Hillside:  Dan Pearson and Huw Morgan in Somerset

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It is somewhat daunting to write about a garden whose owners are a world-renowned designer with a lyrical, thoughtful writing style and a photographer-writer who chronicles their garden’s finest moments (and his own delicious recipes) in mouth-watering images for their beautiful online magazine Dig Delve. But to visit Hillside is to be enchanted – by its story, its scope, its exquisite melding of the garden to the land, and the land to the garden, and what came long before. So I will attempt to capture a little of the great joy of my short time there in early June.    

We start in the outdoor kitchen where our gracious and hospitable hosts, Dan Pearson, left, and Huw Morgan, right, serve us a refreshing elderflower concoction in pretty pottery cups. Here we hear a little history before wandering the 20-acre smallholding near Bath, which they purchased in 2010 from the estate of the previous owner, Raymond Lewis, an elderly farmer born on the property who had grazed his cattle to the very edges of the rolling limestone pastures and milked the cows in an old tin barn. Upon his death, friends living across the stream at the bottom of the valley below told Dan and Huw that the property was available. After walking the fields with the farmer’s brother, visiting the old orchard and inspecting the house that had last been decorated when the brothers’ mother was alive, Dan wrote later in The Guardian: “There were no ifs, buts or maybes. No doubt. It was where we wanted to be.”  It would take three trips from London eight months later, the car boot jammed with favourite plants from their long, narrow Peckham garden, to begin to put their minds to this vast empty canvas.

They went slowly, doing little for the first years. As Dan wrote in Dig Delve, “It took that long to know what to do with the place and what has felt right here.”  In autumn 2012, they installed a pair of 18th century granite troughs used originally for tanning leather, now intended to gather rainwater. Once the steep land grade was levelled on this upper spine, the troughs would connect the house with the barns and form the gateway to what would become the new kitchen garden beyond.

The horizontal line of the troughs, in the background below, also echoes the horizontal line of 52 ancient beech trees on Freezing Hill in the far distance, which occupies a Bronze Age landform between Somerset and the Cotswolds.

In gravelly rubble between the house and the troughs, Dan grows favourite clumping plants such as eryngium and calamint along with a host of self-seeders: cephalaria, corn cockle, silvery ballota, poppies, blue flax and a white California poppy (Eschscholzia californica ‘Ivory Castle’).

To understand the initial challenges posed by the steep lie of the land, it’s helpful to read Dan’s essay The Kitchen Garden tracking the 4-year progress from the trough installation to the first harvest.  As he wrote, “When we arrived here the flat ground was literally no more than a strip in front of the outbuildings. We perched a table and chairs there to make the most of not being on the angle”.  Gardening on the steep hillside was a challenge: “Sowing, thinning, weeding and harvesting on a slope were all that much harder with one leg shorter than the other and tools and buckets balanced.” In time the ground near the barns was leveled and a breeze-block wall built to hold back the sloping fields above, to reflect heat and the fragrance of perfumed plants……

…. and to give fruits such as cordon-espaliered pears, below, a warm surface on which to ripen. A fig in this area is a cutting of ‘White Marseilles’ from Dan’s project at Lambeth Palace, the parent plant “brought from Rome by the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, in 1556.”

In the early years, trees were planted: several in a new orchard; some in a ‘blossom wood’ of native species; hazels and alders down by the stream; memorial trees to honour missed friends; and a katsura grove in the valley with its exquisite autumn perfume to evoke Dan’s long project at Tokachi Forest in Hokkaido, Japan. Trial beds held David Austin roses for cutting, 56 varieties of dahlia and a rainbow of tulips. Signature plants appeared, including different species of towering giant fennel (Ferula spp.), a Mediterranean plant I saw first in the ruins of Troy many years ago, so it always makes me think of Homer to see it now. Dan has used Ferula communis subsp. glauca in his design for the Delos Garden at Sissinghurst. (More on that later.)

Rusticity and a sense of place is preserved in the tin walls of the barn, a backdrop to feverfew, bronze fennel and the unusual lilac-purple valerian, Centranthus lecoqii.  

English gardeners seem to grow more umbellifers than I’ve counted anywhere in my North American travels, and I had to ask Dan twice the name of the lovely one below. It’s Athamanta turbith, a cold-hardy native of the Balkans.

Another plant used by Dan in Delos at Sissinghurst also appears in this upper garden: tall pink Dianthus carthusianorum, shown here (in terrible sunlight, sorry) with Achillea ‘Moonlight’.

Constructed in spring 2014, the kitchen garden comprises a double row of steel-edged, rectangular beds with a broad walk in-between.

The soil where the vegetables grow is rich and productive. According to an elderly neighbour, in the 1960s the former owner’s parents grew vegetables in a market garden on the slopes, and berried boughs from holly trees still standing were harvested for Christmas wreaths for the market.

Creative trellising allows vertical growing of cucumbers and summer squash. Other crops include courgettes, French and runner beans, peppers, salad greens, carrots, turnips, beets, sweet corn and tomatoes (in a poly house).  

Berries and currants are grown in beds with frames that can be netted later against birds.

Three varieties of rhubarb are grown at Hillside, providing the ingredients for Huw’s delectable rhubarb galette.

Time is fleeting and Dan leads us down a path through the meadows towards the brook.  When I look up the hill through a bouquet of massive Gunnera manicata leaves….

….. that I literally held above my head as I passed under them a moment earlier, illustrating the deceptive scale, I see the cluster of buildings at the top. Closest is the milking barn, now the studio office where Dan and Huw carry out their design work.  To its right is the main ornamental garden, which we’ll visit in a few minutes.

On the way to the pond, Dan pauses in the meadow surrounded by oxeye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare), buttercups (Ranunculus acris) and black knapweed (Centaurea nigra). He is in the process of overseeding the meadows with yellow rattle and native orchids, including gift seeds harvested by Fergus Garrett at Great Dixter, to improve the biodiversity here.

 The pond is just two years old, the marginal plants still finding their feet. But water has always been important to Dan in a garden – and this pond might host two-legged swimmers, as well as aquatic flora.  

I am fond of meadows, having grown one or two myself, so I take note of the red campion (Silene dioica)……

….. and blue-flowered Caucasian comfrey (Symphytum caucasicum).

Water runs in a ditch through parts of the low meadows and after planting the banks with marsh marigolds and snowdrops, Dan sought to add small bridges. Apart from a pair made of stone, he riffed on Japanese landscape design with his own timber zig-zag bridge.   

In the damp ground alongside the bridge grows Iris x robusta ‘Dark Aura’.

Despite watching my legs and hands as I navigate the paths, the stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) seem to recognize a feckless Canadian and soon I am rubbing my wrist with a dock leaf (Rumex obtusifolius) proffered by Dan. (It helps with the sting but I have impressive raised welts the next day that cause me to reflect on the traditional medicinal value of this common European plant which, I suppose, would cause you to forget about your chronic arthritis while your skin deals with the acute inflammation.)  

Back at the top, we are now let loose in Hillside’s ornamental garden, which occupies several large, irregularly-shaped beds on the upper slope. Planted in Spring 2017 and finished in Autumn 2017, it was the result of five years of waiting and planning. There is so much to see here, but not nearly enough time to study it carefully.

Burgundy Knautia macedonica is stealing the show, with yellow Euphorbia wallichii in the rear. The profusion of summer perennials and ornamental grasses is still to come, which we can glimpse thanks to Dig Delve’s back issues.

A dark opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) is the progeny of gifted seed from plants Dan saw when cycling to work in his early 20s. It is the only variety he grows, careful not to let it hybridize with the mauve and pink ones his neighbours grow.  

The ornamental garden is a keen plantsman’s lair and it is such fun for us to learn the names of new plants. This is Nepeta ‘Blue Dragon’ a large-flowered hybrid of N. yunnanensis and N. nervosa.

Greek native yellow-banded iris (Iris orientalis) partners with a caramel-colored baptisia in one place…

…. while perfumed sweet peas twine pea sticks in another.

Sulfur clover (Trifolium ocroleuchon) has many of us clicking shutters.

Though it would be lovely to stay another week, there’s just enough time to see the latest chapter at Hillside. This spring, after contemplating the site for a few years and planting it first with a green manure, then a pastel mix of Nigel Dunnett’s ‘Pictorial Meadows’ seeds, a new garden has taken shape. It’s a Mediterranean garden inspired partly by Dan’s work recreating the Delos Garden at Sissinghurst, where he’s been a consultant for almost a decade.  

The new garden features a 6-inch mulch of sharp sand, following principles established by Swedish designer Peter Korn.  It features drought-tolerant plants such as lilac Phlomis italica, below, verbascums and N. American desert perennials like Sphaeralcea ambigua.

I was fortunate to have visited Sissinghurst the previous weekend and saw the Delos Garden….

….. richly planted with asphodelines and sages, among other Mediterranean plants.

Its stone altars were brought in the 1820s from the Greek island by Vita Sackville-West’s husband Harold Nicholson’s seafaring great grandfather and acquired at auction by Harold when the family house in Ireland was sold in 1936.  I have a special fondness for the sacred island of Delos….

…. having visited myself in autumn more than a decade ago when the grasses and wildflowers had gone to seed and were blowing in the hot wind, below. It was my fervent desire to return one day in spring when the flowers are in bloom, but seeing Dan’s garden at Sissinghurst in early June might be the closest I come.

As we head back to the open kitchen, I pass a handsome shrub that Dan tells me is his friend Dan Hinkley’s introduction Hydrangea serrata ‘Plum Passion’.   

And in a sheltered spot near the house are pots of perfumed dianthus and society garlic (Tulbaghia ‘Moshoeshoe’).

As our visit is coming to an end, we are invited to sit and enjoy the lovely English garden tour custom of “tea and cake”.  Huw Morgan has worked his magic on blackcurrants, garnished lavishly with rose petals…..

….. and quite possibly the best lemon pound cake I’ve ever tasted, garnished with tiny elderflowers and lemon slices.   

And after the last crumb is finished and it’s time to head into Bath nearby, Dan and Huw insist on posing with us for a group photo – the perfect hosts with the perfect garden at the end of a perfect visit in Somerset.

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If you like naturalistic meadow gardening, you might wish to read my blog on Piet Oudolf’s entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden, published as:

Piet Oudolf – Meadow Maker Part One and Part Two.

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Dan Pearson’s website

I travelled with Carolyn Mullet’s Carex Tours .

A Love Letter to Smooth Solomon’s Seal

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Each spring, I look with admiration on my drifts of an Ontario native plant that asks so little of me, but gives so much in return: Polygonatum biflorum, smooth Solomon’s seal.  Its tapered shoots emerge in April in my north-facing back garden, where the clumps under the black walnut tree that looms over my sideyard pathway are surrounded by the tiny flowers of the bulbous spring ephemeral Corydalis solida.

By mid-late May, looking back towards my garden gate, the corydalis has disappeared but the Solomon’s seals stand three feet tall.

It’s still early in the garden when they flower, the grasses in my deck pots still just inches high.

The colony in the back corner of the garden grows near a Tiger Eyes sumac and has as its neighbour fall monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’), not yet visible. Both enjoy the same shade-dappled, slightly moist, humus-rich soil.

It’s a testament to the travelling power of Solomon’s seals that they do sometimes subsume other plants. This ‘Ballade’ lily tulip – one of my favourites – is resisting.

But nothing keeps Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ from rearing its pretty head.

My garden features a number of invasive plants – some native, like ostrich fern (Matteucia struthiopteris), others enthusiastic exotics, like my lily-of-the-valley, aka ‘guerilla of the valley’ (Convallaria majalis).  (I’ve written about that pest before in my blog about making a perfumed garden party hat!)  But Solomon’s seal is up to the challenge and can stand its ground.

One that didn’t fare so well in competition with the Solomon’s seals was wild geranium (G. maculatum), shown below in a photo from a previous spring.  

At the Toronto Botanical Garden, blue Amsonia tabernaemontana, shown in the background below, makes a pretty companion for Solomon’s seal.

I love the way the pearl-drop flower buds of smooth Solomon’s seal open, curling up their green tips like dainty skirts.

In November, the leaves turn yellow-gold.

Solomon’s seal and other woodland lovers were featured in ‘Shady Lady’, one of #Janetsfairycrowns from 2021, which I blogged about last year.

My next-door neighbour grows smooth Solomon’s seal as well; it met with the approval of the resident male cardinal.

Finally, speaking of cardinals, here’s a tiny video made in my garden featuring smooth Solomon’s seal with my regular choristers, cardinals and robins.

FACEBOOK: Invasion of the Profile Snatchers

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I have been replaced on Facebook. Cancelled. Subsumed.

It took a week for the bad guys to knock me down and keep me down. I fought tooth-and-nail.  I emailed “support@fb” repeatedly and got no support, or even an acknowledgement. I tried various “recover your account” methods, and found two strange profiles linked to my account, but was stymied when I tried to go further with the unhelpful bots. I wrote passionate snail-mail letters to people in high places at Meta here in Canada, and ultimately to people in law enforcement and to Meta headquarters at …. wait for it… One Hacker Way in Menlo Park, CA. But in the end the criminals won. They became “me”.  On Facebook, though it still looks like “me”, below, I am now really a guy with a Nigerian country code on his Apple iPhone who changed my password and other details on my account, then proceeded to hit up tons of my friends with messages about various scams involving rebates and grants and other ways of making easy money that no reasonably sane person would fall for. Or would they?

In a careless moment, on Sunday May 7th at around 4:40 pm, I fell for one of those cons. I saw on my news feed that a Toronto friend was seeking help because she thought she’d been hacked. Someone suggested in the comments on her post that she change her Friend settings to be private, but she said she didn’t know how.  I commented with a screen grab showing her where the settings were and almost immediately a message popped up on Messenger from “her” saying it didn’t work that way on “her” phone and could I help her with a recovery code that Facebook would email  me. I was dubious and thought about it for a moment, but what harm could it do to give her a code? The email did come from Facebook and in the Subject line on my Inbox, it gave the code, so I dutifully messaged “her” the number.

What I didn’t realize was that I was not talking to my friend on Messenger, and it likely wasn’t even her page anymore.  But now look at what was in the body of Facebook’s email “below the fold” as they say in the newspaper business, once I opened it up fully.  The email was asking me if I wanted to change MY OWN password. It wasn’t for the benefit of any friend – it was the key to unlock my account, and I gave it away without realizing it.   I consider myself fairly skeptical and tech-savvy, but I didn’t see any of that coming.  Needless to say, (and I’ve worked with site developers online in the past) the code should NOT have been in the subject line. It should have been nested within the body so the recipient has a chance to see what is about to happen. As one friend said, we lose our rational brain when someone needs our help. Lesson learned.

Several minutes later, I got another email from Facebook asking if I’d changed my phone number to the Jackson, Mississippi one with the Nigerian country code that they showed me. Needless to say, I said it wasn’t.  At that point, I had to email them proof of i.d. so I sent a copy of my passport.  Three minutes later, they emailed again saying my password had been changed by that phone number.  Hackers know they have to act very fast. Now the Catch-22 was in motion: i.e. you have to know your current password to change to a new one, and since I didn’t know what the criminals had used, I was stuck.  I could no longer open my page on my phone or iPad but by some strange quirk, I was still able to open it on my desktop on Chrome, because I’d never logged out. So I could still post photos on my desktop and did so a few times, hoping they had been kicked off. But soon I got emails from friends about spam on Messenger and I was able to look at that via my desktop. There were loads of messages to friends… I don’t know how many but I’m guessing it was in the several dozens or up to a hundred…. showing that “I” was sending out spam messages and even audio calls about ELF rebates, grants, and other nonsense.  These have gone out in two waves, including today, when a friend in the Bronx emailed me a screen grab of the very same con-game I fell for last week. Only mine featured better grammar. Before I was locked out, I went into Messenger and apologized to all the people who’d received messages and who hadn’t yet blocked me or deleted the conversations; I told them to ignore the request, as it hadn’t come from me. My lovely friends were understanding, but eventually I lost the ability to reassure them since what was happening was not reassuring at all.

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I joined Facebook in January 2010, part of the growing movement to social media. In professional seminars I attended as a freelance writer/photographer in the early 2000s, consultants urged us to “Get on Social Media!! Gather followers! Ask them questions to generate feedback!”   I was never very good at that, had never taken part in chat rooms, but when I finally complied and signed up on Facebook I realized how much fun it was to have this growing community of like-minded folks.  Facebook became my ‘water cooler’, my ‘recess’ (with breaks taken too many times each day!)  Part of why I enjoyed it so much was that I’ve always loved “words with pictures”; it dictated the course of my career. So I especially loved making my cover and profile photos, which I eventually posted in my personal photo library on the cloud.

Of the 2800+ friends I gathered from around the gardening world on Facebook, I managed to meet several “IRL” (in real life) over the years.  On a 2014 trip to California, I met one of the leading native plant proponents based in Sonoma and we shared a lovely dinner with our spouses.  Planning a 2018 trip to Oregon, I put out a bulletin on my page that I was going to be in Seattle and Portland and would love to see my virtual friends for a picnic at the University of Washington (that’s me in the middle with David, Mary, Rebecca and Sue)…..

…… and a few days later at a favourite Portland nursery.  It was such fun to see fellow gardeners Ann, Vanessa, Kate and Patricia in the flesh! It made my life and career much richer.

In 2019, a happy set of Facebook-related events resulted in a shared small plane charter to the wild rainforest of the west coast of Vancouver Island with Mary Anne and Caitlin for a two-day stay in Cougar Annie’s Garden.

A few months later, I was meeting my dear Facebook friend Liberto in Athens “IRL” for the first time, as he hosted a botanical tour of Greece. That trip resulted in a very comprehensive blog about Greek flora — and music!

Liberto was the smartest part of my Facebook puzzle years 2013-15, when I designed tough anagram picture puzzles that tested my friends’ plant identification skills and anagram-solving talent. The solution to the one below is ‘California Dreaming’ (on such a winter’s day, get it?)  I wrote a blog about those fun puzzles.

Because I photograph plants for my stock library, I also became an administrator of a Facebook site called Plant Idents with more than 7.7K members.  As of this week, since I’m locked out of my Facebook account by criminals, the other admins are working without my help.

For seven months in 2011-12, I wrote a daily poem to accompany a photo I took on a one-mile walk and posted them on Facebook – I called them Walking Time Rhymes.  This was from November 25, 2011 in Vancouver. My mom would die less than 3 months later, so this particular rainy walk and rhyme was precious to me. 

And through Facebook, I met a group of very special friends and like-minded garden communicators who organize yearly tours called the Garden Bloggers’ Fling.  This lovely garden was in Denver in 2018, below. This September, we’ll meet in Philadelphia.  Our wonderful tour host Karl lost his own Facebook page to hackers, along with thousands of curated photos from his garden travels throughout the world.  We will have much to talk about together.  

Though I’m gone from Facebook for the moment, I’m pushing hard to get my page back. But like Hansel and Gretel, I’ve left some crumbs in the FB forest in the form of three sets of unique hashtags I made over the years. My friends who have enjoyed my pollinator posts….

…fairy crowns…..

…. and my blogs featuring music and related gardening concepts will likely know what they are.  The hashtag for social media was invented by a smart young man named Chris Messina, an open-source advocate who was kind enough to drop me a note saying he’d lost his own page once to hackers so he knew how stressful it can be. If you live by social media, you can die by it as well. I’m hoping I’m only seriously wounded, but not fatally. Fingers crossed.  

POSTSCRIPT: I set up a new Facebook page on July 13th. If you get a friend request from a woman who looks like this, it’s really “me”.

My Covid Journal

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The end of March 2023 marks 3 full years of dealing with a contagion that rocked the world in a way that no disease had since 1919 and the Spanish flu. As of today, the World Health Organization reports that 8,830,881 people died of Covid 19, a figure that almost certainly understates reality, given that many nations were not keeping statistics, or simply not reporting them to outside sources. I was reminded of this as I looked through my photo folders since March 2020, noting all the ways, big and small, that it touched us. This is my Covid journal.

March 14, 2020 – Covid has now been recognized in Canada for two weeks and the newspaper is starting to issue public service announcements.

March 17, 2020 – On St. Patrick’s Day, when I am supposed to receive my new left knee (elective surgery was cancelled by our provincial government), I listen instead to our Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland speak on behalf of the nation’s Covid Committee.

March 21, 2020 – The first day of spring and the newspapers echo our thoughts, for we are indeed “alone together” “in uncharted territory”. By now, we are watching daily t.v. reports by provincial health ministers somberly reading out Covid-19 statistics, including deaths, mostly in nursing homes at the outset.

March 24, 2020 – As people of a certain age, we are encouraged to stay home and stay safe. Instead, our 40-something son brings us groceries. And we wash everything down with rubbing alcohol! Honestly! Could Covid come in on our Raisin Bran?

March 26, 2020 – My apples have never been so clean, even though we doubt that they are spreading Covid.

March 31 2020 – People are encouraged to show the love in our front windows, so children passing by don’t feel so forsaken. I can’t help adding voices….

April 7, 2020 – It feels more real when Boris Johnson is sent to the ICU with Covid. It will be a few years before we learn that his own carelessness around Covid helps bring him down.

April 8, 2020 – Our civic government goes into overdrive protecting its citizens, and the park parking lot at the end of our street is closed. You can still walk in, mind you, but the dog-walkers have no place to leave their cars.

April 10, 2020 – People are getting decked out in masks and I can’t resist doing my own Lawrence of Arabia take on the newest disease control measure.

April 10, 2020 – A family birthday party is held outdoors. The new normal.

April 21, 2020 – Doug’s exercise club is closed, as are gyms all over the city. It will eventually declare bankruptcy. But Doug makes do in the living room, being careful with his golf club.

April 21, 2020 – A neighbour is sewing masks on her machine for visitors to local hospitals. I ask if I can buy a few and she gives them to me free, refusing my offer.

May 2, 2020 – Spring has sprung and people have been walking past my garden since the very first snowdrop. They seem desperate to have some touchstone, the normalcy of the seasons changing. From the porch, I chat with these women who have been photographing the spring bulb parade.

May 6, 2020 – Sourdough baking has taken the nation by storm, and a friend drops off a warm loaf on my doorstep.

May 7, 2020 – The front garden is bursting with color. Such a comfort.

May 8, 2020 – As friends sign up for no-contact grocery shopping services, we weigh how we should be buying our food. Just at the right time, we see an ad for a 100km local farms offer and pick up our order at a parking lot nearby.

May 9, 2020 – People are starting to have cabin fever, and friends call to ask us to take a walk with them. I love that the trilliums are in bloom in this spot overlooking a Toronto ravine.

May 10, 2020 – It’s Mother’s Day and my two youngest sons and future daughter-in-law celebrate my day with me on the front porch. Mimosas!

May 16, 2020 – I’m not sure now about the 46 ways we were going to change. Did we tick them all off? Or did we just tick off people who learned to hate poor Anthony Fauci in the U.S.?

May 18, 2020 – Everybody is growing seeds at home, it seems, since nurseries are effectively shuttered. I order soil from Amazon (!) and get into the act on the window seat of a 3rd floor bedroom, with the rare Petunia exserta and a marigold that Linnaeus and Rudbeck were said to have grown in Sweden.

May 19, 2020 – Our neighbourhood grocery store is allowed to open with a strict limit of customers inside at any one time. The handsome security guard outside (left) keeps count, ensures we’re masked and makes us clean our hands with the sanitary gel. The employee at right beyond the new social-distancing floor tape wears full-face protection.

May 31, 2020 – We watch our first-ever Zoom memorial service, for a dear friend, all the way from Santa Barbara.

Sept. 29, 2020 – I burst out laughing one day as I look at my lipsticks, and think that Revlon and l’Oreal are going to be badly affected when they can’t sell lipstick to mask-wearing women.

Oct. 31, 2020 – Halloween comes and Dracula and the jack are wearing masks.

Nov. 1, 2020 – On the 1st of November, I begin a 5-month ‘Covid project’ to distract myself through the winter. I call it #janetsdailypollinator. This is the saffron crocus (C. sativus) which I photographed in the town of Krokos in Greece. Little do I know that it won’t be the only winter that Covid visits.

Nov. 13, 2020 – Given we can’t go to restaurants anymore, we get into a rhythm of ordering each week from a local restaurant. Our favourite is halibut-and-fries from Zee Grill, a seafood fixture in our neighbourhood.

Dec. 5, 2020 – My brother, sister-in-law and nephew come to visit but we don’t go into the house – so we do a portrait in the driveway.

Dec. 24, 2020 – We are so fortunate to have our house on Lake Muskoka. It’s just three of us for Xmas eve, but we decorate our oak totem like it’s a fresh-cut balsam fir.

Jan. 14, 2021 – It’s a new year but with a spike in cases and deaths, the province institutes serious isolation rules. They even use the emergency system to drive it home.

Jan. 18, 2021 – My special order of home-sewn masks arrive and of course there’s a floral motif.

March 7, 2021 – The grandkids arrive for a March break visit and they stay outside (mostly) because who wants to give nana and poppa Covid?

March 7, 2021 – It feels weird to have a picnic on the cold front sidewalk, but we do. I feel such sympathy for my daughter and son-in-law who both work at home. Now they have 3 kids ‘attending school’ via their little tablets on the dining room table. But at least they have a back yard with trees, unlike all the kids who live in apartments and are in isolation with no schoolyard in which to play.

March 11, 2021 – Thanks to a dear friend who dropped sourdough starter in a jar on my front porch, I’ve made my first loaves – with olives! (The fad doesn’t last with me – I don’t want to be a slave to yeast. But I take up focaccia instead!)

March 31, 2021 – I wrap up my 5-month daily pollinator project and make a giant montage.

April 2, 2021 – Vaccination #1 at Sunnybrook Hospital less than a mile from home. #2 would be Moderna two months later.

April 12, 2021 – The news remains dire with the 3rd wave.

April 13, 2021 – The spring garden is in bloom and I have a crazy idea. Instead of creating a bouquet with the blossoms, I make a floral tiara. I decide it’s going to be called a ‘fairy crown’.

By the end of the fairy crown project, there will be 30 versions. In 2022, I’ll do a blog for each one, celebrating the flowers and garden chapter that made each possible.

April 16, 2021 – It’s our 44th anniversary – and we celebrate with take-out from Zee Grill.

June 12, 2021 – Barber shops and hair salons are closed so darling Lena, my daughter’s hairdresser, comes to the backyard and does open-air cuts – including one for poppa.

Nov. 16, 2021 – It’s been a while since I was on a plane but I take the opportunity of a reduction in cases and isolation measures to fly to Vancouver to visit my brother and sister. The mask is hard to get used to for 5+ hours but that’s the rule now.

Feb. 11, 2022 – Almost after the fact, a giant anti-mask and anti-vaccine policy protest convoy is organized by truckers and sympathizers from across Canada and ends up closing down our capital city Ottawa. It goes on for days and days as the protesters call for the prime minister to step down — while honking horns day and night in the 18-wheelers that block the streets around the parliament buildings. It is surreal. And people are fed up.

Feb. 18, 2022 – Things get serious when the government uses the Emergency Act to seize assets of the protestors and give the cops extra powers to end the protest.

May 27, 2022 – By now, all the Covid test kits that were handed out to companies are gathering dust on shelves. My local greengrocer throws one in with my order as a bonus.

June 12, 2022 – My niece Lily Frost is a singer and single mom who hasn’t had many gigs for 2 years so I invite her and her band to perform a concert for my neighbours and family. It is a perfect day, the band is sizzling hot and such fun.

Lily and her band Thelonius Monk give a wonderful performance for 2 hours.

Aug. 31, 2022 – On the last day of August, we fly from Toronto to Edinburgh, below, on the first leg of what will be a memorable trip. Masks are mandatory in the airport and on the plane, but when we line up at customs in Edinburgh, not one person is wearing a mask. Days later, we leave for 5 days in Florence before celebrating our son Jon’s beautiful wedding to Marta in the Tuscan hills. After that, we take part in a wine tour of Sicily that lasts until the end of September. It feels almost… almost… like things are returning to normal.

It’s been a remarkable three years. As of now, I am the only one in my family (along with the grandkids) who hasn’t had Covid. Yet. But it’s still flying around and finding people who thought they’d dodged it completely. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll have to add a postscript to this journal. In the meantime, another spring has arrived, reluctantly, with snowflakes, and I’m ready to get back into the garden!

POSTSCRIPT: On June 9th, in the middle of a much-anticipated garden tour in England, I tested positive for Covid and had to depart the tour. Fortunately, I have a son living in London and he could take in his poor mom and make her tea and soup. But I was sad to miss the last wonderful gardens.

An Ecological Outing in Zihuatanejo

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We could have hung out by the hotel pool sipping a cool drink and reading our mystery books. After all, a salt-rimmed margarita in the hot sun when it’s snowing hard at home is always a welcome respite in winter.  But you don’t get to experience real Mexico by doing that. If, like me, you’re interested in nature and getting out of the tourist enclaves, if you want to see desert or jungle or mountains untouched by development, you have to have a plan.  My plan while visiting the little town of Zihuatanejo on the Pacific coast north of Acapulco involved researching what was available nearby. This was our fourth visit to Villa Carolina, below, a small palapa hotel on Playa la Ropa in this former fishing village, a hippie town in the 1960s (seriously, Timothy Leary tried to create an LSD-fuelled communal living project here in 1963, but got shut down by Mexican authorities) that has become a favourite beach getaway not just for Americans and Canadians, but for Mexicans with vacation homes.

But the difference between our last visit in 2006 and winter 2023 is that a new ecological park had been developed not too many miles away and I was determined to pay a visit to El Refugio de Potosi.  Which is how we ended up in the back seat of our guide Javier Pérez Sosa’s car at 8 am heading southeast through little towns on the highway.

I had told Javier in advance that I was interested in native flora and hummingbirds, so we parked beside the road in the countryside where I was surprised to see a wetland covered with water lettuce (Pistia striatotes).  Though listed as an invasive most everywhere, no one really knows where it originated; various experts believe it to have been native to both Africa and South America, thus it is called “pantropical”. 

What was most interesting was these native Mexican birds called northern jacanas (Jacana spinosa) that were wandering on top of the water lettuce, as you can see with the black adult and grey juvenile below. They’re perfectly adapted as waders with big feet to walk on floating plants, including water lilies, feeding on insects on the leaves or small fish below the surface.

We walked up a dusty driveway to an abandoned farm hut as Javier pointed out various birds in the trees around us. But he wanted to show me the green fruit of the cirian tree (Crescentia alata), also called the Mexican calabash, cannonball tree, jicaro, morrito or morro. 

The hard fruit, once hollowed out, is sometimes used to make maracas or food and drink containers. It is believed that at one time megafauna were responsible for dispersal of the seeds; today the fruit is often broken open by horses which use their hooves to crush them in order to eat the seeds.

Back in the car and headed towards El Refugio, Javier slowed briefly and opened the back window so I could photograph a native roadside flower whose nickname, he said, means “hairbrush”. It is one of the Combretum genus endemic to Mexico, likely C. farinosum.

It wasn’t long before we arrived at the stone walls of the 7-hectare El Refugio de Potosi. Outside was a wonderful piece of art, a “Fish of Found Objects” made entirely of trash: beer cans, plastic plates, bleach bottles, toilet floats, compact disks, old toys, etc. As founder Laurel Patrick would tell me later about the fish, a community effort sponsored and financed by El Refugio: “We collected items from the road and the beach and others brought stuff they found or no longer use to create the sculpture.  Obviously most of the donated items came from foreigners as the average local Mexican family does not have a surplus of unused or unneeded items. The goal is to use the Fish to start conversations about trash and littering. For many it was their very first opportunity to participate in such a project or to exercise even the most basic of design/art options.”  (You can read here a 2013 story that relates how Laurel Patrick was inspired to create the refuge.)

Just inside the parking area, there were zebra longwing butterflies (Heliconius charithonia) nectaring on Ixora coccinea.

Nearby a geiger tree (Cordia sebestena) was in flower. Though most of the flora here is native, there are many beautiful tropical plants to catch the eye.

I also noted the first of many infographics we would see here.  Understanding local ecology is one thing; grasping it in the context of deep time on the planet is what inspires visitors and reminds them that this is more than a wildlife refuge.

Then came the Ciclo de las Rocas. The rock cycle is not something every school student focuses on, but is the essence of geologic cycling on earth (and a natural component of climate change). Magma forms from earth’s molten crust and mantle; sometimes magma is extruded through volcanic openings and fissures (left) as lava that cools as extrusive igneous rock. Beneath the earth’s surface, metamorphic rock also melts as magma, later cooling and crystallizing as igneous rock. Tectonics slowly, over millions of years, thrusts the rock to the surface in the form of mountains. Weathering and erosion bring the rock and eventually entire mountain ranges back down as sediments (sand, mud, pebbles, etc.) which are carried into low basins and rivers, then into oceans. The sediments compact and cement together to become various layers or strata of sedimentary rock. Tectonics, i.e. subduction of one plate under another along coasts, eventually brings them underground where extreme heat and pressure change them once again into metamorphic rock which melts and is uplifted as part of mountain-building. This cycle has occurred everywhere on the planet over its 4.5 billion years.

Along the path, we came to a new little museum, the finishing touches still being applied.

Birds are shown….

….. along with their eggs, biggest to smallest.

Javier spent time stressing Mexico’s great biodiversity.  The country, which occupies only 1.5% of earth’s surface, punches far above its weight in biodiversity, hosting 10% of the planet’s known species. It is in 3rd place globally in mammal diversity, 2nd place in reptiles, with insects representing the biggest share of Mexican fauna, almost 48,000 recorded species. When El Refugio’s owner Laurel Patrick first came to the region in the 1980s on winter vacation from Hood River, Oregon, where she owned a tree nursery, she became fascinated by the flora and fauna of the region but found few people who could talk to her about it. Conservation was virtually non-existent in the area. Eventually, she built a beach house near the small town of Barra de Potosi while partnering with biologist Pablo Mendizabal to create a non-profit center highlighting the wildlife and flora of the region. Finally, she made the decision to sell both her tree nursery and her beach house in order to fund and devote herself fully to El Refugio de Potosi. Construction began in 2008 and doors opened to the public in 2009.  Three years later, she was named Conservationist of the Year by the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas.

We passed a boulder-edged pond filled with aquatic plants where the resident neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) was swimming. He climbed up the rocky bank, gave my sneakers a quick sniff, then wandered off.  El Refugio is both a wildlife refuge and research centre, so animals living here have either been rescued as rejected pets or as injured or orphaned animals. We would meet many others, like the otter, on our tour.  

Orange-fronted parakeets (Aratinga canicularis) peered out at us from their cage. These birds, though not endangered, are often captured by illegal traders for the pet industry.

A beautiful, mosaic-tiled concrete armchair marked the hummingbird feeding station where dozens of feisty birds of a number of species were vying for a taste.  Laurel Patrick made this under the tutelage of mosaic artist Sherri Warner Hunter.

Black-chinned hummingbirds perched daintily…..

…. while cinnamon hummingbirds flew between the feeders and nearby shrubs  This is a male, indicated by the rufous feathers and the black tip on its red bill. I’ve included a video a little later in this blog showing the frenzy at the feeders.

The biome here is Coastal Tropical Dry Forest. The rainy season in the Zihuatanejo area is mostly June-October and the temperature is fairly consistent with daytime highs around 30-32C and night temperatures around 20-24C.  

Infographics near the animal cages give a summary of their diet, habitat, litter size, diurnal/nocturnal nature and species stability.

We were able to meet the Mexican dwarf hairy porcupine (Coendu mexicanus) whose daytime nap we briefly interrupted.

A little further down the path were a coatimundi (Nasua narica) and collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu), aka javelina, who live together peaceably.

Most impressive of all the habitats at El Refugio is the large military macaw enclosure.

Outside was another interesting infographic, this one on the evolutionary status of flightless birds.

Nearest the door in the enclosure was a military macaw (Ara militaris mexicanus) on a termite nest. In the wild, macaws are known to make their own nests on these structures. 

Says Laurel Patrick:   “The military macaws are certainly endangered in the wild and once populated this area. The 14 macaws that reside here were either rescues or the result of a breeding pair that have sanctuary here.  My dream is to train a group of the macaws to free fly towards scattered feeding stations during the day and return to a safety cage at night.  Because they are birds that have been in captivity throughout life, they cannot just be released as they have zero survival skills.  The project will require participation from the local communities as these birds are frequently poached and can be sold for a significant amount. There is still a strong market for wild birds to cage, even though it is strictly prohibited in Mexico.”

I was fascinated by the rock-gathering being done by the macaws. One seemed to be chewing on a fairly large stone, similar to my childhood budgie working on the cuttlebone in his cage.

Here’s that little video I promised earlier:

The iguana enclosure contained several large green iguanas (Iguana iguana) hiding in the striped leaves of a screw pine (Pandanus spp.) or noshing on chopped-up cabbage, but we were also treated to the sight of the less well-known spiny-tailed iguana (Ctenosaura pectinata), native to western Mexico.

The biggest exhibit here is the 60-foot-long sperm whale skeleton (Physeter macrocephalus). The whale was found in 2009,washed up and decomposing on a beach nearby. Many local people helped to bring it to El Refugio where it was assembled and mounted. Sperm whales are the largest toothed predators in the world, but they are smaller than blue whales which can grow to more than 100 feet in length.

The finger-like bones in its flippers (toothed whales or odontocetes have five bones, untoothed whales or mysticetes like the blue whale, Baleena azul, have four) provide an excellent illustration of homologous limb structures, now adapted for different functions, but indicating that humans, whales and bats share a common ancestor.

Nearby, artist Daniel Brito was beginning work on a mural that would show the human evolutionary path out of water.

As Laurel explained, apart from the ancient horsetails (Equisetum), it will also include the ginkgo tree (G. biloba), with its deep evolutionary lineage.

This area featured another ancient plant, a cycad – sago palm (Cycas revoluta) – to help tell the evolutionary story, along with large native ferns.

More interpretive signage stressed the role of insects on earth, whose known species currently tally more than a million species – and likely a multiple of that number of insects not yet found or categorized.

I stopped to admire more tropical garden flowers, including hibiscus….

….. and golden dewdrops (Duranta erecta).

Javier pointed out the yellow flowers of nanche (Brysonima crassifolia), a native shrub whose small fruit is popular as a dessert and a liqueur.  

We finished our visit with a climb to the top of the 60-foot-tall (18 m) observation tower.  For Laurel, it was important to have a feature that gave people from the area, who perhaps have never travelled by plane or even been in a skyscraper, the opportunity to look over the landscape all the way to the horizon.

From the top, we could gaze over the rooftops of El Refugio’s buildings and nearby coconut plantations to the Pacific Ocean and the rocky, white islands called Los Morros de Potosi.

In the other direction, we could see the Sierra Madres and the nearby Laguna Carrizo. On its far shore, I saw a line of white which, when I changed to my little telephoto camera…

…. became hundreds of American white pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) along the shore, fishing in their Mexican winter home.  The largest migratory bird, its breeding ground is in Canada and the northern U.S.

Our visit was over but it was lunchtime! We travelled to nearby Laguna de Potosi where open-sided beachfront cafes with covered roofs called “enramadas” were serving food. We let Javier pick his favourite.

I seldom order beer, but after several hours of touring in the heat, I was happy to sample Mexican Victoria beer….

…. followed by tasty fish tacos.

If my knees weren’t so tetchy, we might have taken a kayak out for a spin on the laguna! There is so much to see. Next time.

We took the coast road home to Zihuatanejo where the day ended with yet another beautiful Mexican sunset from Playa la Ropa.

IF YOU GO:

Check the El Refugio de Potosi website for visitor information.

Apart from public open hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings, there are three approved guides on this page who can visit by appointment at other times. I highly recommend Javier Pérez of Explora Ixtapa who can be reached via Whatsapp at 52-755-104-7392. (He also does bicycle tours.)

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Do you love Mexico, too?  You might enjoy reading my musical love letter to Mexico, part of a blog series I did a few years ago.