkyards, modern office towers, or nothing. In other towns, small parks mark the former station gardens; some are dominated by war memorials. Meanwhile, among the many ghost towns of the prairies, the only evidence that there was ever a garden or even a station are the unkempt yet distinctive caragana hedges.
Hotels
But it was not just railway gardens and structures that typified the station landscape. Almost as inevitable as the flowers and the water tanks were the station hotels. Every town had one, sometimes more. Large or small, brick, stone, and wood, they could be found across the street and right behind the station.
Both hotel and station continue to cater to the public in Alexandria, Ontario.