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A downside of disappearing to the UK (and to elsewhere in Europe) in the middle of springtime is – of course – that one’s little acreage here on Vancouver Island is still only just getting into its stride when it comes to the Glories of the Garden. We will vanish across the ocean and by the time we get back some of these beautiful shrubs and flowers will have been and gone for another year.
As least I got to take pictures of these ones:
Though not – of course – the (non-fruiting) cherry tree!
…more Canadian – or what?!
OK – now I know in reality that the mere acquisition of power tools is no signifier of national characteristics, but I think I can safely say that – had we remained in the UK instead of crossing an ocean and a continent to come to this delightful spot – I probably would not now be the proud part-owner of a gas (petrol) power washer.
I can further safely say that the thought of (part) owning such a thing would never have crossed my mind. Nor – in all probability – would I have known what to do with such a beast.
Out here on the wild west coast, however, there is apparently sufficient use for such a thing (for cleaning one’s deck – getting the crud off one’s patio and pavers – cleaning the stucco or sidings with which one’s house is most likely clad) that it is worth forming a partnership (in our case with a dear friend from Saanichton also in possession of deck, pavers, stucco etc) to jointly invest in same.
And of course, if one is going to do such a thing it makes no sense at all to go with a namby-pambly, wussy electric version (for pussies only!). No – the only real option is to go for the all-Canadian, hard as nails, tough as you like gas model – preferably with a Honda power unit (like the one here!). I have to say, it made short work of cleaning two year’s worth of gunk off our deck.
Though we and our dear friend will be taking turns at having fun with it, for the moment the machine is sitting in our shop alongside our gas mower, our gas weed-whacker (strimmer!) and our unfortunately girly electric leaf blower (ooops!).
Oh well – there’s always next year!
Tags: Canadians, Friends, Gardens, power tools
Paddy and Mick are out walking on a logging road in the depths of British Columbia. They see a sign nailed to a big Douglas Fir. It reads:
‘Tree Fellers Wanted’
“Ah!”, says Mick – “‘Tis a pity that Seamus isn’t with us. We could have gone for that job!”
I’ll probably get into trouble for that! Oh well…!
We have had the tree fellers in and they have been felling a tree (and lopping some branches). The tree was a little cherry tree at the back of our (croquet) lawn. It didn’t fruit but it did blossom gloriously each spring for all of a couple of days. The main problem can be seen in this photo of the view from our new deck:
That picture was taken at about this time of year two years ago. The tree had grown considerably in the interim and was seriously impacting our view toward Mount Baker.
As can be seen from this comparable shot – taken just this morning – we also had the experts nip out a few of the lower branches from one of those big Doug Firs:
The next step is to persuade our neighbours down the hill to trim back the cedars at the back of their garden, to give our lovely vista another couple of years of unimpeded viewing pleasure.
Since virtually every house in our neighbourhood has views that are not dissimilar to ours this sort of negotiation is quite common. One usually offers to pay the costs and since it makes little difference to the residence further down the slope, those concerned tend to be co-operative.
Let’s hope we also get lucky!
It is my habit, at this time of year, to post to this journal selected images of verdurous nature – in particular in that form which it takes in our garden. I do this, of course, to show off just how splendid is life in this balmy coastal paradise at the time of year at which spring bursts forth in all its glory.
The absence of such images this year is telling… telling mostly of the near six weeks for which parts of our estate were buried under a foot or two of snow.
Now, nature is no mug – having been around this loop any number of times in the past – and simply slammed on the brakes, burying its head (in a hideous clashing of metaphors) until such time as things warmed up again on the climate front.
Well – that time is now and all is thus once again kicking off as per usual – but it is, of course, now late, late, late…
…and not only late: there is the distinct air of all of our growing things having taken a bit of a battering during that icy sojourn. No doubt all will recover in time but we really do need some nice sunshine to help things on their way, in place of the current cloudy/rainy/chilly weather that seems to have become a fixture here in recent days.
Ah well – ‘tis only April and these things often don’t pick up properly until May, the which they will doubtless do just in time for us to head for Europe. Ah well…
The dogwood and magnolia trees at least are in bloom and looking good!
“When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is ‘over yonder’ in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement”
Timothy Morton
What is it with nature?!
On the subject of the word ‘binge’ the Cambridge Dictionary offers us:
noun uk informal
an occasion when an activity is done in an extreme way, especially eating, drinking, or spending money:
a drinking/eating/spending binge
‘He went on a five day drinking binge’.
The use of the term is practically always pejorative (with the exception of its employ in the course of braggadocio – usually by the young!) and by way of illustration of the weaknesses and excesses of human beings.
So – what does that have to do with nature?
I have previously waxed lyrical in these jottings concerning the abundance and vigour of the flora and fauna of the west coast of Canada. Springtime is a particularly verdant season and it can be difficult to keep up with the garden when it is putting on its annual growth spurt. Spring – however – does at least make some sort of sense to me, following hard as it does upon the heels of the fallow winter months.
Autumn is different – or so it would seem to me at any rate.
In the autumn we get fungi! In just a few days these amazing organisms burst en mass through our lawns and beds in a manner reminiscent of the creature from ‘Alien’ (though without the lawn bit of course). They are omnipresent for a short period and then wither and vanish again for another year – as though never there. Do they lurk underneath the grass the rest of the time, just waiting for the ordained moment to burst forth like a joke waiting for a punchline (that would be the one about the ‘fun-guys‘!)?
Then there are fruit flies (time flies like an arrow, etc!). Exasperated home-owners reach for Google to plead: “How do fruit flies come out of nowhere?“. May-flies famously live but a single day; fruit flies, sadly, can live for forty to fifty – seemingly all of it during the autumn and mostly around the recycling bin, which they can – apparently – smell from several miles away.
Worst of all in my view – however – are the spiders.
During the rest of the year – and particularly during the hot summer months – these arachnids lurk sulkily in dark corners, or scurry away furtively when stones or suchlike are turned over unexpectedly. Every now and again they stir themselves, get their arses into gear and produce a bit of desultory webbage – as though to demonstrate that they still can.
Come the autumn all that changes! The spiders are abruptly jolted into action and start weaving the most outrageous structures as though their lives depend upon it… which, of course, they may do! I know nothing of of the annual cycle of these tautologically multi-legged arthropods.
What I do know is that the creatures themselves seem to double in size and to multiply exponentially in number just as soon as the temperatures start to fall, whilst their sticky ambuscades become more and more elaborate and are thrown across ever more infeasible spaces. The end result is that it becomes nigh on impossible to mow one’s lawn (as did I yester-eve) or to cultivate one’s garden without getting a face full of spidey-silk!
Bleuch!!
What I want to know is – if binging is frowned upon in humans, why is it considered acceptable throughout the rest of nature?
It is no secret that we have now entered my favourite time of the year – a subject on which I have almost certainly waxed lyrical any number of times in previous postings (at around this time). There are many reasons to delight in the season… nature reborn – the first hints of the summer to come – the warmth anew upon one’s shoulders – the fresh aromas on the balmy breeze – that strange golden light in the sky!…
My first instinct is to break out the trusty Fuji and to document the nascent spring/summer season as I have done so many times before. As the photos attached below will attest I am not about to refrain from so doing on this occasion either.
It is also time for the first Intrepid Theatre festival of the season – ‘UNO Fest’ – a feast of one man/woman shows which aim to amuse, inform, to move and to set the tone for the rest of the year. I am once again on airport/ferry pickup duty – an endeavour that brings me into contact with fascinating artists from around the world – and what’s not to like about that?!
Finally – in response to Aeroplan threatening to expire our precious points should we not have used them by the end of the month, a short but expedient trip has been arranged. We leave on Thursday for Montreal – a city that I have not yet visited but which am very much looking forward to seeing – before heading back to Vancouver early next week in time to catch the Paul Simon farewell concert that was the subject of a previous missive.
Further photographic images are bound to follow…
As the drear dark days of winter finally pack their bags and grumble off to the southern hemisphere to bother somebody else, nature rubs its sleepy eyes, yawns and sticks its head outside for a quick recce. To its surprise and great delight there is no-one home! The adults are apparently all away and that mischievous little imp has the garden (yard) all to itself.
The results are pretty much in line with the description that the excellent Glaswegian comedian – Kevin Bridges – ascribes to the teenage gangs from his boyhood whenever one of their number discovered that he was the fortunate possessor of an ’empty’* for the weekend!
Mayhem ensues!
By the time the rain has drifted away, the temperature risen to an acceptable level and I get around to dragging my sorry behind out into the garden – it looks as though the rain-forest has dropped by and decided to stay for the duration. There follows a month (and more) of hard labour!
Now – this is where ‘relativity’ comes in.
I am – you must understand – not talking about Einstein here – nor Galileo nor Newton. I am referencing neither the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis nor meta-ethical morality (which turns out to be a good thing as my knowledge of either is limited to the world of Wikipedia!).
I refer to the fact that what appears during the height of the summer (I don’t venture out there at all in winter!) to be a perfectly sensibly-sized plot – just about large enough that the neighbours on either side don’t intrude in any way – metamorphoses in the inchoate springtime into a vast overgrown estate full of fiendish flora resembling nothing so much as Wyndham’s Triffids.
A whole bunch of seemingly endless hard work – in other words.
Worth it though, of course. Best get back to it…
* Parents away – house to themselves – party!!
Tags: British Columbia, Gardens, nature, Spring
Not much later this time last year I was (ab)using the pages of this ‘journal’ to elicit assistance with the wildness that flourishes but a few yards outside my window. In that instance I was trying to establish which of the abundant flora in my garden (yard) were plants that I should be encouraging (not, of course, that that would make any difference either way!) and which were weeds and other undesirables.
The answer was – naturally – that all the things that were doing particularly well were the weeds!
Anyway – here I am again – begging free gardening advice from those amongst you who are horticulturally inclined (or perhaps make a living from said pursuit).
This – I take to be a Yukka of some variety:
As you can see it is doing its damnedest to push everything else out of the bed in which it resides.
The question is – how on earth does one prune such a beast?
Answers on a postcard please (as the saying goes)…
Ithankyou!
Tags: British Columbia, Gardens
One of the joys of living on the west coast of Canada – with its moderate oceanic climate and in what the World Wide Fund for Nature defines as the Pacific temperate rain forest ecoregion – is that we inhabit a verdant paradise of lush and abundant vegetation.
One of the drawbacks of living on the wet coast of Canada – with its moderate oceanic climate and in what the World Wide Fund for Nature defines as the Pacific temperate rain forest ecoregion – is that we inhabit a verdant paradise of lush and abundant vegetation!
Though the summers here on the tip of Vancouver Island tend to be dry and delightfully temperate, the winters incline to the aqueous. As I write this post I can gaze out of my studio window at a landscape that is undeniably ‘socked in’. I believe that the landscape is still there – but I cannot actually see any of it.
The result of all of this humectation is – naturally (see what I did there?) – that during the late winter and early spring all of that lush vegetation grows and grows and grows – as though there were no tomorrow! It grows upwards – it grows outwards – and it presumably grows downwards as well!
Nature reveals itself to be the epitome of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, with each species striving voraciously to overrun its neighbour in the ongoing quest for sunlight, water and nutrients. Left to its own devices the wonderful variety of plants in our delightful garden (yard!) would doubtless whittle itself down to just a couple of bigger, stronger brutes as all the weedy (there I go again!) specimens are trampled underfoot (I think I just stretched that particular metaphor a little too thin!).
The bottom boundary of our compact but decidedly highly-desirable estate is bounded with splendid trees and dense foliage. This latter is mostly – as far as I am aware – laurel of one type or another. Now, apparently the Schipka Cherry Laurel – which appears to form the bulk of this hedge – has the following qualities:
It also grows around 2 ft a year up to a height of 18 ft! As this boundary growth had not been pruned back for at least two and a half years – and most likely rather longer than that – it was in serious danger of taking over the smaller shrubs in the bed in front of it, not to mention cutting off our view of the sea whilst simultaneously advancing on my croquet lawn!
Fortunately it can also be pruned really hard. Apparently it simply shakes itself off and starts growing again.
I do now have a huge pile of clippings to be disposed of. Any takers?
Tags: British Columbia, Gardens, Spring
There is something completely magical about the way that fungi live patiently in one’s lawn – in the shape of millions of spores just waiting for the perfect conditions in which to thrive – before suddenly bursting forth for the purposes of reproduction. They have a relatively narrow window in which to do so once the air turns cooler and the moisture levels rise, before the first frosts persuade them once again to keep their heads well down for the duration.
Persistent little buggers, aren’t they!
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