Random Access

Mississauga has a lot of nice public parks but few of them can match Rhododendron Gardens at the height of blooming season in May.
The lakeside park, at the western entrance to Port Credit, fairly bursts with pinks, lavenders, reds and whites when the rhodos are in their glory. It’s a riot of colour that would make Don Cherry blush with envy.
There’s a long story about how the special plants came to be on public property. Here’s the précis: In the late 1980s, Credit Valley Conservation wanted to do some work to channelize the Cooksville Creek in the backyard of the late rhododendron hybridizer Dr. Joseph Brueckner. He had spent years crossing rhodos that grew in the arctic with other breeds so that the glorious plants would bloom in Canada.
His backyard was filled with fantastic plant material, much of which would have been destroyed by the creek work. Councillor David Culham, who was sitting on the conservation authority, brokered a compromise that preserved the rhodos and a grateful Dr. Brueckner offered to donate several hundred plants to create a special park.
What was then called Cranberry Cove Park was ideal, since it was on the waterfront and had plenty of pine trees. The plants need high humidity and benefit greatly from the acidic soil conditions found in pine forests.
The picture above shows Dr. Brueckner in the middle, Culham on the left and then-Ward 1 Councillor Harold Kennedy in May 1990 in Brueckner’s backyard when the plants were just about to be moved to the park.
Over the years, the parks person who nurtured the rhodos, Wayne Graham has moved on, some plants have died and “we’ve started to see a degradation of the collection,” says Frank Buckley, manager for Mississauga’s parks south division.
On Saturday, the City and Ward 1 Councillor Carmen Corbasson (if she is feeling up to it after her recent fall), members of the Cloverleaf Garden Club and Culham, who retired recently as an Ontario Municipal Board member, will be at the park from 10 a.m.-noon for the kickoff for a new volunteer-based stewardship effort.
Buckley says the session will be an introduction to the refurbishment plan for the park, which includes trail maintenance, removal of invasive species such as garlic mustard and re-development of the large flower bed on the edge of the park, which will be used to create floral themes to promote events in Port Credit such as the Waterfront Festival and Southside Shuffle. “The objective is to make it more brilliant and entertaining,” says Buckley, who’s working with the BIA on the idea.
There is a new gardener assigned to the park, Para Kanp, who just happens to be a master gardener. “His expertise is a perfect fit” for Rhododendron Gardens, says Buckley.
Students looking for a way to fulfil their 40 hours of community service, service groups looking to adopt a worthy cause and ordinary folks who’d like to help are all invited to come out and sign up.
But be warned: One of the duties that volunteers will be asked to do is to remove the dead seedheads from the rhodos, which must be done a few weeks after they bloom each year to reveal the tiny buds that will provide the next year’s growth.
Being the proud owner of exactly one rhodo, I can assure you this is not a job for the faint of heart or the weak of back.
If you doubt that the effort is justified, however, just take a drive along the Lakeshore in the middle of next May. You’ll see why Dr. Brueckner’s perennial gift is well worth the labour.