Spring resurgence

John and I have been really good about staying in our neighbourhood during the pandemic, but every once in awhile, we just have to break out. On Wednesday, a month and a half after our last such visit, we returned to Richmond's Iona Beach regional park for another walk on the north arm jetty. Lots has changed; spring has transformed the landscape, and the easing of pandemic restrictions has brought some life back to the adjacent river and the airport. All photos by John Denniston.

The trees have leafed out and the yellow broom has turned some formerly bare  areas into idyllic pathways.

Getting into the sparser, sandy area, I was surprised to sniff the scent of wild roses and see a patch of pink. I don't know what kind of roses these are or why they would have appeared here, but they look like low-growing, large-flowered variations of the Alberta wild roses I grew up with. 

Nearby, poking up amid the sand grasses, are these blue and purple flowers. A Google search shows they are either wild sweet peas or vetches. 

Here's a bank of these same flowers, with the Fraser River and a log boom in the background.

These are probably the rankest weeds, but they were red and looked pretty against this log. Let's call them spring flowers.

Iona Beach was a silent and stripped-down place when John and I walked its north arm jetty at the end of March. All was Covid-era quiet – no action on the river on the one side or at the airport on the other. The scenery was beautiful, but the beauty was in its austerity – in the blue-grey horizontal lines of ocean, sky, sand and water, relieved by the vertical pops of skeletal trees and log-boom pilings poking out of the sand.

A month and a half later, it’s all coming back to life. When we walked there Wednesday, planes rumbled to and from the airport, and on the river, tugboats nudged the log-booms, with pole-wielding crewmen doing their dangerous dances on the logs. On the jetty itself, spring had exploded. Broom turned the river banks electric yellow and leafed-out trees transformed once-bare paths into idyllic byways. On the bleak sand wastes, the usual coarse grasses were interrupted by sudden surprises –a patch of pink that turned out to be heavily scented wild roses, and a bank of blue-purple flowers  foregrounding the river scenery.

It’s a coincidence that the shutdowns of economic and social life due to the coronavirus are lifting just as spring resurrects the natural world. But appropriate, somehow. Even broom, wild roses and wild sweet peas can only stay dormant for so long.

The north arm of the Fraser River, virtually deserted during our last visit to the park, is showing signs of life again. Tugboats were busy moving log-booms around.  

Spring is greening up the rough grasses growing among the rocks of the ocean shoreline.

But even spring weather doesn't make the sand grasses luxuriant. That's why a patch of roses in the midst of  such terrain was a big surprise.

This log photo could have been taken in March, but I include it here because it shows the unchanging beauty of the area. 

And this one shows the grasses, sand and broom that made this visit so different.

As we left, the skies were darkening;  the broom's yellow blossoms shone as bright as electric lights against the gloom.

Layers of different kinds of plants under those impressive skies reminded me of a painting by Kathy Robertson, a beloved Saltspring neighbour who unfortunately is no longer with us. I think she would have enjoyed painting this scene.