Category Archives: Garden

Garden Tour – 11 Years Later

Posted on by

July 4, 2011 was the day I arrived in Canada after four years of living in the Philippines, to start a completely new adventure on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The move was a long time coming and I have always loved it here. I felt at home here on the island long before I even made the move, in those years of frequent visits when I always had to leave in the end to go “home”. This final move was a true homecoming.

Eleven years ago, when we moved into this house, the back garden was a blank slate, just a bare rectangle surrounded by a wooden fence. The first thing built was the GreenHouse – a dream of mine since forever, then all the stone work on the patios replacing big concrete slabs, then digging up the sod to build flower beds, installing new fences and planting area along one side of the house, shaded by wooden lattice. The buildings were repainted. Later came the really big project, the huge pergola patio that stretches along the side of the house. And along the way, planting, planting and replanting – trees, shrubs, perennials, vines. The garden is filled with bees, butterflies, dragonflies and other insects, hummingbirds and other birds that pop in to check things out. It’s been an ongoing project of love – a refuge, retreat and a place of ever-changing eye candy.

So this is what our 11-year old garden looks like now – in summer, along with some “before” shots:

The first garden project 2011 – the GreenHouse along with the very beginnings of my fuchsia collection
2022
2022
2011 Beginning the hardscaping of the blank canvas in the backyard. The Bunkie Studio where I hang out is on the left.
2022
2011 The side of the house I call the Summer Greenhouse. Benching and staging for the fuchsias during the summer shaded by lattice.
The Fuchsia Ranch 2013 in the “Summer Greenhouse” I only have a few fuchsias left in the collection. Last year’s two heatwaves wiped out or damaged most of those remaining.
Outside The Bunkie 2012
2022
Planted trees, Coral Bark Maple and Cryptomeria 2012
Trees – 10 Years Later and still growing fast
View from the GreenHouse 2012 – planting begun
2022 view from the GreenHouse
Front of the house – 2012
Front Garden Summer 2022
Completed pergola 2014
2022 – 4 different honeysuckle vines, Japanese maples and, of course, fuchsias

Hanging out in the jungle garden is so relaxing, even the neighbour’s cat, Little Black Cat, aka Cricket, is enjoying making herself quite at home. Or, depending on point of view, taking over. “Give me back my seat!”

Dennis – 11 years old. Loving Summer in the Garden 2022

But peace in the garden for Dennis was not to last. Then came the cousins. Oh, no!…

Steve had a job in Nanaimo this month and stayed with us during the weekdays for three weeks, bringing his little animal family and leaving the grand-dog, Rosie, and grand-cat, Sox, in our care during the day while he worked. A vacation for them outside in the jungle garden and it was fun hanging out with them all day. And all was well – Dennis turned out to be quite gracious about the visitors.

Rosie
Sox

It took a long time coming this year but summer finally arrived, well into July. It had been unusually cool and rainy for months and months. Complaints were muted though as we all remember the horror show of last summer with its record heat, drought and fires. Now is the time to move outside and enjoy the warmth and beauty of this very special place.

Ditto Days

Posted on by

Could this be the end of Ditto Days?

Here is a typical conversation as I met friends and neighbours on my walks around the neighbourhood (my only social life) this past winter.

“How are you?” one asks. “Fine” comes the answer – and then a pause. “Well, as good as can be expected…” the voice trails off. “Given the circumstances. And you?” Ditto.

“So what are you doing today?” I think of what I did yesterday, and the day before, and last week and last month… Ditto.

Day after day after day of sameness. Ditto Days. Big sigh.

This winter was a hard one, on so many levels. In early October the rain started and never stopped for months. Mama Earth has shown us extraordinary things and this year threw everything at us. Floods that disrupted the entire province, cutting off road and rail from the west coast to the rest of the country. Huge snowfalls that went on for weeks, so not typical of this mild winter coastal landscape. Day after day was short, gray and gloomy.

The Beach at Qualicum Beach. Waves taking out the sea wall during the winter storm. The building with the blue roof is a motel we stayed in many years ago when we stopped here on a summer vacation on our way from Victoria to Tofino. We took one look at the view (not this one!) and the town and decided we wanted to live here. The rest is history.

My interior landscape was also disrupted. I found that my usual daily walk routine changed and some days I stayed inside looking out – for no particular reason that I could see or understand. It just happened. I stopped writing. I stopped taking photographs. Restrictions became a place to hide in as I watched people I knew in crisis of one kind or another. I watched what was happening in the outside world alternating between horror and resignation. The collective mood was oppressive, confused, chaotic and restrictive. I could see that it was only a matter of time before this global pent-up frustration would explode and it did, in ways both big and small, collectively and individually. As people sicken, trucks rolled. As the planet burns, humans kill each other.

I recently was reading something about the transition we are going through as we face (or don’t face) the realities of environmental degradation and climate change that has transformed any vision we once might have had about our lives as humans in this world. It asked us to consider the question, “What is your vision for our collective future?” I paused and thought about that and replied, out loud to no one, “I have no vision for the future” and then burst into tears.

In recent weeks it seems the politicians have decided the pandemic is over and lifted most public health measures including mask wearing in public places, leaving the medically vulnerable (me included) on their own. Some people (not me yet) are travelling a bit more, seeing more people, attending more group events, ditching the masks and the distancing, taking advantage of the reprieve. Everyone makes their own choices and it seems like deja vu. We’ve seen this before and it did not go well.

But here’s the thing. This is not ‘before’. Remember always that everything changes, that this too shall pass and shape shift into something else, for better or worse, and the future is not ours to see. Que sera sera. So I take my refuge in the natural world and it is a good place to rest and return to joy. Now we are past spring equinox and with each passing day the great, oppressive weight of those winter months is releasing for me as the days get longer and brighter and finally, finally we are blessed with some days of sunshine in between the rains. My mood lightens. I look outside to a blaze of yellow as the potted daffodils are in full bloom and flowering shrubs explode in colour. I’ve had a few days of being outside gardening and that’s all it takes for a welcome attitude adjustment. I’m out walking again every day, my camera is dusted off and soon the longer weekly day hikes will begin.

The springtime view from my front window. The draping white clumps of flowers on the Pieris on the left, the early ‘Taurus’ Rhododendrum bursting open huge red flowers, lime green Euphorbias self-seeding their way to taking over the landscape and on the right, beside the front door, the uber-fragrant Daphne that scents the entire front garden.

The days no longer feel all of a sameness and it is the natural world that comes to the rescue once again. Every day there is something new to see and celebrate as spring reveals itself – new buds, new flowers, new songbirds returning and newborn lambs are back in the farmer’s fields.

On April Fool’s day I looked out to the backyard to this strange sight:

Dennis: “WTF!”

A visitor from our neighbours’ garden on the other side of the back fence. She too was tired of restrictions and had decided to expand her perimeter. The next day she returned and perched on the top of the fence looking in. This time she brought a friend.

Now this hasn’t happened before, this is something new, something smile-making. I take it as an omen. The end of Ditto Days.

The Skunk Cabbage is a very early sign of spring emerging in the wetlands. A favourite of bears emerging from hibernation as an early food source.

Capturing Spring

Posted on by

At the beginning of May, as spring was starting to explode here in coastal British Columbia and the mood lightened with each opening blossom, I decided that after such a winter of angst and disruption it was high time to turn my attention fully to the natural world and go live there and try to record some of that, both in image and memory. So (once again) I went into total news blackout, grabbed my camera and each day went out to see what was what. There was a lot.

I didn’t have to go far. Our garden transformed from late winter resting and early spring bulbs to a vibrant jungle by the end of the month. Each day there was something new, a new shoot, a new bloom and a patch of garden could change from morning to night. By the end of the month, there is now blooming honeysuckle, peony, iris, lupin, valerian, poppy, aquilegia, lily of the valley, sage, chive, rosemary and more. By tomorrow, something else will open up.

Further afield, as it were, I’d walk past the farmer’s field, where I’d been watching 7 lambs, born in February.

One day I stood and watched for a long time as the lambs played a game. One little lamb would take off at full speed, running from one side of the field to the other, round one of the trees and head back to where it started from, jump up on a concrete platform, then leap down off the other side. All the other little lambs would follow so there would be seven little lambs running back and forth across the field as fast as they could, sometimes bumping into each other. But they weren’t just running. Little lambs leap. They run some steps and then they jump vertically, all feet off the ground, and then keep running. It was a riot.

I was reminded of the time in New Zealand when we went on a visit to a sheep farm and had a demonstration of the sheep dogs in action, herding the sheep up and down the field, to precise directions from the farmer. These little lambs I was watching this day were herding themselves! They were hilarious.

Queenstown NZ Sheep Herding 2016

The lambs weren’t the only members of the herd of assorted animals in this field worthy of a portrait:

A little further down the trail, there’s a pond worth checking out for frogs this time of year. Instead I came across another family:

The forest at the end of our road is a noisy place these days, now that the songbirds have returned and it’s canoodling season. In winter I often notice and remark on the silence of the forest, the almost total lack of bird song, other than that from the ravens flying above. They’re never silent.

In spring, when there are so many birds in the forest and the owls are also very active if they have owlets in the nest, I sometimes find the owls just from the noise of other birds or squirrels. This happened three times in a week this month, when I noticed the sounds of stressed out birds above, quite high in the canopy. They were yelling and swooping and clearly extremely pissed off. I checked it out with my trusty binoculars (my walking necklace) and sure enough, there was Owl, pretending to take a nap, obviously much too close to someone else’s nest. The interesting thing about it is that there were a number of different species of birds who had come flying in from wherever to help harass the owl. As well as yelling loudly, some were flying back and forth, close in front of him/her, and some were even dive bombing. The owl completely ignored them.

On May 26th the total eclipse of full moon was visible from where we are. I didn’t get much sleep that night as the eclipse started at around 1:30 a.m and ended around 4:30. I dozed, waking up every half hour or so to sit up and look out the window.

Accompanying this full moon were the lowest tides I have seen on our beach:

And here’s what I found on the beach that day:

An eagle feather. In pristine condition, it must have just lost it (I wonder how). I take this as a gift and a reminder to always look, always see, always notice. This is a beautiful world.