My own personal treehouse

Since we bought our Dunbar house in the mid-1970s, we've added so much greenery that it almost feels like a treehouse. It's part of my dream of being in the midst of nature while still living in the city. John took this photo of me from the front steps earlier this week. The white blossoms to the right are a Korean dogwood now in glorious bloom. To the left, a star magnolia that has finished blooming for the year. Photo by John Denniston.

This is what the front of the house looked like when we first moved in. The big cedar in the middle was removed and replaced with a star magnolia. Hedges and other trees followed. Photo by John Denniston.

The same scene today, with the house nearly invisible behind the greenery.

My fantasy house would be the hollowed-out stump of a huge tree with a thatched roof, tiny leaded-glass windows, and, incongruously, a fireplace. It’s an image drawn, I suspect, from a Beatrix Potter drawing of Peter Rabbit’s mother pouring out tea from a kettle dangling in the blazing fireplace of her tree-root house while naughty Peter watches from a plumply pillowed bed in a background alcove. His three siblings, presumably not in disgrace, watch the proceedings from a cozy position in front of the fire.

At one time in Vancouver, you actually could live in a hollowed-out tree stump, as this pre-1910 photo from the Mount Pleasant area shows. It would be difficult now, building codes and mod cons being what they are, but as I look around the little cottage I have occupied for more than four decades, I see the ways that I have tried to recreate the feeling of living as simply and cozily in the midst of nature as Peter Rabbit’s family.

Okay, it's pretty rudimentary and lacks the charm of the tree-root homes Beatrix Potter created for her imaginary characters. But I've always been intrigued by the possibilities of what you could do to turn this early Vancouver dwelling into something charming.

Any sensible people would have renovated long ago, modernizing and adding the equivalent of another whole house. But I have clung to the single-pane windows, the original hardwood floors, the wood-burning fireplace, the original layout of the old-fashioned kitchen. It pleases me to know that our house, now nearly 100 years old, is made of the kind of old-growth timber that will never be seen again. I got a first-hand glimpse of it when we renovated the bathroom when we first moved in; the dark solemnity of the exposed original lumber made it feel like a pioneer cabin in the wilderness.

Aside from preserving the original feel of the house, we have upped the nature quotient by adding layer after layer of greenery. Trees not only form a green screen around the perimeter of the property, but also cuddle up to the house. Walking from room to room recently, I realized that green leaves and blossoms block almost every sign of the city from our view; we could be living in a treehouse. Only through one window, by looking way up above the laurel hedge, can we see the upper part of the neighbour’s house. The recent maturing of a mock orange tree just outside the bedroom window has closed off the view of even the backyard – we have to brush blossoms out of the way when we open or close the window. Paradise! And the Portuguese laurels we planted a few years ago to block out a big house behind us are now about 20 feet high; they grow so fast that they have almost accomplished their mission. 

The mock orange now blossoming outside our bedroom window seems to want to get into the house. Photo by John Denniston.

I realize this attitude must seem strange to many. Why not add to the value of our property by enlarging and modernizing? And to some, all those trees might seem claustrophobic or messy, not to mention pricey to maintain. We know that given the crazy property values in this city, neither our house nor our trees will last a nanosecond after we’re gone. But until that happens, our little original cottage with its wrapping of greenery is as close as I can come to living in my own hollowed-out tree with leaded glass windows and a kettle steaming over the fire for tea.

The back yard of our house when we first bought it. Photo by John Denniston.

The beginnings of the additions to the back yard.  Photo by John Denniston.

Trees and other greenery now virtually hide the back of the house. Photo by John Denniston.

Behind this mass of greenery to the right is an old garage. Two Portuguese laurels were planted on either side of the entranceway to hide the big house behind us. The trees tend to block the entrance, so an opening has to be cleared every once in awhile.

Those Portuguese laurels provide a nice backdrop for John to assemble his new e-bike. Of course that can't be done without a record, and here John is making a video of the assembly process.

From the living room, we see trees and more trees.

This is my view from the couch in the living room. I spend a lot of time here.

The dining room provides virtually our only glimpse of neighbours; note the grey boards behind the laurel hedge.

Out of one of the dining room windows, the Styrax is in bloom. We can watch the bees busy in the blossoms as we have lunch.

Above the coffee machine in the kitchen, more laurel hides the neighbours.

Washing dishes isn't a pain when it gives you a chance to watch the birds fluttering in the trees outside.

The window of the back door shows a greenery-filled back yard.

And back to the front of the property: Is there really a house in there?

Don't throw out . . . the cookbooks

I learned to cook out of a Purity Flour book similar to this one. First published in 1917, the version we had at home was probably from the 1930s or 1940s. Yes, it was getting pretty shabby by the 1970s, but I still regret not ending up with it.  

It had hard red covers, it was splattered and old, and it had every recipe – from tea biscuits to beef stew to angel cake – that any farm kitchen of the 1950s and 60s needed. I learned to cook out of it in my teens, on my parents’ wood-and-coal-fired stove in rural Alberta, and when they sold the family farm in the 1970s, I kept a sentimental eye on that reminder of a long-gone time and place. Sometime (not quite yet), I planned to ask my mother if she would – someday when she didn’t need it any more – pass it along to me.

 I was a city person by then, a career person who’d adopted the trendier eating habits of my place and time, but seeing that battered red book in my mother’s subsequent kitchens was a touchstone with the past. It was a reminder of the chocolate pudding made of cocoa instead of Belgian chocolate, the lemon sponge out of endless farm eggs, the potato salad with home-grown radishes and peas.

My parents had moved out to B.C. by then, and one day when I visited them, I realized the cookbook was … gone. “Oh,” my mother said breezily, “it was a dirty old thing after all those years. I got a new one – very clean.” The new version had shiny soft covers and modern graphics instead of the familiar faded heads of wheat barely visible against a dark-red background. It lacked the heft, the significance of the old book; gone was the decades-old splodge on the upside-down cake recipe.

I thought of my missed chance when my niece Michelle wrote me about a recent blog involving another of mom’s cookbooks. This book was home-made; after leaving the farm, mom began copying her favourite recipes into a blue ledger to consolidate them into one place. That ledger, held together with masking tape and so old that some page edges have turned to lace, was one of the mementoes I saved when she died in 2014. “Whatever you do – please don’t get rid of that blue ledger!” Michelle wrote after I blogged about mom's hot-cross bun recipe from it. “I would love to take a look through it one day.”

I don’t think Michelle, who has some interest in family history, will be disappointed. Like any good cookbook, it contains a multitude of hints about its owner’s interests and times. There are the recipes, yes, but there is also a 1990s list of the premiers of all the provinces of Canada, paired with stamps of each of their provincial flowers. There is a map of my parents’ Chilliwack garden with names and locations of all the plants they put in (grapes, pears, cherries, roses). There are recipes reflecting different eras – sugar-free rice pudding from when my father was diagnosed with diabetes, for example, and a copy of my extravagant trifle recipe from the time of big family Christmases. There are newspaper clippings that caught her eye – about plant origins, water shortages, the physical impacts of aging (“Women lose bone mass faster than men,” Surrey Leader, 1990). And, curiously – although she did always have a head for math – an explanation of how to figure out the square root of a number, complete with example.

As mom showed, a recipe book can be far, far more than a description of how to make certain dishes. I promise not to throw it out.

This is the new version of the Purity cookbook, published in 1967, that mom got after she tossed the old one. Judging from the state of its pages, it wasn't nearly as well used as the original one. 

Here's the ledger that mom consolidated her best recipes into. It was getting pretty rickety by the time I inherited it in 2014, but it's still usable. It's also full of other mementoes from her life.

Some of the page edges have nearly disintegrated into lace.