Isabella Preston

Isabella Preston (September 4, 1881 - January 31, 1965) was a horticulturist and public servant widely recognized for her achievements in plant hybridization and extensive work in ornamental plant breeding. She is Canada's first female professional plant breeder. During her 26-year career, she produced nearly 200 new hardy hybrids of lily, lilac, crab apple, iris and rose plants for Canada's cold climate. While female plant breeders were rather rare in her day, she quietly challenged gender bias and set the stage for new generations of breeding programs at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and elsewhere.

Early life and education Isabella Preston was born on 4 September 1881 in Lancaster, England where her father worked as a silversmith. As a child, she attended boarding school in Liverpool and later studied at the University of London. She gardened from an early age, helping her father on the family farm. Her only formal education in horticulture was obtained through a course at Swanley Horticulture College in Kent which she completed before emigrating to Canada in 1912. She was 31 years old when she and her sister Margaret immigrated to Canada following the death of their mother. Margaret had accepted a position as a music teacher in Guelph, Ontario, and encouraged Preston to join her. Preston found her first job in Guelph picking plums, peaches, and raspberries on a fruit farm. She enrolled at the Ontario Agricultural College the same year to study plant breeding and was one of the few women pursuing the subject at the time.

Career Throughout World War I, plant breeders intensified their focus on fruit and vegetable plants. Government campaigns urged increased production in order to feed military personnel. Preston worked on breeding fruit that ripened quickly and was more resistant to insects and disease. This was accomplished in 1919, when she crossed two lilies, L. regale and L. sargentiae, to produce the Creelman Lily (Lilium × princeps ’George C. Creelman’), a six foot tall white lily. Following her death, 139 of her gardening and plant books, along with her personal archives, were donated to the Royal Botanical Gardens Library in Hamilton, Ontario. She developed many of the 125 different strains in the Central Experimental Farm lilac collection. Her lilac and crab apple hybrids are also still seen flowering on the Central Experimental Farm each spring along with two of her roses. Preston's hybrids were disease-resistant and well suited to geographic regions within Canada since one of the mandates of the CEF was to produce plants hardy enough to survive northern prairie winters. Preston retired from the Central Experimental Farm in 1946 but continued to act as an advisor. Most of these can be seen in the CEF's lilac collection today. (The varieties of lilac that were commonly seen in Europe bloomed too early in the Canadian climate and the buds or blooms were frequently nipped by late spring frosts.) Eighty of Miss Preston's late-blooming cultivars are recorded in the International Lilac Register although only about one-half of these were distributed to other institutions or nurseries. Cultivars ‘Audrey', 'Elinor' and ‘Isabella' received Awards of Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society, London, England, in 1939, 1951 and 1941, respectively; 'Bellicent' was awarded a First Class Certificate in 1946. who worked at the CEF from 1956–86 and became known as Canada's rose expert.

Honours and awards Preston was hailed as the "Queen of Ornamental Horticulture" and a new hybrid species of lilacs, "Syringa prestoniae", was named in her honour. This was the result of a cross between wild species from China and put Canada on the lilac "map".