The 1935 painting "Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky" (below) is by Emily Carr, 1871-1945) Canadian artist
until last week when I joined a Road Scholar group on a tour
of gardens and parks in British Columbia.
The programme was fairly ambitious, taking us by ferry from Vancouver to Victoria, the capital of BC at the southern edge of Vancouver Island. This was a wonderful world for this Vermonter and I wondered why it never occurred to us to relocate to Vancouver. I can say it has occurred to increasing numbers of mostly young Asian people beginning with the Hong Kong exodus in the 1990s. There is big money in British Columbia now, making real estate values crazy and the entire area expensive to live in. There is ambitious building happening in downtown Vancouver -- high rise office and residential space, changing the character of the old neighborhoods.
We began our tour with a visit to Stanley Park in downtown Vancouver, a 125-year old public oasis surrounded by seawall and bike paths, walking trails and deep forest. It was fair weather for us, warm for that area with not a drop of rain. Wait, we were told, until winter when it rains all the time but rarely freezes. Trees love it.
A constant throughout the trip is the enormous public support there
is for these green spaces. Friends of This and That, scores of
volunteers who weed and plant and do the work of professional gardeners for free. The planning and foresight to create these
spaces makes our own efforts here in the US seem lacking. We do
it, but with the zeal of the Canadians. "Don't forget to look up,"
said one guide and this advice about looking at the trees and sky
On the campus of the University of British Columbia, we were
guided through the Nitobe Japanese Gardens, by a
knowledgeable student who may have weighed 90 pounds. Her
small body scintillated with energy and she herded the group
of large Americans with humor and aplomb. I thought if I were
her mother, I'd be so proud of her. From this quiet retreat, we
crossed the road to the Museum of Anthropology, an interesting
building housing a collection of Canadian First Nation artifacts including many totem poles, some inside, some out.
Canadians say, "First Nation," when referring to indigenous people rather than "Native American," for example. I prefer the Canadian
usage for its breadth and respect. To me, "Native" has negative
overtones, a kind of high-to-low perspective. That's just me. The
few people I talked to about it did not recognize my qualms.
We went to Vancouver's thriving Chinatown for a visit to the
Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Gardens, a pure rendition of a Chinese scholar's
garden.
Everything about this garden is meticulous. Every planting,
every element of the structure, has been done with the greatest
care and respect for tradition. When you look up, you emerge
from the distant Chinese past and catch glimpses of new
skyscrapers -- perhaps being erected by present-day developers
of Chinese ancestry.
After returning to Vermont and thinking it over, my
favorite garden is the Van Dusen Botanical Garden in
Vancouver. Developed on the 55-acre site of an abandoned golf course, this garden is another tribute to community cooperation and public will, an oasis in the heart of the city. Described as "a living
museum...playing a vital role in education, scientific research and
education," it did have a head start with trees on the original golf course and open spaces cleared for fairways and such. There is a maze and water features, shady walkways, ponds and lakes,
flower and herb gardens, and just about every kind of rhododendron
and laurel. Nothing seems studied although everything is planned. There are no fakey floral displays just whisked in from the nursery
to spend time in a garden until they fade and another batch is tucked in.
I found peace and joy in this garden and hope some of it sticks in my memory.
We got on a huge ferry boat for the 1-1/2 hour trip to Vancouver Island (pop. 759,000) -- 290 miles long and 62 miles wide -- the southern part of which lies south of the 49th parallel. The capitol
of all British Columbia is Victoria (pop. 350,000) at the southern
tip of Vancouver Island. From this coast, you can see across the water to the snow-capped Cascades in Washington State.
European exploration began in the mid-1700s with quests for fur, lumber and, of course, gold. The English established settlements of the Hudson's Bay Company and Victoria became the capitol in 1866. There is a major Canadian naval installation here and the
island has encouraged a new tech industry in addition to tourism.
Viking has a large nearby manufacturing operation for the STOL Otter air and amphibious planes. The mild weather has always drawn the retirees from British civil service and there is a lingering
but fast-changing whiff of Empire.
One one of our tour days, we took in three very different Victoria gardens. In the morning, we visited a private garden created by a
woman who began with nothing. Slowly she tweaked and changed, planned and dreamed of a spectacular space. A house is enfolded
by various planting beds and walkways, all privately maintained and tended and recently given a major Canadian garden award. Deer have become a scourge and the entire place is now surrounded by a high fence.
Next was the romantic Abkhazi Gardens, a refuge and tribute
to love and the determination of two people separated by
concentration camps and the fortunes of war. The story begins
in Paris just after WWI when Marjorie Pemberton-Carter first met the exiled Georgian Prince Nicholas Abkhazi. They wrote
back and forth and went on with their lives: Peggy as a companion to her awful adoptive mother after whose death in 1938, Peggy settled in Shanghai. Nicholas settled with his mother in Paris after his father was executed in 1923. Everything was lost and he somehow managed to survive for the next 20 years. When WWII
began, both were interned: Nicholas in Germany and Peggy in a Japanese camp near Shanghai where she actually managed to
keep a garden. After the war, she made it to San Francisco using
money she hid and wound up in 1945 with friends in Victoria. So far, is this not an amazing story?
With the hidden money, Peggy bought a little treed and rocky lot where she built a tiny summerhouse and began planting more trees. In 1946, she received a letter from Nicholas after which they met in New York City and got engaged. They were married in Victoria in 1946.
The garden became their focus and their "child" and they continued
to experiment and refine it for 40 years. Nicholas died in 1987 and Peggy in 1994 at the age of 92. The garden was acquired by The Land Conservancy of British Columbia and rescued from a high-density development.
So that's a pretty romantic story and the garden reflects the taste
of the couple as it flows around the rock, weaves along pathways
lined with rhododendron and woodland species. Let me say now
that we missed the rhododendron which is everywhere in these
gardens. We missed the azalea of which there is plenty. We kept
hearing how glorious it all was a couple of months before although it certainly was plenty glorious when we were there. Still, I think
an earlier trip to Vancouver, say in May, would have been the
better time.
So we all trudged along, in and out, stopping for soup and tea out of nostalgic mismatched dishes and pots in Abkhazi.
We loaded onto the bus and were off to the gardens at Government House, official residence of British Columbia's Lieutenant Governror. Started in 1911 with armies of gardeners, by the 1990s, austerity reduced the professional staff to one and an ambitious volunteer gardener program began.
Our guide, a longtime volunteer, was pulled away from his work that day to be with us. The house sits in a large park with extensive gardens and walkways. Open free to the public. Oh, goodness. You cannot imagine the extent of this place. It has every kind of garden under the sun: rose, rock, herb, country, cottage, woodland, sunken, -- on and on -- all maintained primarily by the volunteers. I liked this garden for its scope and the old plantings. The trees, of course, are fabulous and they inform everything.
Was this an exhausting day? An overload for the senses? Good
thing I'm writing this down because even at a few days remove,
all has become a blur. The thing to do would be to see maybe one
garden a day, take your time, spread it out. We couldn't do that, so
on we pressed and after a walking tour of the inner harbor at
Victoria, we loaded up for Butchart Gardens about 20 miles out
of Victoria.
This is the Disneyland of all gardens. It has everything but the kitchen sink, all in a playland of blooms and the occasional breathtaking moment. "Exit Through the Gift Shop" would be
the title for this blog if I weren't so enchanted by everything else.
Fleets of buses, thousands of selfie-sticks and crying toddlers. Dogs in baby carriages. How come they allow dogs? This is most
surprising! So, dogs, babies, tourists -- almost a million a year at about $30. an adult pop -- including sometime gardeners like us.
Spectacular is how you'd describe the rose garden -- the biggest and most extensive I've seen anywhere.
And the amazing thing: it is a vision of a person, a fabulous attraction that began as an unused quarry and cement factory in 1921, by Jenny Butchart, a woman knew what she wanted and I'm assuming she had deep pocket to work with. The garden remains in the family today and the scope of it truly is breathtaking. Again: the vision, the energy, the velocity! The annual beds are replaced four times a year and each one is deadheaded and tended almost hourly.
There is a serene Japanese garden with several quiet pools. Walkways wind through sun and shade. Always there are the crowds but somehow the gardens seem to absorb them. There is no real privacy but one can find quiet spots.
We stayed on and had an excellent early dinner at Butchart.
Maybe saving the best for last, we met with guide Joan Looy
for a morning in Victoria's 200-acre Beacon Hill Park.
Joan is a fabulous presence who knows everything and everyone in Victoria. She trudges along throwing out nonstop facts and figures, local lore and hilarious asides. She is devoted to conservation and to the heritage of the First Nation. She lives her job as scholar, teacher, gardener and narrator of everything. She is also devoted
to the life and work of Canadian artist, Emily Carr. More on that.
The land for Beacon Hill Park was set aside by Sir James Douglas (as in fir) governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island in 1858. In
1882, the land was officially made a municipal park. The vision!
Again. The hill was a special site for the First Nations Coast Salish people who were the original inhabitants of the Victoria region.
Preservation of the native flora has been a challenge and it is one of Joan's main concerns. As she goes along, she'll stoop and pull a
weed or a bit of something invasive. She will tell you a lot about camas, a flowering tuber cultivated and harvested in three-year
cycles as an important indigenous food source.
Joan leads us over a pebble bridge erected to the memory of Emily Carr whose work had been neglected and unrecognized until fairly recently. At the end of the tour, Joan invited two of us to go
with her to the Victoria Art Gallery where some of Carr's work is
on display.
Although she studied art abroad, Carr returned to Victoria to
live and often work in a quirky lady-in-the-van style accompanied by a monkey, some cats and a three-legged dog. She was interested
in the art and people of the First Nation although she was an outsider. Her ravishing paintings pre-date O'Keefe although there
are resonances and they did meet. Her art remained generally unrecognized and unknown for most of her life although she was included and respected in the "Group of Seven" Canadian artists who exhibited in Ontario in 1927.
A couple of Carr pieces at the Victoria gallery are on brown paper done in oil thinned with turpentine. She could work freely and fast with these materials and they dried quickly.
Maybe Emily Carr speaks to me because trees are her
main subject and unrestrained tree cutting was a danger she saw
early on.
Ye ghosts of all the dear old trees, the oak, the elm,
the ash. Nightly those gentlemen go tease, Who hew
you down like trash.
She investigated forests, she lived in forests, she identified with
trees. "I ought to stick with nature because I love trees better
than people." Her trees are female and they have many moods
and moments. "Carr's trees form the axis around which her work rotates," says the Art History Archive, in which Carr is listed under
"Women Artists" along with Cassatt, Frankenthaler, Hepworth, Kahlo, Morisot, O'Keefe, and others. Good.
In the Spring of 2015, Carr's "Forest Light" sold at auction for
$1.53 million. In 2013, her "Crazy Stair" sold for $3,383,000
the most ever paid for a Carr painting.
So, thanks, Joan, for your generosity and your amazing spirit.
Without you, I'd never know about the camas or Emily Carr and
I never would have remembered to "look up."
Arbutus Trees 1931
British Columbia Forest Service:
The sad fact is that over 1,900 species found in BC are “at risk”, and in many instances it's because of the continued logging of their wild forest habitat. To make matters worse, climate change has also impacted our forests. More than 9 million hectares of forest lands, mostly on BC’s central plateau, have been hit by the pine beetle epidemic and other pests due to warming winters and forest mismanagement.
