The sweet, the blighted and the fleeing

Gardening is an ever-learning experience. This year's crop of sweet peas taught me they grow much better if you give them space and sunshine....

...instead of planting them in the midst of a forest of delphiniums, which had given me sad results indeed for the past two years.

I also learned that my garden is not meant to grow strawberries. Here, I'm holding up pretty much the entire crop. Photo by John Denniston.

When we got back from Saltspring last weekend, the sweet peas had taken over one end of the garden bed -- a pastel tangle of sweet-scented pink, white and purple reaching for the sky.  It was a victory of sorts, because I’d feared I’d lost my touch. After two years of trying to coax sweet peas to thrive in the midst of towering delphiniums, this spring, I finally admitted defeat and moved them. Space, sunshine and a bit of fertilizer later, I once again have sweet peas scenting the house.

Gardening is a constant battle with the elements, though, and the strawberries I planted in the food-growing frenzy of our first Covid spring are another story. The first year, I obediently nipped off the flowers to help the plants get established, expecting a big payoff this year. It never came.

 The berries were few and far between, and once they got to a certain stage, as if deciding the whole exercise was pointless, they turned to mush and shrivelled up. The few that escaped the blight and tried to ripen weren’t much better. I’d find near-red berries on the ground, discarded after one bite – even the marauding garden critters didn’t like them. I tried one myself once; it had the vague flavour of strawberry, but it was raw and sour. I discarded it too.

My blighted berries. Not very appetizing.

I don't know what form of blight these berries caught, but the message seems clear that they're not happy in my yard.

Then there are the plants trying to escape my too-shady garden. A Covid-era raspberry cane behind the vegetable patch should be giving us some juicy raspberries about now. Instead, it’s bent itself almost double, fleeing for the sunshine of the back alley. Kale and leafy greens along the lattice-work fence bordering  the alley are doing the same, wistful prisoners poking their heads into the light.

The raspberry plant contorts itself sideways trying to reach through the fence to the alley. It's too busy trying to escape to make berries.

From the alley, you can see the kale poking through the fence.

There seems to be a theme in all of the above: Don’t try to grow food plants in the shade. If there’s only one sunny spot in the garden and sweet peas are the priority, admit it. It really shouldn’t have taken Covid to teach me that.

Another view of this year's sweet peas, with the blue delphiniums in the background.

And, a bouquet for the house at last.

He made me do it

 

If a sign says, "keep out," John's first reaction is to ask me to pose violating it. Here I am in Pacific Spirit Park on Monday morning, ignoring a "bridge closed" sign. Photo by John Denniston.

I am a very law-abiding person. I don’t even jaywalk, much, and then only with great wariness. But I live with a former news photographer whose livelihood depended on a certain facility for, shall we say, bending the rules. Outwitting the authorities was a regular – and to John, a most enjoyable – aspect of doing the job.

Now that we’re in gentle retirement, we’ve carried on with our lifelong habits. If a sign says “do not enter,” I don’t.  John’s first response is: “Why not?” Then, “Is there a picture there?” And finally, “Carol, walk past that sign and turn around for the camera.”

These little violations are always trivial, but it’s interesting to reflect that if anybody was paying attention, I’d definitely be the scofflaw of the couple. And that John has the evidence to prove it.

There was shade and a rock to sit on at the Long Harbour ferry terminal on Saltspring Island in June. Who knew it was beyond a "no public access" sign? Photo by John Denniston. 

At SFU's Burnaby campus last winter. A slippery slope, a "no trespassing" sign, and me. How could John resist? Photo by John Denniston.

Pandemic windfall

Winter plus a pandemic plus an early-summer heat wave have left some of us a lot of time for solitary occupations.  And some of us have more to show for it than others. In my friend Linda’s case, the last four months have produced a cornucopia of knitting. A little of it is for herself, but mostly, friends and relatives are getting a windfall.  Here are photos of her recent projects:

One lucky baby in Linda's family is getting a hand-knitted blanket, a bunny, shoes and two hats. With a beginning like this, will this child ever be able to stoop to synthetics?

A closer look at the bunny, with its deliciously plump thighs, and the little yellow shoes.

A beautifully sophisticated blanket to wrap a baby in.

Linda's self-indulgences have included some new socks for herself...

... a  yellow pair for a family member...

... and another colour for his partner.

 

This is a watch-cap for my partner John, something he has longed for ever since it became impossible to buy proper woolen watch-caps. It was my gift to him, courtesy of Linda, for his 76th birthday. He was very pleased.

Linda has always enjoyed making soft toys for kids, and animals like this elephant are guaranteed to give delight....

... as are these lions, with their saucy manes. 

Not made yet, but next off Linda's knitting needles will be lemurs like these.

This is what they'll look like when they're done.

The striped tail and yellow eyes will please some lucky child. 

Hot, hot, hot

 

John is more adventurous than I am in the record-breaking heat, but for awhile on Monday, he agreed to wear a towel-wrapped icepack and take a break in my semi-cool basement lair. He wouldn't snooze on the futon I lay on the floor, though, preferring the 40-degree living room for his nap.

I’m skeptical about weather-scare stories – too many heavy-rainfall alerts and polar vortexes have blunted their impact – but I have to admit somebody was right about the heat wave. When the back-porch thermometer reads 30 C at 7 a.m. and is still stuck at 40 by 7 p.m., yup, it’s extreme weather alright.

John and I react differently to scenarios like this. I hunker down in the basement, the only semi-cool space in the house, working at my computer or reading. I make only necessary forays into the swirling heat of the upstairs rooms, where open windows and fans only push the furnace-temperature air around. I don’t go outside; even our shady back yard is a sauna.

For John, it’s an adventure, a challenge. He walks from room to room with the thermometer, reading out doom. He walked up to Dunbar street, where the heat was bouncing from sidewalk to store and pedestrians were only there to scurry into air-conditioned stores. He concedes to wearing a cold, wet towel or icepack around his neck, but I caught him sleeping on the living-room couch this afternoon with the sweat trickling down his face. The temperature was nearly 40.

It’s racing weather, he says, and it’s true he raced motorcycles in California at temperatures like these. But I remind him that was 30 years ago, and he admits I may have a point.

After three days of extreme heat – just like the forecasters predicted – we’re supposed to get some relief soon. I really hope they’re right. Again.

I wouldn't swear on the accuracy of our back-porch thermometer, but this is the first time I've ever seen it register 40 C. Canada's hot spot Lytton had us beat, though. It was 46.6 Sunday, and 47.9 on Monday, the highest temperatures ever recorded in the country.

Muffin birthday

What's this? John looks askance at the unique version of birthday cake that's part of his family history.

When my partner John let it slip that the date of an upcoming block party was also his 76th birthday, scheming ensued.  Should there be a cake? A recording of “76 Trombones”? Seventy-six somethings? Party organizers wanted to know.

No cake, I told them.  John would prefer a laugh any day. Why not just have someone tell the story of the birthday muffin?

It’s a family story from harder times, when kids would scrabble under the sofa cushions for nickels to fund an ice-cream outing. A time when John’s grandfather, living with unlocked doors in the West Vancouver house he built himself (there was a sawmill in the basement), reportedly once said: “If anyone breaks in, I’ll offer to go halves if he finds anything.”

Kids’ birthdays weren’t necessarily highlights of the year in that era – parties were not a given, and bouncy castles and gift bags were phenomena of the future. But John’s aunt, an irascible soul given to laying down the law rather sharply, went a step too far when she let it be known that her son, John’s cousin, shouldn’t expect a cake on one of his birthdays.

He moaned and complained so incessantly that his mother finally lost patience. She grabbed a muffin – remember that 1950s’ muffins were austere little things, likely bran  – and stuck a candle in it. “Here’s your birthday cake, kid,” she said. “Now stop whining!”

John didn’t get a cake this year either. But he got something better –  a celebration of his birthday from neighbours gathered under the shade of the boulevard trees. And best of all, their laughter when one of them, coached by me, told the muffin story once more.

The grand finale was the presentation of a single bran muffin, candle blazing in the afternoon heat. John blew it out.

John makes a good show of pretending to enjoy his birthday muffin. A few bites was enough, but as a photographer, he understands the importance of making use of props. 

Alas, the muffin was from a grocery-store six-pack and too sweet for John's tastes. I couldn't face baking a batch myself in the summer heat. 

Seven months later. . .

 

After more than half a year away from Saltspring due to pandemic travel restrictions, we wondered what we'd come back to. There were changes, but as this view  of our swimming beach from the Vesuvius ferry  terminal shows, the basics remain. Photo by John Denniston.

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf describes what happens when a house, the summer getaway for the large and lively Ramsay family, is abandoned for 10 years due to the Second World War and its aftermath. Woolf’s images returned to me this past winter when I wondered how our Saltspring house, deserted for months due to Covid, was doing without us.

 Were windows cracking, the roof leaking? Had ants and mice founded colonies? Had it, as the Ramsays’ house had, “gone to rack and ruin”? I imagined the moonlight glancing into the empty bedrooms, my version of Woolf’s: “Only the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter. . . .”

 With travel restrictions lifting, we got back to Saltspring this week after seven months away. The passage of time, one of the themes of Woolf’s novel, was marked by the wall calendar, frozen at November 2020 on this bright June day of 2021. Otherwise, the house seemed to have scarcely marked our absence – no leaks, breaks, mice or ant colonies. The only casualty was a toaster that decided its carriage-control lever would depress -- and toast -- no more.

But time hadn’t stopped in the little village around us. Beloved neighbours have moved away and promising new ones have arrived. One little waterfront cottage has been bulldozed into an empty lot, while two others have been renovated into better shape than ever. Trees have been cut, hedges uprooted, and fences built. Some gardens have been enhanced, others abandoned.

 Our house may seem to have escaped unscathed, but it’s seven months older, just as we are, along with all our neighbours and their houses. There’s no escaping the changes wrought by time, as Woolf knew.

 Here are a couple of her lovely paragraphs from the “Time Passes” section of her novel, followed by some of John’s photographs showing what’s happening in the neighbourhood:

 The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell

on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.

The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the

clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had

rusted and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly,

aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself

between the tiles in the larder. The swallows nested in the drawing-

room; the floor was strewn with straw; the plaster fell in shovelfuls;

rafters were laid bare; rats carried off this and that to gnaw behind

the wainscots. Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and

pattered their life out on the window-pane. Poppies sowed themselves

among the dahlias; the lawn waved with long grass; giant artichokes

towered among roses; a fringed carnation flowered among the cabbages;

while the gentle tapping of a weed at the window had become, on

winters' nights, a drumming from sturdy trees and thorned briars which

made the whole room green in summer.

 

. . . . The place was gone to rack and ruin. Only

the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden

stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with

equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw.

Nothing now withstood them; nothing said no to them. Let the wind

blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the

cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawing-room, and the thistle

thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on the faded

chintz of the arm-chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out

on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries.

During our absence, a terrific winter windstorm and high tides  pushed logs and a massive amount of ocean debris onto our local beach. Beach-lovers cleaned it up, and months later, just in time for summer swimming, the beach looks just like it always has. Photo by John Denniston.

Ever since we bought our Vesuvius house in 1999,  the walk to the ferry terminal has included passing by a little whitewashed cottage with a Mexican flavour. Now it's gone and work has begun on its replacement. It will have a lovely view. Photo by John Denniston. 

The plantings for this tiny beachfront cottage change year by year, but are always a work of art. Photo by John Denniston. 

This cottage, across the road from the beach, always looks good, but this year, the explosion of pink roses against the yellow siding has made it a head-turner. Photo by John Denniston.

This house has seen a lot of work, upgrading and painting in the last few years, but the flower-filled rowboat is new. Photo by John Denniston.

Across the road and down a hill from us is a farm that has been taken over recently by a hard-working couples who tend fruit trees, herbs and vegetables, as well as bees and a family of sheep. Photo by John Denniston.

 

Yes, there is a distressing amount of garden work to be done after so many months away from our place.  I began snipping away at blackberry brambles Sunday night. To the right is a huge bay tree that I planted as a twig about 20 years ago. I'll leave that alone. Photo by John Denniston.

The sunset, seen through the trees from our deck, marks the passage of another day. Photo by John Denniston.

Gardening (lazily) for the birds and bees

A forest of foxgloves in a Dunbar side garden made me think about today's changing attitudes toward weeds, flowers, and bird and bee habitat. How important is tidiness in a garden anyway?

Red and yellow poppies front foxgloves and wild roses at the front of this West Vancouver garden. There seem to be more and more wild spots like this these days.  Photo by John Denniston.

Another tangled display of wild and planted flowers in West Vancouver provides an insect feast. Photo by John Denniston. 

 

The lawn of a little nearby bungalow is a solid sheet of tight-packed blooming clover. Along a sidewalk just down the street from us is a forest of pink, purple and white foxgloves. An area in front of another house is a blaze of red and yellow poppies, with foxgloves and wild roses poking up behind.

Is it just me, or are Vancouverites letting up a little on tidy gardens? I’m suspecting several years’ worth of publicity about pollinator-friendly gardens that cater to bees, birds and butterflies is beginning to have an effect. “Butterfly Ways,” pock the boulevards now – little plots of two or three often-struggling plants meant to attract butterflies. And there are “pollinating gardens” with brilliant swaths of insect-friendly plantings in some Vancouver parks.

Even I, not the tidiest of gardeners at the best of times, am changing my ways. In the fall, I rake dead leaves onto the flower beds to give insects something to burrow under. I leave seed-heads for the birds and let dry plant stalks stand as potential egg-laying sites for insects. I even quell my automatic dandelion-murdering instincts to give the earliest bees a food source in the spring. My garden is not as neat as it used to be, but it's a lot less work.

My messier winter garden is spilling over into the summer now, as I rethink the annuals I once used to buy automatically to “colour up” the summer greenery. The pansies I planted last fall are still blooming, but they’re being taken over by the poppies, foxgloves, daisies and hollyhocks that arrive on their own and seem to want to thrive without any help from me.

At first I was a little horrified at the idea of letting things go. But as I see the beauty of other people’s tangled gardens, I realize they’re much more appealing to me than the order I once aspired to. Beauty, less work, and happy birds and bees. What could be wrong with that?

On the downside, here's what happens if you abandon your lawn completely. Buttercups take over in a solid mass, as has happened in the lawn of this soon-to-be-demolished house. I've never seen bees hovering over buttercups, but maybe they provide food for something. Photo by John Denniston.

My buttercups. I work away at them in patches to keep them under control. The white spots are rose petals. Photo by John Denniston. 

My front garden is a tangle of leftover winter pansies that I'll let bloom until they don't. Then poppies, daisies and hollyhocks  can take over for the summer.

The two Portuguese laurels in my back yard produce "cherries" in the fall that the robins flock to and fight over. In the spring, the climbing roses provide some high-up decoration.

The delphinium patch keeps the bees happy when the plants bloom in the summer.

There's something to be said about mixing order and disorder: The wildly blooming pink wiegelia is a nice contrast to the rest of this well-groomed West Vancouver garden.  Photo by John Denniston.

Order in the extreme. Perhaps because I'd been looking at wild gardens, I was amazed by this very large, perfectly round ball of orange and yellow begonias hanging in a back porch. At first I thought it had to be artificial, but when I got closer, it was real enough.  The other planter looks, well, more natural. I suspect neither provides much food for insects. 

Landscapes and moving things

After nearly 50 years with my camera-toting partner John, I have a pretty good sense of what will catch his eye. Two for-certains are anything transport-related, and particular types of landscapes. But he still surprises me sometimes by seeing things I miss completely. Here are some John-photos from recent walks:

Here's a scene I didn't notice: We stepped out of our car at Iona Beach Regional Park in Richmond on Thursday, and John hoisted his camera immediately. It was only when I saw the result that I understood what his photographer's eye had caught -- vast fields and clouds bisected midway by trees and mountains. All photos by John Denniston.

John was thinking of "greenways" as opposed to the city of Vancouver's "paveways" when he took this photo of me on a tree-lined path at the Iona park. 

A woman and her very large dog on the riverbank are part of this scene, but look what's also there -- a tugboat and a pleasure craft. Anything with an engine/motor/ wheels gets a second look from John. 

There's something about this stark row of piles stretching into the distance, intersecting with the mountains and skyline behind that to me is a trademark "John" photograph. He's taken the shot before when the tide was in, with the piles just poking out of the water -- equally arresting and haunting.

To me, just a guy and a bike. To John, an interesting new version of an e-bike and a chance to chat up the owner. Turns out this is a prototype of a foldable electric bike that the very affable helmeted young man is developing. He was at Iona to test how it behaves in the sand. 

Still with transport, the evening before in our Dunbar neighbourhood, we saw a boy whizzing along the sidewalk on what appeared to be a ball with a platform on each side. John may be retired, but his news photographer's instincts are intact, and he caught the kid mid-ride. We found out the  contraption is a Onewheel, a motorized kind of skateboard. With a white light in front and a red light behind, it's a strange sight coming at you in the twilight.

A row of Nissan Figaros, a Japanese right-hand-drive vehicle, is a common sight outside this particular house in Dunbar. They're used in the owner's restaurant business, according to one chat we had with him. The shape and colours of the cars turn them into a kind of street-side ornament. 

Another kind of beauty: Wildflowers and weeds. John would have walked right past this little display at Iona if I hadn't drawn his attention to it. Sometimes he misses things, too.