Vancouver the lovely: a personal post.

I started to look at some of the pictures I have taken in and around Vancouver over the last two years, since I met and started to visit Vince. I found some pictures I have not posted before, and I also find myself crying...Vincent, Skyping me from the airport before he took off on Saturday morning for Montreal, where he is now visiting his mother, sister and nephew, had a catch in his voice. He was trying not to look at the mountains.

Vancouver is a city ethereally and preternaturally beautiful. Her mountains, snow-topped and fir-ridged, her glassy inlets and bird-filled bays, her turquoise mountain torrents and moss- clean air, is perhaps the most beautiful city I have seen. Always a dangerous thing to say, as it is so connected to emotion. And this from a Capetonian. And a lover of Istanbul and her dreaming spires, with apologies to Waugh...And so many cities that I have not seen, and do not know...

There is a lot of Cape Town in Vancouver: the proximity of mountains to water, the pristine wild within the urban wrap. The ease of access to natural beauty. The omnipresent green and grey of a Cape winter. Then there is an Interlaken-ness too: Swiss Alp majesty, the brilliance of the sky reflected in the fjords, the rushing mountain water, the flowers at altitude. And her American roots: Northwest wildness, a bear-mountained, salmon-berried wilderness: Lynn Canyon; Grouse Mountain, where he asked and I said yes; Stanley Park; all within a Europe within North America, where strangers greet you and bus drivers, driving buses that arrive and depart on the minute, ask you how you are.

So, some more pictures. To pay tribute to her beauty, to thank her for the beauty she brought me, and to my husband, who loved me enough to leave, in addition to his country, a city that spoke to him daily in pictures and under his feet as he ran miles and miles along the seawall.

I am humbled by his love, and am sensible of the sense of loss that he must feel. Vincent, you are the stuff of dreams. And a real man. And I know what that means.

Mount Baker, in Washington, a couple of hours away.

Van Dusen Gardens, in the middle of the city.




Lynn Canyon.

Grouse Mountain flowers.

False Creek.

Granville Island's duck prosciutto: to live for. Smoky, fatty, sliced like tissue paper. Unforgettable.

Silvia Hotel.

Vince's neighbourhood, the West End, on English Bay.



The blackberries on the seawall. Bliss for a born forager.

The seawall.


The Syringe, below.

The beach, 40 seconds from his flat. Sundowner martinis.


City of glass and lights, from his balcony.

Sidewalk flowers: snow-in-summer.

Stanley Park's flower borders near the aquarium.




..and its wilder side.







Talking to chickadees.

Migrating owls

If saw my first white breasted nut hatch this week, Vincent saw his first saw-whet owl. We think. Except the face has not the white markings of the saw-whet pictures we've seen. Could it be a pygmy owl? The person he spoke to on the phone at OWL said it could be either, migrating. I did not know owls migrated!

Take a trip to Vancouver to see his sweetie.

Fortuities, I mean chickadees

Rarely, I dream about birds. They are usually very small, pretty birds, of a species my dream invents, who sit on my hands or fill my dream-composite garden.

Until visiting Vancouver no little bird (apart from my large pet bantam when I was small!) had ever perched on my real, not dream-hand, though a friend had told me about chickadees fluttering about him somewhere near Toronto (is it only Canadian chickadees that are so friendly?).

In Stanley Park, standing under a canopy of quiet redwoods, or near a lake on a path overgrown by salmon berries and listening with ears pricked for the high-pitched staccato twittering of these little birds, with a hand held out in hope, is one of the nicest things I have ever done. I know one should not feed wild birds but...I am weak. How they see one, or notice one standing there, in a random spot, stopped just because their calls have been heard high above, I don't know.

Near the lake, above and below.

In the forest. This was wholegrain bread crumbled so the grains remained. Sensibly, they did not like it. So then I bought them the wild seed in the first pictures.

"I flew all the way down here for this? I don't eat bread, you silly human!"

Waiting for chickadees

...who are usually more reliable than Godot.

   

This was a little while ago in Vancouver's lovely Stanley Park. I dragged the patient Vincent to the park almost daily to see if the chickadees would sit on my hands, and it was like magic when they did, fluttering down like Kundera's fortuities from the apparently empty, soaring green trees above.

Macro

Vincent has started experimenting with super macro photography after stumbling upon a superb picture of a dragonfly covered in dew drops (story and link here). To read about his first adventure click here and to go straight to the pictures, click on this gallery. The pictures are delightful, dropping you into a world whose grace and complexity are usually lost to our eyes.

Fields of Flowers, Mt Baker

Still catching up on the trip I took to Vancouver with a memorable detour to Washington.

To the right is...Table Mountain. Washington! Quite different from the one I know. But also rich with plants and fresh water. We started our day up high and then worked our way lower.

Lots of late lupins, maybe L. lepidus, scattered about, growing in low mounds over the rock, at this higher elevation.

I nearly missed this, right near the path in the shadow of a boulder, and squawked when I saw it. At first glance it resembled the rare Mimetes, from the Cape Mountains [the photo in the link is from Farm 215, a very interesting guest house near Stanford in the Western Cape, a couple of hours SE of Cape Town, where conservation and eco-friendly design are merged in a very happy and unusually sophisticated way].

It is Indian paintbrush, Castilleja [probably] miniata.

Apparently the flowers themselves are sweet and edible (luckily for Vince I didn't know that at the time), but the leaves and green parts are very poisonous due to a high selenium content.

Pink mountain heather, also hugging the rocks higher up: Phyllodoce empetriformis.

Above: Funny. This is what makes me so happy to be where plants belong. You see where they come from, and what their origins say about how they grow and what they need. Spiraea! So used and abused in "landscapes". The word makes me think of red mulch. I do like to use it as a tough hedge, sometimes, and I never knew that there was one native to these mountains.

Spiraea splendens var. splendens. Of some 70 species worldwide it is one of only 10 native to North America, and of a handful native to the Pacific Northwest. Here it is in the middle of its range, which stretches from British Columbia south to the Sierra Nevada and east through Montana, Idaho and Oregon.*

Above: fireweed - Chamerion angustifolium. Tall, stunning flower, with many still in bud, often right beside the road, as we drove down the hairpin bends to Glacier, later. Apparently quite easy to grow from seed. *

We made our way, mit picnic, down to a snowfed lake in an area called Heather Meadows. We followed what was barely a path, eschewing an obvious one on the other side of the water. It was hard not to walk on flowers. In some places the path disappeared into a stream, or became a stream's course.

Below, this was the first and almost the last flower I saw, both higher up, growing in the scree, and down here, wetter but still rocky. It was not in the books I have, but the Plant Forum at the University of British Columbia (UBC) was very helpful. Luetkia pectinata - Partridge Foot.

It is only about 6" tall...



Ranunculus occidentalis (I think) - or western buttercup. Very buttercup-y.

An orchid, I thought. But no. Pedicularis groenlandica. Common name? Lousewort. Lousewort...? -well. This one is called Little Elephant's Head, which is a little better (larger?), but not much. It is hallucinogenic! And partially parasitic, living on the roots of other plants. Likes to have wet feet, too.

A daisy? Erigeron, probably peregrinus. Lovely name.

These were prolific along the flat parts of the water meadow, along with their yellow cousins. Still, it took a helluva lot of Googling, as I was completely without frame of reference for a search. I could figure out that they were Mimulus, but which?

Mimulus lewisii, named for Lewis of Lewis and Clark. Another good name; one to situate the landscape within myth again.

And here the cousin. So thick underfoot that squashing was inevitable. Mimulus = monkeyflower. Bad name. This one is Mimulus tilingii. Creeping monkeyflower. Native to California. Must have wet feet. And in some places it really was in the small streams.

And the moss. Identifying moss is beyond my present scope of attention. It was just very lovely. Thick and fresh and deeply, brightly green.

We made our way around the little lake and beside the well-worn path there was one broad patch of phlox, growing, apparently, out of the rock.

Phlox hendersonii.

These, growing beside a small stream tumbling down a steep, grassy slope, looked like more ranunculus to me, and I searched and searched. Again, the UBC's Plant Forum came through with an answer: Parnassia, they said, and that steered me toward the species, fimbriata. Fringed grass of Parnassus. Though it hardly resembles grass.

It belongs to the Saxifrage family, and is considered threatened. I can't find why it is named after Parnassus, which is a Greek Mountain...?

Below, this little blue one stumped me too. And there was only the one. Usually, you see one flower, and then you see some more of the same (also a nice thing to apply to gardens, moving from drift to drift). UBC helped again. It is carniverous! Pinguicula vulgaris. Indeed. Or common Butterwort. The leaves are sticky and trap insects, which are then absorbed...yum yum.

The little path down on the right is the one on which we returned, after circling the blue.

Below: Valeriana sitchensis,* filling a whole bank between that little path and the water.

False hellebore - Veratrum viride - standing about 4 feet tall. Very poisonous to stock and considered a pest by farmers. There were no farmers here.

Back higher up, grasses grew in swathes amongst the low blueberries.

And the best for last. Very low growing blueberries, possibly bog blueberries? No more than a foot high and spreading in broad sweeps of red, their cloudy blue fruit held singly rather than in clusters, and no less sweet for it.

I could have stayed a lot longer. It was a brief taste (literally) of one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.

* Encyclopedia of Northwest Native Plants for Gardens and Landscapes, Kathleen A. Robson, Alice Richter and Marianne Filbert, Timber Press, 2008.

Thank you, Vincent...x