Winding-dough bush
Winding-dough bush is only my name for it – a woody shrub in a native plant garden in Bowker Valley. I am thinking about the names we give to plants because I recently watched an interview with David Begay. Previously, the name I have used for that shrub is Mock Orange.
David Begay, an astrophysicist by profession, is Navajo, and speaks that language. He says that the Navajo language names things according to people’s relationships with those things. The language is built on verbs more than on nouns. For example, the Navajo word for “land” expresses contact with the sole of a moccasin. Thus an English speaker and a Navajo speaker might always understand “land” differently. Our noun “land” allows us to see an object, a thing that we may own and may use or abuse as we wish. The Navajo word allows its speaker to feel a relationship, a physical experience of constant support.
So I think about my relationship with this Philadelphus bush. I wish I could claim it as the local native Philadelphus lewisii or gordonianus, but this one is probably a European immigrant, like my own family. Our relationship is mainly one of pruning, on my part, and growing back vigorously, on its part. It arches over a walkway, glorious in June with fragrant white blossoms. Without pruning it would arch too low and whack people in the face.
After watching the interview with David Begay, I felt doomed by my language. How will we ever learn to love and care for living Earth while we are stuck with a language that ignores our relationships with plants, animals and rocks. Mock Orange, this noun, encourages me to see the bush as thing, tagged like a specimen in my personal museum of shrubs. A relationship-based language might have survival value. It could help us to experience our participation with the species, habitats and life systems we are so rapidly destroying.
I prune also to keep the bush away from a Garry Oak. Somebody told me that Garry Oaks do not like immediate contact with trunks of other trees and shrubs. I cut off those stems at ground level. The result is lusty growth of new shoots, taller than me, and useful. Straight and strong, the annual crop of sticks supports peas and broad beans in the vegetable garden. Thus, accidentally, I have learned the gardener’s art of copsing. Pruning the vigourous woody shrub at ground level produces reliable harvests of useful sticks.
Probably people have been copsing Philadelphus bushes in Bowker Valley for thousands of years. The reference books report that its wood has made arrows, bows, netting shuttles and combs, and recently, knitting needles. Again accidentally, I have re-entered the valley’s ancient, sustainable economy. What names have people given the shrub? What relationships with it have they acknowledged?
My name for it, Winding-dough, refers to a family ritual. At New Years, Sherryll and I love to host a winter picnic with a campfire in a park by the sea. One of our traditions is cooking bannock on a stick. Bannock is camping bread, very good eaten hot, with butter and jam. It cooks best when you roll out the dough long and thin like a garter snake, and wind it like a snake around the end of the stick. Preparing for the winter picnic includes cutting the cooking sticks, long, straight and strong, from the Winding-dough bush.
The relationship is cyclical. The copse grows new stems every year. They serve at New Years as winding sticks for bannock, then in the spring as climbing sticks for peas and beans. David Begay comments that Navajo and North American native economies based themselves in cyclical processes, self-renewing. The industrial world, he points out, operates largely on linear processes. Find a resource; use it up; throw out the waste; move on. Future survival and prosperity dictates that we must learn again to relate to our Bowker Valley home in self-renewing cycles.
As a young man, I collected nouns, names of plants, animals, rocks. Loving nature, I desired to encounter and precisely label every aspect. Now I would collect relationships. Loving nature, I would live into its economy. Perhaps, over years of interaction with plants, animals and rocks, some of them might take on new names in my heart. The names would not be nouns to make them into things. The names would be verb constructions to acknowledge partnership in valued relationships, like winding dough for bannock at the winter picnic.
I wondered, as a young man, how to become native to Bowker Valley. As with most people here, my grandparents immigrated from another continent. I wondered how to become “from here”, not exotic. My present theory is that we become indigenous by participating actively and respectfully in the valley’s ecosystems, it’s natural economy. Take and give back. Gather. Prune. Nurture. Protect.
Philadelphus lewisii - Wikipedia photo by Werewombat
NOTES:
The Interview with David Begay was part of the Journey of the Universe: Educational Series of videos by Mary Evelyn Tucker. journeyoftheuniverse.org
Wild Bees
What a relief yesterday to see bees at work in our garden. Mid-March, and the peach blossoms are waiting for pollination. No bees now – no peaches in July.
They don’t really look like bees to me, these early-season pollinators. Neither honeybees nor bumblebees, at first glance they look more like houseflies, shiny black. But they do their job. The little tree, plastered against a southwest wall for maximum heat, huddled beneath eaves for shelter from rain, reliably gives us fifty or sixty tasty peaches.
Last year, honeybees did not appear in our Bowker Valley garden until August. That late in the season, most pollination for vegetables and fruits was already accomplished. Wild bees did it, bless them, not just these black ones, various kinds, some tiny, some huge.
Wild bees abound in this garden because we provide them habitat. The old house offers hundreds of cracks and crannies where a small bee might nest. In our perennial beds, bumblebees may dig their burrows into leaf mulch and undisturbed soil. Areas of local native vegetation give wild bees their natural habitat.
Garry Oak ecosystem is our distinctive habitat in Bowker Valley. It teams with wild bees. Local expert, Gord Hutchings of Hutchings Bee Service, estimates that sixty bee species live in Garry Oak ecosystem. Only one other locale in British Columbia supports such diversity. Local native habitat is the key to diversity of bees and other pollinators.
Garry Oak ecosystem provides wild bees with the kinds of flowering plants they have evolved with. Even in mid-March, so early in the growing season, Red-flowering currant blooms bright and profuse; Tall Oregon Grape bears its yellow flower clusters; Indian-plum blooms white. While most cultivated shrubs and trees are barely waking up, food for bees already flows abundant in local native habitat.
Areas of Garry Oak ecosystem also provide nesting sites. Most of our local wild bees nest in the ground, and most are solitary. Ground that is not cultivated or compacted, that is littered with leaves, branches and rocks gives wild bees places to burrow.
As we learn to maintain pockets of native habitat in our yards, blocks and neighbourhoods, pollination in our Bowker Valley gardens becomes more reliable. We harvest fruits and vegetables in abundance, even in those years when we don’t see a honeybee until August.
Being Blackberry
Last article until February: Gerald is dealing with a severe attack of full-time employment, and hopes to return to the valley early in 2012.
I admit to a troubled relationship with Rubus armeniacus, to confusion and conflict with Himalayan Blackberry.
Love! It’s the best berry, the sweetest, most flavourful quintessential taste of late summer in Bowker Valley. Less-than-fully-lived would be August and September without afternoons blackberrying. Moving with care among its thorns, Sherryll and I picked fifty pounds this year for freezing. Apple-blackberry pie was my breakfast this morning.
Hate! We Bowker Creek volunteers battle against Himalayan Blackberry all year. This afternoon we will uproot and pile canes for the Oak Bay Parks crew to remove. Most pernicious of foreign invaders! Bully! Cane of one season arches thirty feet or more to smother any native shrub or meadow. From past seasons, dense thicket of dead cane defies any oak seedling to take root. Soil erodes along the creek as blackberry replaces deep-rooted natives that have stabilized the banks. In North America, Australia and New Zealand, Himalayan Blackberry ranks prominently on lists of noxious weeds.
Photo by Natalie Bandringa
Love it or hate it though, who can help but admire its brilliant strategies for conquest. Not only may its cane arch ten metres, but also the tip of that cane will take root where it touches down. Himalayan Blackberry gallops over parkland and farmer’s field. When I uproot it, any small root fragment in the soil will sprout again. But its key strategy is to taste wonderful. Every berry is a bundle of seeds. One square metre of blackberry thicket can produce 10,000 seeds. Birds and bears gobble berries, then deposit seed packets far and wide.
The berry offers not only flavour, but also food value. In fairness to Rubus armeniacus
let us recognize a few of the nutrients it delivers to birds, bears and humans. A great source of Vitamins C and K and the mineral, Manganese, blackberries are rich also in dietary fiber. And they rank high on the list for antioxidants, substances that fight carcinogens, boost immunity and prolong youth. What a food!
The person to thank or to blame for Rubus armeniacus in North America is Luther
Burbank, our most famous nurseryman. Burbank ordered an envelope of seeds from a seed exchange in India. After selective breeding he marketed his variety in 1885 as Himalayan Giant. The plant itself staged its invasion from there. By 1945 it established wild populations along the Pacific coast. Now in Bowker Valley, it quickly overruns unguarded hedgerow, streambank and vacant lot.
Himalayan Blackberry is not a Himalayan plant. Botanists have disagreed about its origins and given it various Latin names. England and Germany have sometimes received credit or discredit as its homeland. Plants of Coastal British Columbia lists it as Rubus discolor. Other books use Rubus procerus. Botanists now believe that it comes from the Caucasus mountains of the Middle East, between the Caspian and Black seas, specifically from the country, Armenia. Hence the name armeniacus.
Wikipedia photo
Wonderful gift to Bowker Valley but environmental disaster, admirable success but ruthless bully, love it, hate it, we may see, reflected, in Himalayan Blackberry our own history here. My troubled relationship with Rubus armeniacus reflects confusion and conflict with my own role in the valley. Yet we are not exactly the same. Evolving in me are attributes unknown to the blackberry plant – conscience, sense of justice, free will.
Photo by Natalie Bandringa
The blackberry can choose no other behaviour than takeover. We can choose. For Rubus armeniacus and for ourselves we can elect to participate in diverse ecosystem here. Yes I may love Himalayan Blackberry and also go at it with shovel and loppers. Yes we may submit ourselves to equity with other species in the valley – become its gardeners and bloom in the garden.
Notes:
Here are some sources that gave me useful information about blackberry:
At Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus_armeniacus
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberry
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Caucasus_region_1994.jpg#file
The blackberry page in A Comprehensive Guide to Hiking Cedar Butte (Washington): http://www.scn.org/cedar_butte/cb-himal.html
The blackberry page of the Invasive Plant Council of BC: http://www.invasiveplantcouncilbc.ca/invasive-plants/himalayan-blackberry
A Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board draft document at: http://www.nwcb.wa.gov/weed_info/written_findings/CLASS%20C%20PDFs/Draft%20Written%20Findings%20for%20Rubus%20armeniacus.pdf
Indian Celery
Seeds and stalks of Lomatium nudicaule burn in the backyard. The dawn glows pale pink and blue beyond the big oak, and frost whitens grass and roof. Burning Indian Celery, my intention is not to invite Coho Salmon into the valley. The time of year would be right though. During thousands of October dry spells, people have glimpsed Coho jumping in the bay, awaiting the big rain that will swell the creek so they can enter. But Bowker Creek is a storm sewer these days, not yet ready for salmon. My intention is to assure the Coho that they are not forgotten in this valley.
People who lived here before the city, believed that salmon people, in their homeland many days paddling south and west of here, ate the smoke from this plant. Coho Salmon village at mealtime grew fragrant with celery aroma as seeds burned on cooking fires in all the houses.
The aroma was well known also to people who lived in this valley. It arose from their eating bowls at suppertime. The seeds flavoured their soups and stews. So did the new leaves in spring. And eaten as salad, young leaves of Indian Celery added Vitamin C to the springtime diet. Good food, I recommend it – and a very local food. On the BC coast it grows only in our Gulf Islands zone. Open, sunny, dry slopes where Indian Celery thrives are rare on the raincoast.
Not just a food, Indian Celery is medicine. People chew the seeds to ease symptoms of cough and cold. It gained the name “Indian Consumption Plant” during the 1800s as a source of relief from tuberculosis. People chew the seeds also at the start of meetings, for clear speech. Indian Celery possesses anti-infectant properties. From the flowers, bees gather its gummy resin for disease protection in their colonies.
A word of caution: Indian Celery has some very nasty cousins in the valley. Before gathering it, identify accurately. To the carrot family belong many wonderful food flavours: anise, caraway, dill, fennel, parsley. A few family members, however, are deadly. In Bowker Valley gardens, for example, a common weed is the Poison-hemlock that ended the life of the philosopher Socrates. Make careful use of a field guide such as Plants of Coastal British Columbia. Its editors have grouped all local members of the carrot family, so the reader can distinguish among them.
Once seen, Indian Celery is easily forgotten, not showy. After producing its modest display of yellow flowers in the spring, it stands the rest of the year, a straggly dry stalk in the long grass. This humble carrot cousin however, held a central cultural role in the valley for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. People depended on salmon as the greatest food wealth of the coast. When the net or trap captured the first migrating salmon each year, the community greeted it with ceremony. The first salmon arrived as an honoured guest. People welcomed it with its favourite food, smoke from the Indian Celery.
The smoke rises now from a pottery dish on the picnic table. To the Coho Salmon I would say: Indian Celery still grows in the valley. A community prepares the creek for your visit. Some day we will invite you and await and greet you with this smoke.
Notes:
Plants of Coastal British Columbia, including Washington, Oregon and Alaska (Jim Pojar and Andy Mackinnon editors, Lone Pine Publishing, 1994) assembles the carrot family on pages 211-222 with helpful illustrations.
People around the Salish Sea included Lomatium nudicaule in their origin stories and in their First Salmon ceremonies. Two enlightening accounts are found in:
The Earth’s Blanket, Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living, Nancy J. Turner, Douglas & McIntyre, 2005, pages 48-50,
and in:
“The Faith of a Coast Salish Indian”, Anthropology in British Columbia Memoir No. 3, Diamond Jenness, British Columbia Provincial Museum, 1955, pages 18-21.
Hedgerow Habitat
“Say: Nature in its essence is the embodiment of My Name, the Maker, the Creator. Its manifestations are diversified by varying causes, and in this diversity there are signs for men of discernment.”
Bahá’u’lláh
Old hedgerow, diverse and wild, ranks as my preferred church, temple or synagogue. Finding it in urban Bowker Valley, preserving, planting and generally promoting it could become a serious hobby. Heaven knows, I log plenty of hours in more standard places of worship with walls and roof, but for access to wonder and transformation, hedgerow habitat tops my list.
Overt worship there, I cannot recommend, or any worship in the usual sense of the word. Only children and the most senior seniors can get away with standing, rapt, staring at the bushes. The rest of us need a pretext. A walk with Sherryll provides my most common pretext, and hers. Photography is good. Best, though is participating in hedgerow process by picking and eating berries, planting, pruning – joining its community.
By hedgerow habitat I mean strips, approximately two to six metres wide, of bushes and small trees, given time to evolve into complex systems. It may spring up on its own, such as along untended edge of parking lot, or we may purposely plant it, such as beside Bowker Creek. It may develop without human interference, or with attention from a referee with loppers.
The linear strip shape of hedgerow makes it a corridor along which creatures may travel for water, food and new homes. It also makes a wonderful route for a walk. Non-linear patches of brush, however, can be equally enchanting. A thicket ten or twenty feet across, surrounding a stump, broadcasts birdsong. Our friend Carolyn calls these little thickets “twitter bush”. Recently I notice twitter bush habitat developing in rain gardens beside city streets and buildings. Between hedgerow and twitter bush, the common factor is complex community.
Over years and decades hedgerow allows networks to form among plants, birds, insects, reptiles, mollusks, fungi, bacteria, mammals and countless creatures I am too ignorant to name. Life immense in variety and number rushes forward at full tilt in elegant balance. Hedgerow vibrates. That’s what draws the children, elders and some of us in between. Spirit emanates, powerful yet symphonic in interplay and interweave. We may experience hedgerow vibes consciously or unconsciously, faintly or with hair standing on end, but they influence us.
“…the world of being… is endowed with a power whose reality men of learning fail to grasp. Indeed a man of insight can perceive naught therein save effulgent splendour of Our Name, the Creator.”
Bahá’u’lláh
Visit hedgerow and encounter wonder. Birdsnest, anthill, garter snake flicking out of sight, bumblebee clambering inside a blossom – action, beauty, drama, all here all the time. Children in particular find wonder, which may be vital to our future on the planet. The childhood experience affects us as adults. When I meet an adult who actively cares for and loves our living earth, I usually find that she or he as a child played and idled amid everyday, small-scale wonders of nature such as hedgerow provides, and has never forgotten.
Hedgerow and twitter bush also help us adults remember. Amid coarse energies of city life, ugliness that becomes normal, survival in the kingdom of fear and greed, an adult may hear a tree frog, scent cottonwood or notice a flicker foraging on white berries, and snap out of the trance. Diverse, complex, evolved community of hedgerow in the midst of city provides access to wonder.
Wonder opens us to transformation. Our severe global human pickle challenges us to learn ecological living. We enter an “ecozoic era” (as Thomas Berry calls it) in which the pronoun “we” becomes more important than the pronoun “I”. The transition is not easy. We make the effort willingly, however, when we already love an ecological system. When wonder in twitter bush, marsh or wild meadow has revealed ecological understanding within us, we already long for humankind to step forward into participation in the wonderful community of earth life.
“…co-operation, mutual aid and reciprocity are essential characteristics in the unified body of the world of being…”
‘Abdu’l-Bahá
The term “unity in diversity” points out the direction in which transformation calls us. “Unity in diversity” is also the model of society that we absorb while staring at mature hedgerow. Need for unity of humankind is already evident to most of us. We can hardly help but grasp that humankind must unite for survival and wellbeing, must recognize one human family in one living earth. The need for diversity has been less obvious to us. Human habit has been to unify by dominance and conquest. We have valued industrial conformity. Now we are called to maintain glorious diversity while giving ourselves voluntarily into the greater being of humankind within the greater being of earth. We are called each to value individuality and individual responsibility, unique and inviolable, while serving the “we” rather than the “I”. For us, this is a new way of walking. Hedgerow teaches us. Individual wonders of song and blossom there arise within and contribute to the whole glory of hedgerow community.
As we allow strips and patches of brush into all parts of the city, as we allow them to evolve complex, diverse community, we bring ourselves into daily contact with an ecological energy; we gift our children with moments of wonder; we assist ourselves toward transformation.
“…co-operation and reciprocity are essential properties which are inherent in the unified system of the world of existence, and without which the entire creation would be reduced to nothingness.”
‘Abdu’l-Bahá
Notes
Quotations are all from Nature: an Emanation of God’s Will, Bahá’i Publishing Trust, 2005.
Vultures in the Valley
Photo from Wikipedia
Among bird species, the Turkey Vulture, Cathartes aura, defines early autumn in Bowker Valley. Migrating south to winter range, they encounter here the Strait of Juan de Fuca. To cross it, the Turkey Vulture has no intention of laboriously flapping for 40 kilometres. Its migration style is to soar and glide from one thermal updraft to the next.
As they have moved down the east coast of the Island on warm September days, soar-and-glide has worked well for them, but here they find the cold Pacific that generates no thermal elevators. So they wait. The Island’s south shore accumulates hundreds of Turkey Vultures, looking for the big updraft that will lift them high enough for the long glide over the strait.
In Bowker Valley we see thirty or forty spiraling together. This circling flock, known as a “kettle” of vultures, makes an arresting spectacle. It stopped our soccer game. My daughter’s team, nine and ten-year-olds, were playing a Saturday morning match on the Oak Bay High fields. The “Flames” were a fiery, energetic team, but I noticed a midfielder not running. She was standing in the midst of the fray looking up in wonder. Soon all of us, players and parents, were gazing at the vultures kettling above the field.
Photo from Wikipedia
These are impressive creatures. With wingspan of almost two metres, the Turkey Vulture closely approaches the Bald Eagle as our greatest soaring bird. In fact, distinguishing vulture from eagle in high silhouette can be challenging. The identifying feature usually is the dihedral. A term best known to aeronautical engineers such as my brother Michael, dihedral refers to the up-tilted wing posture of the vulture. Birds of Canada describes the Turkey Vulture as soaring “…effortlessly for long periods with wings held definitely above horizontal in a broad V.” A Bald Eagle holds its wings out flat.
Michael explained to me that dihedral affects stability and maneuverability. The eagle, with its flat wing posture (no dihedral), soars stable and majestic in wide, sweeping curves. The vulture with its V (positive dihedral), teeters and tilts, sensitive to every air current. The tippy-looking flight provides another key to distinguishing vulture from eagle.
Migrating from the Island, Turkey Vultures are leaving the far northern fringe of their summer range. They will winter along the California coast, in Mexico or even farther south. The most numerous and widespread vulture of the Americas, their range extends from here to the southern tip of South America. More than four million Turkey Vultures range over twenty-eight million square kilometers of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean.
Photo from Wikipedia
They avoid heavily forested areas, favouring relatively open country, with woods nearby for nesting. Southeastern Vancouver Island, our dry, open hilltops and south slopes, provides their kind of habitat.
Turkey Vultures do good work here. Their Latin name, Cathartes, means “purifier”, which is the best way to think about scavenger birds. When animals die in the countryside, Turkey Vultures soon find them. They hunt by smell, cruising at low altitude for recently deceased mammals (large or small), birds, or fish washed up on shore. From 15 kilometres or more the vulture can detect a scent and follow it to an animal that is beginning to decompose.
Over the winter, we will need to depend on other purifiers, because in early October the vultures are departing. They kettle and glide over Bowker Valley, seeking the big updraft. I follow them on bicycle, hoping to witness the great event. But they move gradually westward, far beyond the valley, and I give up the chase.
Probably they will continue west along the shore to the Sooke Hills to join hundreds more of their kind. Tomorrow or next week a rocky south slope will send up the thermal current that lifts the Turkey Vultures high enough, and they will glide south out of sight.
Photo from Wikipedia
Notes:
Wikipedia was a very helpful source. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_Vulture
For local information, the best source was David Stirling’s chapter, “Birding in the Victoria Region” in A Naturalist’s Guide to the Victoria Region, Victoria Natural History Society.
A good field guide is Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds, Houghton Miflin.
A basic resource book is W. Earl Godfrey’s The Birds of Canada, National Museums of Canada Bulletin No. 203.
As I read and listen to this article, I think my mom would have liked the writing. The thought makes me very happy. So this one is for you, Mom.
Photo from Wikipedia
Walking the Divide 2
Photo by George Sranko
“We are indeed closing down the major life systems of the planet.”
Thomas Berry (all quotations in this article)
Today’s walk is a loop that starts and ends at the intersection of Shelbourne Street and Cedar Hill Cross Road. On this second of four hikes around the watershed divide, George and I will walk the upstream, northern boundary. We are starting, not on the divide, but on the valley floor. This is the heart of Bowker Valley, our deep-soil bottomland, also known as the Shelbourne corridor. The creek flows here dead-straight for six blocks beneath Shelbourne in pipe. The soil lies compacted beneath street and parking lot. We are starting at the noisy, paved, car-exhaust-smelling heart of the valley amid the outcomes of our twentieth century dream.
Quickly then, lets climb the valley’s east slope, up Mt. Tolmie. The route is east on Cedar Hill X, right on Iona and left up Glastonbury. Steep road leads into Mt. Tolmie Park. From here, any uphill trail will take us to the summit, to the watershed divide.
Autumn is on Mt. Tolmie, the first real fall day. Last night heavy rain fell. This morning, sky over the valley moves fast – big shapes of grey, white and blue, always changing. Wind gusts up the western slope. Turkey vultures ride, tilt and teeter on the up-blast. Vulture migration in Bowker Valley means autumn.
For autumn beauty of Garry Oak meadow, this is the place. Mt. Tolmie Park is our most glorious expanse of that rare and endangered ecosystem. GORP is active here, the Garry Oak Restoration Project. It’s a crew of volunteers with Saanich Municipality who root out foreign invaders such as English ivy that can rapidly take over. In the parking lot below the summit, a trail map shows the sections of the park where the GORP crew is presently focusing its efforts.
Volunteers working thousands of hours on the hilltop to restore a beleaguered life community – it contrasts so strongly with the desecration below us in the Shelbourne corridor. When I think about today’s hike along the Bowker Creek watershed divide, I think of the divide we are all walking, between centuries and between dreams.
“These are the two radical positions – the industrial and the ecological – that confront each other, with survival at stake: survival of the human at an acceptable level of fulfillment on a planet capable of providing the psychic as well as the physical nourishment that is needed.”
From the summit we look out on the entire northern end of the valley, and on Mt. Douglas beyond the valley, dominating it. My hat blows off. I chase it and pull it down tight over my ears. It’s time to leave the windy, chilly summit.
George knows the trails. He leads down stone steps beside the reservoir. A plum tree overhangs the trail, with plums ripe for the shaking. Tasty. This path down the north slope of Mt. Tolmie in early autumn is one of the glories of Bowker Valley. Rosehips are at their reddest and snowberries at their whitest against deep-brown tassels of ocean-spray. Oak leaves, light brown, new-fallen, litter the path.
Trail brings us to Cedar Hill X Road again, where we turn right. As we walk today, the valley will slope down to our left, and we will walk just inside the watershed boundary for most of the route. At Henderson Road we turn left onto the University of Victoria campus along University Drive. We cross Ring Road onto footpath leading through the Ring, the core of campus. It’s quiet. Not much activity in the Ring on Sunday morning.
Having recently written about the UVic Ring as headwaters of Bowker Creek, I enjoy telling George about the university’s efforts to get rainwater into the soil. I’m happy to see water in the rain garden behind the Mearns Centre. Last night’s rain has made a pond that beautifully reflects the geometry of the building’s windows.
What a difference between this pond, gently filtering water into gravel, to seep, pure, into the creek, and today’s starting point where toxic water rages in culvert. The old dream of Western Civilization has brought us far and has wrought many wonders, but it has long passed its best-before date. In the twentieth century it twisted into nightmare greed and destruction against the living planet, including our own small watershed. The old dream is dying. Can we replace it with a more wholesome vision? Early in the twenty-first century we may glimpse our new dream only dimly and in fragment images. This rain garden pond is one of the images.
“In relation to the earth, we have been autistic for centuries. Only now have we begun to listen with some attention and a willingness to respond to the earth’s demands that we cease our industrial assault, that we abandon our inner rage against the conditions of our earthly existence that we renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe.”
Again on Ring Road we turn left, past McKinnon gym, and right on Gabriola Road, along a sports field. Here is the activity on campus this morning. A hockey game with U of A blazes on the all-weather field. We turn left on McKenzie Avenue, and see rugby and soccer practices.
Activity is also in the allotment gardens beside McKenzie. A gardener is dismantling her plot. She tells us that the entire garden is moving just along McKenzie, and expanding. The new plots will reduce the long waiting list. Today the garden brims with autumn abundance and with colour of nasturtium, mum, sunflower and ripe tomato.
From McKenzie we turn right on Fleet Street, left on Teakwood and right on Larchwood. This is residential neighbourhood on flat land. The houses date from the 1960s and 70s. Fifty years ago this was farmland when houses, expanding north up the valley fully over-ran the watershed. Front yards are well-tended, liberally-watered lawns, flower beds and ornamental shrubs. This neighbourhood stands with both feet firmly planted in twentieth century suburban dream.
We venture left on Applewood. From the map I guess that its cul-de-sac leads to a footpath across greenspace. George finds the footpath, but it ends in chain-link fence. We peer through the fence into pasture. A miniature time capsule of farmland persists here, completely surrounded by backyard fences. No cows graze, but deer rest in the grass.
We backtrack on Applewood to Larchwood, proceed north to Blair, and turn left. Here is the extreme northern limit of the valley. One house on Blair has a different front yard. As attractively landscaped and as well-tended as its neighbours, this front yard is all edible, all fruit trees and herbs, and built for minimal watering. So the neighbourhood is dabbling a toe at least into a new dream.
Blair ends at Shelbourne and we turn left. We have returned to the corridor, big pavement country. At Tim Horton’s, we turn right and dodge traffic across the Canadian Tire parking lot to Cedar Hill Road.
“In this disintegrating phase of our industrial society, we now see ourselves as not the splendor of creation, but as the most pernicious mode of earthly being. We are the termination, not the fulfillment of the earth process…. We are the violation of earth’s most sacred aspects.”
Not to be confused with Cedar Hill X Road, which crosses the valley, Cedar Hill Road runs lengthwise, north-south. The oldest route in the upper valley, it began as trail in the mid-1800s between Fort Victoria and Cedar Hill, aka Mt. Douglas.
Right on Arrow Road, and we are climbing up the west slope of the valley. Left on Oakwinds, and we are starting down the valley’s west side. We cross McKenzie and turn right for a few paces. A trail leads up to Shorncliffe Road. Terrain now is hilly and rocky, with many oaks, but also many dead-ends and loops. There is no route south inside the watershed boundary, so we turn right on Shorncliffe, out of the watershed.
Walking amid mature trees, stopping to photograph deer of remarkable size, it is easier here to ponder new visions for a civilization that walks more lightly on the land. Thomas Berry suggests that our task is to join-in with a dream already in progress, to give ourselves back into the dream that the earth dreams. Let’s quit viewing ourselves, he says, as the centre of everything. Let’s accept our identity as one wonderful element in the amazing life community of this planet. We are not separate from earth; we are earth, and we are the means by which earth is becoming conscious of herself. Thomas Berry invites us to re-join Earth’s dream, to allow her to awaken within us and through us, so that our living planet may continue to evolve as a whole and healthy community of which we are a vital member.
Shorncliffe leads us down to Cedar Hill X, where we turn left. At Merriman, a left takes us up to another section of Shorncliffe, and back into the Bowker Creek watershed. The intersection at Synod Road provides our last vista of the northern end of the valley. We turn right, down to Cedar Hill Cross Road, where one more left turn, down to Shelbourne completes our loop.
“…the human as that being in whom this grand diversity of the universe celebrates itself in conscious self-awareness.”
Notes:
The quotations in this article all come from Chapter 15 of Thomas Berry’s book, The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club Books, 1988.
The Garry Oak Restoration Project (GORP) brochure is online at: http://www.saanich.ca/living/natural/pdf/gorpbrochure.pdf
Photo by George Sranko
