pathways

Taking a stroll around the backyard, I've discovered a narrow path in the grass. I suspect its the raccoons who've trod it.

It's the end of the March and I am refusing to mow the lawn until the calendar says April. But with all the rain and the last couple of days of warmer temperatures, the grass is bursting out.

I've considered the big cedar hedge a part of the "wildways" that would allow wildlife to find their way amongst the houses and the school behind us without being seen. I know the raccoons hang out inside the hedge. One afternoon last month while I was digging in the vegetable garden I heard growling. I thought it might be dog on the other side, the school side, of the hedge. After some minute, out popped two raccoons, clearly in the throws of mating season. Giving me a scowl, they continued on in the grass towards the back, climbed the old chestnut tree and scooted across to my neighbour Jim's cedar hedge that extends from the chestnut tree.

But the path in the grass means that in quieter times they prefer the lawn to the hedge. I don't blame them either. The hedge is dense and cedar makes my skin itch.

One troubling item is that the path goes around the compost bin. We must take care to secure the scraps inside the bin.

coastal truth

"No more shovelling snow"
is their excuse
to uproot
from 'back east'.

But while they sleep 'out west'
a pacific front meets arctic outflows.

Snow blows
March cherry blossoms
in the dreams of a lotus-land night.

Red-Flowering Current

I took this photo last week the day before we had snow. (March 9th) It is the first to flower in my native garden, and tells me that Spring will soon be here.

I bought two Ribes sanguineum plants from a Native plant sale at Richmond Nature Park in the spring the year after I planted my salal twig. One plant died off after the next winter, but the remaining plant has spread nicely. About two years ago, I pinned down a twig and covered it with soil so that a new bush would take root. And it did.

The flowers are a strikingly bright pink and hang in lovely chandeliers. Last year was the first year I found berries but I didn't try them. The Nature Park encourages the planting of red-flowering current because they attract wild birds like our local Rufous Hummingbird. Sure enough, a hummingbird whirred around here, although it seemed to be more interested in the purple flowers of the sage plant in my herb garden then it did anything in my native garden.

Update:
It's now April 6th and my current is in full bloom. As I sit at my desk inside directly across from it, I've seen the first of the giant bumble bees visiting it. Welcome friendly bees!

Recolonization begins

Not long after I moved in, we took a weekend jaunt up the coast. Trundling along the backroads in our station wagon, we found ourselves in the middle of a clearcut.

The politics of clearcuts: On the one hand, they destroy an entire eco-system in one fell swoop, they generate a great deal of waste in the form of wood that is not ultimately marketable, and they are ugly. On the other, because much of the forests are inaccessible because there are not any roads, cutting everything in sight appears to make it economically viable (?-this logic has yet to be proven to me).

Imagine: you're driving through lovely Nature (yes, driving!) and feeling very in touch with your inner Pan. The trees are tall and green and provide a dark and mysterious shade to what may lie beyond. It feels pristine, idyllic, Edenic. Untouched by the corrupting hand of Man, of Civilization, of Commerce. You round the corner. It is tight and rocky (it's a former logging road, afterall) and you come upon a clearcut. It's a real shock. Exposed land means no more mystery. The land is scarred and blighted. Scraggly. Yet also very neat. The borders of the clearcut run straight and correspond with the maps that determine where the logging companies' leases extend.

So there I was, standing on the side of a gravel berm that seperated the road from the clearcut. At my feet there sprouted a bunch of salal seedlings, volunteers ready for recolonizing action. One of the volunteers was struggling, looking parched. I scooped it up and placed it in a yogurt container. It's roots were too shallow for the deep gravel.

I feel guilty, of course, for taking a native plant out of nature and I've never done it again. This is wrong, especially in a clearcut. But it was going to die anyhow. I suppose if I had left it, it would have died, decomposed and created a small humous groundcover that would nourish the gravel. But I doubt it. It was too close to the roadside and would have gotten squashed by the logging trucks.

When I got home, I dug up a clump of grass in the shadiest part of my garden. This area is on the northeast side of my house. It only gets the sun in the late summer afternoon. It remains wet for 50 weeks of the year. I planted the salal.

And this small seedling became the start of my native garden. The photo is of the salal bush now, six years later.

Six years ago, my garden....

I moved to this garden 6 years ago. The house was 24 years old but it had been rented for the previous ten. What existed of the garden had been neglected.

In the backyard, previous gardeners had planted a back hedge of cedar and it had grown enormously tall and thick out of neglect. At one end of the hedge, there is a giant chestnut tree and at the other, a bed with a red gangly rhododendron (like griersonianum) and a sickly aspen. Two old apple trees were covered in moss and full of suckers. The front door was blocked by a bed of white rhododenron, piersis (formosa forrestii) and a sad boxwood. That was it, except for the thick carpet of mossy lawn.

There was no fence in the front yard between our lawn and the neighbours. Because we are in a corner, the combined lawns gave the appearance of grandeur. However, within the first month, I noticed that the neighbour used the lawns to back his truck over in order to access his backyard. There were deep tire grooves in the parts where the truck needed traction. I mean, if he had asked for permission, I guess I wouldn't have gotten so uptight. But when I happened upon the truck in my frontyard, I decided on the stop to fill the space with as many plants as I could.