Rugby Icon-Super Cherry Star,
The amazing - Dr. Evans!
A2 The Edmonton Journal, Wednesday, October 7, 1998
Written by Nick Lees

Rugby icon tackled over his super-cherry strain

More than 1,000 rugby fans from throughout the province will be at Ellerslie for the Alberta Rugby Championships Sunday and will give Dr. Ieuan Evans some free advice.

Members of teams from Calgary, Banff, Red Deer and Grande Prairie will join with local players, many of whom are women, to tell plant scientist Evans it’s time he created something a little more rugbyesque than the self-serving "Evans Cherry."

"The main men’s game is between the Edmonton Clansmen and Calgary Irish," says Edmonton - based Davie Graham, publisher of the National Rugby Post, tongue in cheek.

"Their emblems are a thistle and a shamrock. Why wouldn’t Evans, an icon in the rubgy world, improve on their thistle and shamrock rather than work to have a cherry named after him?"

But Evans, 58, originally from Swansea, says he’s done lots over the years for the rugby community, including raising $10 million for teams by founding five bingo halls.

"It was exactly 20 years ago that I seeded the championship field at Ellerslie," says Evans, a biochemist and plant disease specialist. "I also planted 3,000 trees of 50 different species on Ellerslie’s 31 acres."

He adds that he should be allowed to enjoy finding a strain of cherry so hardy that it is being shipped to St. Petersburg shortly. Also, after three years, it is growing fruit after surviving the minus-45-degree winters of Fairbanks, Alaska.

Most rugby enthusiasts know that Evans came to Canada via Florida in 1968. Later, he founded a rugby team in Guelph, Ont., before coming to Edmonton to play for the Clansmen Rugby Club and then to referee for 20 years.

"A fellow Welshman living in Sherwood Park sent me a cherry sample in 1977 and I was surprised at the amount of fruit being produced, " he says. "Not much grows at 40 below."

The scientist tracked down the parent tree to an orchard near the Edmonton Institition. But he got the cold shoulder during the years he tried to introduce it to government agencies.

"A friend, Kris Pruski, a tree-cloning specialist, grew a tree in his back yard and by the late 1980s,

these self-pollinating trees were producing huge crops of cherries in many places, " says Evans.

"They won’t grow everywhere, but some 100,000 must have been produced in Alberta in the last couple of years. Farmers in Quebec and New York say they are doing well and the Russians are keen to try them."

Should the rugby fraternity disavow Evans, he’s welcome in two other communities.

Some Alberta farmers call him "Dr. Copper" and love him for recommending that they add fertilizer to soils, when he discovered one in four acres of wheat is deficient in copper.

Local Italians think the world of him because the cherries they have grown on their Evans trees have made wine that can only be described as "magnifico."

Says Graham: "He hasn’t even come up with something that you can brew a decent ale from."

Pruski says the cherries have other uses: "They make great pies, jellies, jams and syrup."