East Vancouver Rain Forest - 2024 04 07

 

It was a great day for gardening.

First, we loaded the truck with 6 empty trash barrels and headed over to the Burnaby Lake equestrian barn. It didn't take long for the two of us to fill all 6 trash barrels with manure. I was digging from the back of the manure shed. The manure, sawdust and straw were already composted to the point that there were worms in the pile. Matt was out at the front of the other shed. He collected the fresh droppings and straw. It was easy enough to maneuver the full trash barrels back up onto the truck bed.

Our second stop was the Coast Salish Plant Nursery at the Wild Bird Trust of BC just off the Dollarton Highway. It is hard to describe the feeling of returning to the salmonberries, huckleberries and thimbleberries of my childhood. Also the sword ferns and liquorice ferns. 

I have been dreaming of turning our east boulevard into an indigenous understory planting in the shadow of the giant Lombardi Poplar tree. I pulled up the sad turf grass years ago, and every year I have worked to keep the grass from coming back while figuring out what to plant. This year, after working with Levon Kendall at Foodscape BC, I figured out that I wanted to restore native rain forest plantings and push the grass out for good.

My parents purchased an old orchard in Lynn Valley in the early 1950s. On this lot they built a modern 4 bedroom house to raise their family of 6 children. The lot backed onto Hastings Creek. There used to be an old footbridge that crossed the creek at the bottom of Draycott Road and then wound through the salmon berries and ferns before joining up with the path that would take you to a second footbridge before leaving the forest onto Allan Road.

This was our playground, our land of adventures, industry and imagination. Endless summer hours were spent splashing in the creek, building dams, exploring the clay banks, and venturing under bridges and through tunnels. There is a massive cedar stump, it's remains are still there to see. This was our play house. Me and my friend Elaine busied ourselves with making our own little home in the woods away from the troubles of family life and noisome brothers. I don't ever remember actually sitting down in our stump house. It seemed we were always busy fixing up one little corner or another. All within earshot of the bubbling creek running beside us.

When the salmonberries and thimbleberries were ripe we would pick them and stick them on our fingertips before biting down on the sour tartness or soft sweetness of the berries, depending on how ripe they were.

The huckleberries would ripen and we would browse like young black bears, hungrily picking and eating the small red berries.

Everywhere around me were the exotic shaggy curls of the young sword fern shoots. 

Today we brought a wagon load of these marvellous plants home from the Coast Salish Plant Nursery. I am so grateful they have created a place were we can get the plants we need to rehabilitate our land, to give it back to the native plants that once grew free and wild. 

In Vancouver, it takes a great deal of effort to maintain the monoculture of a turf lawn. It is a holdover aesthetic of our colonial forbears to dominate the landscape and subordinate nature to an artificial construct of lawns and aspirations to aristocracy.

Today, I aspire to ecological integrity and the health and beauty of these native plants. Tomorrow I will put them in their new home.