Tag Archives: Caitlin Atkinson

Under Western Skies…. and Facebook

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I once wrote book reviews for a gardening magazine. I told the editor, my friend, that I wanted her assurance that if I found fault with a book, I would be free to state that. She agreed, but I’m not sure the publisher felt the same way since books promoted in popular magazines always get a lift in sales, and that’s just a good business relationship to cultivate.  But if I’d been given ‘Under Western Skies’ to review it would have been a 5-star rave, even if I hadn’t been thanked in the book acknowledgements.  And to think… it’s all because of Facebook.

Let me back up a bit. I’ve been a Facebook member for almost 12 years. Apart from old friends, neighbours and family, pretty much all my 2700+ ‘friends’ community shares with me a love of gardening in some form.  Writers, photographers, nursery owners, garden designers, plant breeders, active enthusiasts – they hail from all over North America and Europe and New Zealand, too.  But it was a chance conversation in the Idaho Botanical Garden in September 2016 between my husband Doug and Boise garden writer/radio host Mary Ann Newcomer that put in motion a sweet event that happened three years later.  We were heading home from visiting friends in Sun Valley via Boise and a pre-arranged meet-up with Mary Ann, one of those Facebook friends I’d never ‘met’ in real life (or IRL as they say on FB) but I’d ‘known’ virtually since 2014.  After touring much of the garden (you can read my blog on Idaho Botanical Garden here), I decided to meander to the top of the wonderful Lewis & Clark Trail snapping shots of the Plants of the Canyons, below, while Doug and Mary Ann relaxed at a lower level.

During their conversation, Mary Ann mentioned writing a story in 2013 for Leaf magazine about a famous British Columbia garden, Cougar Annie’s Garden, below (photo by Janis Nicolay).  I had once told her that Doug and Peter Buckland, who now owns the garden via the Boat Basin Foundation, had been good friends since the 1960s.  In fact, Doug remembered meeting Cougar Annie herself on a visit decades earlier.   

And that is how, a few years later in May 2019, Mary Ann contacted us to say a California photographer named Caitlin Atkinson was interested in photographing Cougar Annie’s Garden for a book project she had developed. As it happened, Doug and I were finalizing the details of an early autumn trip that would take us to see family in British Columbia before flying to San Francisco– and Peter had long wanted me to visit the garden. To make a long story short, the stars aligned, and in early October we met in Tofino and chartered a small plane to fly us 20 minutes north to the garden.

Doug sat in front with the pilot; Mary Ann had her phone out to make sure….

… she captured some of the stunning landscape of Clayoquot Sound below….

…. and Caitlin sat in the rear.

Just a few hours later, luggage stowed in our rustic rainforest cabins, Peter was giving us a tour of the property…..

…. that included Cougar Annie’s house….

…. and explaining the significance of logging zones in the first growth forests on the mountain slopes nearby.

We went our separate ways and met late in the afternoon in the Great Hall of the Temperate Rainforest Study Centre.

The property is completely off the grid with minimal propane use for cooking and washing up, so dinner in the hall was by candelight.

The next day, Peter toured us along the Walk of the Ancients, showing us 700-year old red cedars and “canoe trees” carved out by First Nations people.  Beyond the inner history and relatively recent saga of Cougar Annie’s Garden, this ancient forest seemed to me to be Peter’s real story, his love and appreciation evident in his understanding of its ecology….

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…. and the 2300 feet of hand-hewn cedar shake boardwalk, below, on which we trekked through giant trees to reach our cabins. To say it was a life-changing two days seems trite, but it was.  And I felt compelled to write my impressions in a 2-part blog which you can find beginning here.

Throughout those two days in early October 2019, Caitlin disappeared with her camera and we would only see her at dinner.  Her images and Jennifer Jewell’s words (Jennifer is well-known for her NPR radio show and podcast ‘Cultivating Place’) comprise the last story in the book and do Cougar Annie’s Garden at Boat Basin and Peter Buckland great justice.

The Rest of the Book

The book’s subtitle is Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast, and it spotlights 36 such gardens from the Southwest, Southern California, Northern California, the Intermountain West and the Pacific Northwest.  In the Southwest section, there are sophisticated desert gardens in Phoenix and stunning wildflower gardens in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Santa Fe. But I was delighted to turn the page to find the Albuquerque garden of my New Mexico Facebook friend, landscape designer Hunter Ten Broeck and his wife Barb featured. Caitlin’s photos brought his garden, developed through xeriscaping principles reflected in his company’s name, WaterWise Landscapes, to life. 

In the Southern California section, I was absorbed by the story of tech executive Dennis Mudd whose mountain biking in the hills near San Diego inspired him to research the endemic native plants near his Poway home and ultimately restore nature to his garden, telling Jennifer Jewell “I’m living in a truly interconnected web of life.”.  But it was while reading the story of landscape architect David Godshall’s Edendale Garden in Echo Park in Los Angeles that I did a double take, seeing the name of a dear Toronto friend mentioned. As Jennifer wrote: “Reading City Form and Natural Process: Towards a New Urban Vernacular by Michael Hough taught him that most standard landscaping supports almost no life, a ‘searing’ revelation.”  I interviewed Michael Hough (1928-2013) over many months 26 years ago for a magazine profile, accompanying him to his Environmental Studies classes; tagging along on site visits with his students; visiting his ecological landscape designs; sharing a glass of wine in his garden; and listening to him talk about his regeneration plan for the Don River, below, one of Toronto’s three watersheds.  

In the Northern California section, it was a delight to come upon ‘Sebastopol Local Love Story’, featuring the garden of my friend, native plant specialist Phil Van Soelen and his wife Mary Killian. When we were planning a trip to the Bay area and wine country in spring 2014, Phil suggested we build on our Facebook relationship and meet “IRL” and that’s what we did, visiting him in the lovely garden he then had, below, within sight of the garden Mary owned behind him, to which he moved in 2015. Caitlin’s photos feature some of their fabulous native plantings. Later we went for dinner, two Facebook pals and their spouses getting to know each other better.

That week we also visited Phil at California Flora Nursery, which he opened with Sherrie Althouse in 1981. It was a rainy morning in Sonoma, but I’m so happy we got to see him in his element there, since he sold the nursery a few years ago.

In the gardens of the Intermountain West, Mary Ann Newcomer’s Boise garden is featured, as well as the Idaho Botanical Garden.  Renowned Colorado designer Lauren Springer’s name pops up in a few gardens in this section, most prominently in the Niwot, Colorado garden of Mary and Larry Scripter. Once again, Facebook and the Garden Bloggers group I joined through it, allowed me to visit the Scripter garden on a Denver trip a few years ago and it was a pleasure to be reminded in Caitlin’s photos of their enchanating prairie meadow garden overlooking their extensive hayfields and the Rocky Mountains. This is a garden I meant to blog about, but never quite got around to. So here is my photo of Mary and Larry, as accompaniment to the piece in the book.

I found Lauren Springer’s famous breadseed poppy Papaver somniferum ‘Lauren’s Grape’ growing there, too.

In the Pacific Northwest section of the book, Harborton Hill, the lush Portland garden of my Facebook pal Bob Hyland and his partner Andrew Beckman is featured. I also met Bob “IRL” in 2018 when I visited his shop Contained Exuberance, adjacent to Portland’s famous nursery Xera Plants. He’s in the photo below flanked by Xera’s co-owners, Paul Bonine and Greg Shepherd.

That was the day I also met a gaggle of Facebook gardening friends ‘in the flesh’, including from left below, Ann Amato, Vanessa Gardner Nagle, me, Kate Bryant and Patricia Cunningham.

Facebook friend Evan Bean’s plant-rich garden near Washington’s Mount St. Helens is featured in this section, as is the Indianola garden of Nancy Heckler, also a Facebook friend. Prominent in this section is the renowned Heronswood Garden on the Kitsap Peninsula. I saw Heronswood in September 2005, when I picked up my mom and drove south from Vancouver, white-knuckling the freeway winding through Seattle towards the Bainbridge Ferry, on a garden-viewing adventure.  Founded in 1987 by plant explorer Dan Hinkley and his partner, architect Robert Jones, Heronswood had been sold by then to Burpee Plants and was being managed by Dan, whom I photographed below (on his birthday). But, as Jennifer Jewell writes of what was a dark chapter in west coast horticulture: “By 2006, the Burpee company had declared bankruptcy and stopped maintaining the property.” The garden fell into disrepair until 2012, when it was purchased at auction by the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe. Today, Dan Hinkley is director and the garden is managed by the Port Gamble S’Klallam Foundation, with Joan Garrow as Executive Director. Caitlin’s photos capture its great beauty and the groundbreaking horticulture for which Heronswood has always been known.

The Pacific Northwest section ends fittingly in Canada with Cougar Annie’s Garden at Boat Basin. Have I been dropping names in this blog? Oh yes, I certainly have, and also celebrating the many wonderful relationships I’ve made through Facebook. We are all reminded constantly how bad social media is; how it manipulates our lives. Perhaps, but I have a different view: it is the quicksilver that flows throughout the world, connecting passionate gardeners who would never have found each other without it.

So, is this an unbiased review? Of course not. Buy the book! Give it to a friend or family member on the west coast and inspire them with these 36 spectacular gardens and gardeners of the golden west.  Oh, and Merry Christmas!

Visiting Cougar Annie’s Garden – Part Two

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If you’ve read Part One of our visit to Boat Basin and Cougar Annie’s Garden, you’re waking up with me now on Day 2. After a night in cabin #6, we rose ready to explore the rainforest and take a little more time to visit Annie’s garden. I looked out our cabin window at the trees growing on the ridge. I saw yellow cedar (Callitropsis nootkatensis, formerly Chamaecyparis). Though it grows from Alaska to California, it derives its botanical name from the fact that it was first collected near Nootka Sound, just north of Boat Basin. Its wood is much used for buildings and was the material Peter Buckland used to make the long sushi table, among other structures.

I could also see Pacific silver fir or amabilis fir, Abis amabilis.

When I walked up the forest path towards the outhouse, there was Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia) growing amongst the salal.

Caitlin was already out photographing when Doug, Mary Ann and I finished a leisurely breakfast and began our walk down the ridge road.  Caitlin had warned us it was steep, and this photo doesn’t really illustrate how steep.  You can see the ghostly cedars along the road. Peter said: “Dead, standing cedars we call ‘grey ghosts’.  They make excellent posts and beams, structurally and aesthetically.  Most have grown in wet ground where nutrients are low, suppressing growth.  Grey ghosts are effectively hardwood.  Their interior is deep mellow brown in colour, ideal for interior finishing, viewable at Central Hall and several cabins.  Logging cut down grey ghosts and left them to rot, a process that takes centuries due to the preserving oils within cedar.  All was not lost.  During the first twenty-five years of construction when logging roads provided access to nearby clearcuts many grey ghosts were recovered.”

As the road flattened, I saw lots of young lodgepole or sea pine (Pinus contorta).

We came upon Peter’s garden in a clearing with raised beds filled with …..

….. the dahlias we’d seen in vases, the ones that recall Cougar Annie’s mail order business…

…… as well as mesclun lettuces (Peter contributed the salads to our two dinners) and….

….. shiso (Perilla frutescens) and squash.

Heading towards Annie’s garden, I saw some old gem-studded puffballs on the road….

…. and passed Peter’s beautiful woodshed, almost filled and ready to supply a winter of heat to the pot-bellied stove in his house.

As we took a path from the road through the trees into Annie’s garden, I wished it was June rather than early October. Had we arrived in spring or summer, we might have seen some of the colourful blossoms of the perennials, shrubs and trees still surviving, with Peter’s help, and illustrated on this poster.

We wandered about, imagining how Annie’s house must have looked in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, when she was still filling plant and bulb orders to be sent throughout Canada…..

…. and growing her own pleasure garden, now setting seed in another autumn.

I saw a big drift of montbretia (Crocosmia crocosmiiflora) and a….

…. hydrangea ensconced in the heather.

A dark blue gentian poked its head up from the leaf litter…..

…. and we found a few grapes growing on a vine.

Hebe grew along a path, below, along with spireas, weigelas, azaleas, rhododendrons and other shrubs.

I chuckled when I saw a Steller’s jay flitting through the branches of a fruit tree. Cougar Annie couldn’t stand these cheeky birds and there was usually one simmering in a broth on her stove (or so the story goes).

Like much of the Pacific Northwest, Scotch broom (Cytisus scoparius) is a troublesome invasive at Boat Basin and Peter keeps it clipped in the garden to prevent seeds escaping.

But the rainforest is always waiting in the wings to reclaim this relict garden. Here native salal (Gaultheria shallon) was blooming for a second time in the season. In some coastal parts of western North America, evergreen salal forms tall, almost impenetrable thickets. It is commonly used by florists as a filler in bouquets.

Its fruit is edible and has a unique flavour, according to Wiki. Native people ate them fresh or dried into cakes, and the Haida and other B.C. first nations used them to thicken salmon roe.  They make a good fruit leather and are also used as a purplish-blue dye.

If the rainforest wants to take back the garden, the little structures have all but surrendered to the ravages of time. I surprised a pine marten who quickly scurried back into the shelter of this ruin….

…… and I was fascinated by the collection of post office papers and bulletins that Annie’s son Frank tried to keep filed when he was still running the little post office….

….. where old magazines talked of even older British monarchs and J&B scotch.

Peter found us in the garden and asked if we’d taken the Walk of the Ancients yet. We hadn’t and he offered to give us a tour. I asked if he would first demonstrate his ‘fool the eye’ diminishing perspective under the pergola he built into the garden. He happily acquiesced.

We passed the old truck that Annie’s son Frank had bought used; it only worked for a few runs before dying and was left here to the forest.

Then we were on The Walk of the Ancients, the path through the redcedar giants (Thuja plicata).  As Peter notes in the handout for the trail: “The stage is now set. A majestic and magical scene lies ahead. It is best to move slowly, to look both around and upwards into the forest canopy. Look for evidence of the people who that came before in search for, and in respect of, the great red cedar. Remember that it was just over 200 years ago that Captain James Cook landed at Friendly Cove, which is only nineteen kilometres northwest of this trail. This event signalled the twilight for early native culture. Consider also that ‘modern’ logging developed the clearcuts of Hesquiat Harbour in only ten years.”

Peter has made signs pointing out trees of interest, and has provided a written guide for visitors.

The first was a tree with a hollow bottom.  “The hollow base formed because the tree grew upon a nurse log or stump which subsequently decomposed into humus. This exposed the tree’s core to moisture and air resulting in centre rot well up the tree. While rot precludes structural use of the wood, the hollows offer many advantages to various visitors. Black bear will hibernate in hollow trees located up the mountain slopes. Mink and pine marten are often seen darting in and out of the root holes sometimes packing clams dug at the beach. Red squirrels, bats, and various birds live in the rotted interior where holes develop up the trees.”

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The scene below is called “Canoe Revival”. Says the guide: “The use of an old canoe tree stump as a nurse log by a younger cedar is quite common. Perhaps this is nature’s way of perpetuating the canoe log supply!”

Somewhere in there is the old sea wall.

Moss hangs luxuriantly on the windfall trees here.

This tree was signed ‘Bark and Boards”. You can see where the bark has been stripped away. According to the B.C. Government website: “The western redcedar has been called ‘the cornerstone of Northwest Coast aboriginal culture’, and has great spiritual significance. Coastal people used all parts of the tree. They used the wood for dugout canoes, house planks, bentwood boxes, clothing, and many tools such as arrow shafts, masks, and paddles. The inner bark made rope, clothing, and baskets. The long arching branches were twisted into rope and baskets. It was also used for many medicines. The wood is naturally durable and light in weight. It is used for house siding and interior paneling as well as outdoor furniture, decking and fencing. Because of its resistance to decay and insect damage, the wood of large, fallen trees remains sound for over 100 years. Even after 100 years, the wood can be salvaged and cut into shakes for roofs.”

Mary Ann stopped to photograph this beautiful burl. (And I stopped to photograph Mary Ann!)

I loved this grouping of “Companions”, in the rear. Redcedar, western hemlock and amabilis fir, all rising from the same place in the forest. This is a true “ecosystem”, featuring the major species of this forest near sea level. (I don’t know what the mossy trunk is.)

To provide a sense of scale, Peter stood under #9, Silver Giant. This redcedar is at least 700 years old.

“Old Friends” are two redcedars growing together, one pointing in the direction of the bog nearby.

As we headed towards the bog, I smiled at the sight of a big banana slug on the path, familiar to me from my B.C. childhood. Ariolimax columbianus is native to the forest floors of North America’s Pacific coastal coniferous rainforest belt, where it decomposes dead plant material, mosses, mushrooms and animal droppings into humus.

Peter pointed out a young cascara (Rhamnus purshiana), whose bark is used by first nations people for digestive ailments and constipation..

Then we toured the Bonsai Bog.

The boardwalk wound through a boggy, stunted forest….

….. and rested upon the sphagnum.

Bog Labrador-tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum, formerly Ledum) has white flowerheads in early spring.

Peter explained that he built the boardwalk atop Cougar Annie’s old trapline. This was the path she took with a lantern held close to her rifle so she could spot the cougar eyes.

Club moss or ground cedar (Lycopodium clavatum) reached across the boardwalk….

…. and the red fruiting bodies or “apothecia” of toy soldier lichen (Cladonia bellidiflora) brightened a rotting tree trunk.

The red sphagnum moss (Sphagnum sp.)…..

…… contained little carnivorous sundews (Drosera rotundifolia).

Until I saw Boat Basin, I was unaware that red-fruited bunchberry (Cornus canadensis) was circumboreal, having seen it in boggy places in Nova Scotia and Ontario.

Gray reindeer lichen (Cladonia rangiferina) is another circumboreal species, and is an essential food for reindeer (caribou).

Though they’re native to eastern Canada bogs from Ontario to Newfoundland, Peter has grown some North American cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon) in the bog, which seem to be doing very well.

Our bog walk finished, Peter returned to his chores and Mary Ann, Doug and I walked back up the road past the “ghost cedars” for lunch and a nap. Rain was forecast for later and we were happy to have seen the Walk of the Ancients and the Bonsai Bog in dry weather.

Barbecued chicken was on the menu for our final dinner and Peter added his homegrown salad greens to our feast. In our cabin, we threw some logs into the woodstove and retired early, listening to the rain beat down on the roof and on the rainforest around us.

Our floatplane was arriving at 9 am so an early breakfast was in order. But I couldn’t resist one last look out at the rainforest, even if it was pouring rain.

The rain stopped in time for Peter to drive us and our bags down the road to the dock on Hesquiat Lake. A black bear galumphed in front of the truck for a bit before turning into the forest. We watched the Atleo floatplane land and taxi down the lake, arriving with a few Atleo employees who were bringing in supplies to Boat Basin for their annual company weekend. The pilot Sinclair then stowed our bags and we hugged Peter goodbye and crawled into the plane.

As we flew southwest towards Tofino, I gazed back over the wisps of cloud weaving through the dark, forested peaks of this rugged west coast of Vancouver Island. I couldn’t quite believe how much we’d seen and learned in less than 48 hours.

And I felt thankful to a crusty old lady named Annie and her determined friend Peter, who helped us see the trees and the forest, not to mention the garden.

Here’s a last look at Clayoquot Sound from the air.

*******

To enquire about booking a trip to Cougar Annie’s Garden and the Temperate Rainforest Study Centre, visit the Boat Basin Foundation Website.

Visiting Cougar Annie’s Garden – Part One

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Perhaps this blog actually began in the 1960s in Montreal when my husband, in his 20s and fresh out of business school and in his first real job, was invited to a party given by some young women from Vancouver where he met their friend Peter Buckland. The two men would reconnect a few years later when my husband moved to Vancouver where they both worked in the financial industy. In 1974 Peter invited Doug to visit him at Boat Basin in remote Hesquiat Harbour in Clayoquot Sound on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island.  Doug was invited for Peter’s “World Tidal Hockey Championship”, the fourth annual edition of a rollicking game played with friends on the sandy beach.  Doug remembers meeting a little old woman who sold them eggs for breakfast. By then, Peter Buckland had known Ada Annie Lawson, aka “Cougar Annie”, for some six years, a friendship cultivated during his monthly trips to the area as an amateur prospector. Annie’s legendary life in the rainforest spanned more than 60 years and included 4 husbands (three of whom were mail order grooms she advertised for in the same paper where she ran ads for her dahlias), 11 children, a sprawling garden hacked out of mossy first-growth forest, a mail-order plant business and well-earned notoriety for being a crack shot of the cougars that terrorized her goats and whose hides brought a government bounty to supplement her sale of dahlia and gladiolus bulbs.

Cougar Annie, 1962. Photo by John Manning-Royal B.C. Museum & Archives

The award-winning 1998 book Cougar Anne’s Garden by Margaret Horsfield recounts the story of her life, from her 1888 birth in Sacramento, California to her Vancouver marriage to Scotland-born Willie Rae-Arthur, the black sheep of his family; her 1915 arrival in Hesquiat Harbour aboard SS Princess Maquinna with her opium-addicted, alcoholic husband and their three oldest children and a cow; her life as a homesteader on 117 government-deeded acres of primeval forest; her hardscrabble career as a nurserywoman and postmistress; the 1981 sale of her property to Peter Buckland; and finally her 1985 death at the age of 97. In 1987, Peter retired and moved to Boat Basin full-time.

Then again, this blog might have begun in 2016 at the Idaho Botanic Garden, when Doug relaxed with my friend, Boise garden writer Mary Ann Newcomer, while I climbed to the top of the wonderful Lewis & Clark collection for a blog I would eventually write on the garden.  As they waited for me to come down, Mary Ann mentioned an award-winning story she’d written for a 2013 issue of Leaf magazine (pgs 48-59), below, about Cougar Annie’s Garden in British Columbia. Doug chuckled and told her about his friendship with Peter Buckland and that he’d actually visited the garden and met Cougar Annie more than 40 years earlier. It was a serendipitous moment, because…..

….. it led to a May 2019 Facebook message from Mary Ann asking for contact information for Peter on behalf of a California photographer named Caitlin Atkinson, who was working on a book project on wild gardens. Since we were planning an autumn trip to Vancouver Island prior to a holiday in San Francisco anyway, we did some calendar juggling and back-and-forth emailing with Peter that resulted in all four of us meeting for a night at the beautiful Long Beach Lodge in Tofino, then checking into the Atleo River Air Services office on a dock in Tofino. bright and early on October 1st 

…. and finally preparing to climb into our chartered Cessna floatplane. We had been warned to keep our soft baggage to the bare minimum, and we added enough groceries for 2 days as well as a little bit of wine. We were heading to a paradise with no electricity or indoor plumbing, after all, so we knew chardonnay would be a welcome touch.

Then we were off, flying northeast on a 20-minute flight over the most spectacular scenery towards our destination 51 kilometres (32 miles) from Tofino.

The rugged west coast of Vancouver Island is the last stop on the North American continent. Here the breakers are massive, making Tofino a mecca for surfers. The temperate rainforest we were about to visit is part of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation, specifically the Hesquiat (Hesquiaht) First Nation, who have been there for some 6,000 years. Through their oral history and written Japanese records of the giant tsunami, we know that on the night of January 26, 1700, a massive 9.0 megathrust earthquake struck near Pachena Bay, not far south of Tofino.  In fact, it was thought to be just the latest tectonic collision in the Cascadia Subduction Zone as the Juan de Fuca Plate pushes under the North American Plate, since it is estimated that 13 such massive earthquakes have occurred in the 6,000 years that first nations have been here. And, of course, west coasters have repeatedly been warned to prepare for the next “big one”.

In the floatplane, Mary Ann was in the middle seat with me focusing on the view….

….. while Caitlin was smiling in the back seat.

We flew over massive tracts of forest and ….

…..sandy beaches and turquoise ocean dotted with rocky islets and dark kelp beds where rivers ran into the sea.

As we approached our landing on Hesquiat Lake, I noticed the landslides on the mountain. We would learn later that these originated in previously-logged areas high above on Mt.Seghers, and during a November 2018 rainstorm had filled the lake with debris.

I made a cellphone video to remember this flight, looking out west towards the open ocean.

Peter Buckland was at the Hesquiat Lake dock waiting for us and helped take our bags and supplies up the hill to his truck parked on the gravel road.

A short drive later, he stopped and invited us to get out and walk with him on the grand tour. He would drive our bags to our overnight accommodation later.  As we made our way under towering red cedars (Thuja plicata), he began by showing us his eagle woodshed, a sloped structure surmounted by the mythical bird that he designed and built.

This eagle woodshed was our first clue that though Peter had to be highly resourceful to live here with no modern conveniences, he was also an artist, a designer, a carpenter, a gardener, a chef and a quirky, funny, well-studied natural philosopher.

He pointed out the stump of a “canoe tree” that had later been felled, showing us the dugout shape at the wide base.  In the lexicon of indigenous people of the west coast, this old red cedar is a culturally-modified tree (CMT).


Then he showed us the little shop building near his house featuring an in situ tree stump as its facade and door frame. All the buildings at Boat Basin, including Peter’s house, the central lodge and guest cabins, were designed by Peter, who also milled and split the lumber, primarily from old-growth windfall on the property. The larger buildings were framed by renowned west coast builder and surf legend Bruno Atkey, working with local crews and with Peter as interior finish carpenter; Peter built many of the smaller buildings himself.

Inside, we stood on a floor of mortared floor tiles made of sinuous Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia).

We made a quick pass through the house he shares with his partner, Makiko, who was away on a trip.  The woodstove here was identical to the ones we’d see later in the eco-lodge on the ridge above.

Then we headed out to sit in the autumn sunshine at the beach cabin on Hesquiat Harbour. Dahlias, below, seem to have a special place here at Boat Basin because Cougar Annie sold the tubers until she was no longer able to operate her business, even peeling them by feel, rather than sight, when she became blind.

Peter’s canoe was tucked into the driftwood…..

….. and a moon snail shell (Euspira lewisii) decorated a log.

We sat nearby as Peter talked about the property, its history and geology while sipping a glass of fresh water pouring from a carved cedar flume.

Then it was time to take the boardwalk that Peter built atop Cougar Annie’s old path from the beach. I looked up and saw evergreen huckleberries (Vaccinium ovatum) creating a lacy understory to ancient cedars….

…. and down at the deer ferns and salal flanking the boardwalk.

We stopped at a massive cedar, below, and Peter pointed out how it was in line with two other huge cedars whose roots reach down to bedrock, while shorter trees around have roots in gravel sediment left behind by glaciers. “So when there’s a tsunami every five or seven hundred years, it’s not a wall of water like Japan (Fukushima), just a rising tide. The water sits for a half hour or so then it all wants to go out at once”, he says. “That’s when all the damage is done, and the trees growing in the gravel are undercut. That explains why these trees are so much older than the surrounding ones.”

Next he pointed out a fallen log acting as a nurse log for a dated 500 year-old cedar.  The log fell because the tree was cut down to make a dugout canoe, evidenced by the missing portion immediately above the stump. The relationship distinguishes it as one of a few sites in North America showing physical evidence of human activity prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

Then we came to the long pergola that Peter built leading to Cougar Annie’s 5-acre garden. He designed it in a manner “to trick the eye”, making it gradually wider in the distance and altering the board size to overcome the effect of diminishing perspective. (The next day, he’d demonstrate that for me.)

When Peter bought the property from Annie, she was 93-years old, nearly blind and had not maintained the garden for a long time. He spent years using a chainsaw to reclaim the various beds and borders — like the garden below, with its driftwood whale sculpture — from the encroaching rainforest, in order to attract visitors to this heritage garden. Six lawn mowers are scattered around….

….  to mow the salal, salmonberries and Annie’s heather that now forms a rampant groundcover.

A wooden wheelbarrow was rotting into the mosses.

And there was the lovely ruin, Annie’s house, where, incredibly, she raised all those children, ran her business, and even found space for the post office counter. We would come back the next day to explore more here.

We stopped at a raised mound of heather where Annie buried three children who died as infants and two of her husbands, Willie Rae-Arthur, who drowned in 1936, and George Campbell, a reportedly abusive man who died in 1944, so the story goes, ‘while cleaning his shotgun’. Peter told us of plans by Annie’s descendants to bring her ashes up to Boat Basin next year for an interment ceremony. So confining was this life that, one by one, her children fled the homestead as soon as they were of age, except for a few sons who stayed to help their mother, one drowning tragically in Hesquiat Harbour in 1947.

Our next stop was a nearby stand of 95-year-old hemlocks. Inspired by Makiko’s tales of Japanese forests where urban people come to sweep the mossy carpets below, Peter is turning this into the Boat Basin version. As he talked, it occurred to me that our stay here in this towering rainforest perfectly embodies the Japanese concept of “forest bathing” or  shinrin-yoku.

And then he smiled as he guided us towards……


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…. the Japanese-signed entrance…..

….. to his sushi table. Peter milled this astonishing 4’ wide x 5” thick x 25-foot slab out of a big yellow cedar (Cupressus nootkatensis). Imagine being invited to an omakase feast right here!

Beyond the sushi shelter is a tranquil, moss-carpeted Japanese garden, with Peter’s Shinto gates at the far end. In a 2004 article in Pacific Rim Magazine, the former curator of the David Lam Asian Garden at the University of British Columbia, the late Peter Wharton, said: “There is an Asiatic strand throughout the landscape in terms of geology and vegetation. To me it makes absolute sense both now, and even more so in the future, when I think the cultures of western Canada and the countries of the Pacific Rim will be even closer than they are now.” 

As we walked on, I caught a movement in the trees and pointed my camera up, but the spotted owl had turned his head away from me, then flew quickly off.

Peter looked north to Mount Seghers on Hesquiat Lake, drawing our attention to the logging landslides on its flank. This peak played an interesting role in early exploration of the west coast of Canada, for it was noted and named on August 8, 1773 by the Spanish explorer Juan Pérez, the first European to record a sighting of Vancouver Island. From aboard his frigate Santiago, he called it Loma de San Lorenzo. Had Pérez gone ashore there rather than staying on ship and trading Spanish spoons for sea otter skins and sardines with the local Hesquiat in canoes, or had he gone ashore at Haida Gwai a few days earlier rather than greeting twenty Haida braves who paddled out in their canoes to trade gifts, there might be a very different North America now. But Juan Pérez neglected to declare the formal Act of Possession. Five years later, Captain James Cook, a veteran sea captain arrived nearby on HMS Resolution becoming the first European to sight both the east and west sides of North America. (To read more about the explorers of the west coast, including Quadra and Vancouver, have a look at The Land of Heart’s Delight: Early Maps and Charts of Vancouver Island by Michael Layland.)

Heading up towards the ridge, we stopped at Annie’s museum….

….. containing artifacts from the Boat Basin Post Office……

….. and bulb labels and Annie’s pruning saw.

As we came out into a gravel clearing, I looked down to see black bear scat filled with fruit, possibly native Pacific crabapples (Malus fusca) which turn soft in autumn.

Peter stopped at his Shake Shack to demonstrate the use of his froe or shake axe. I made a video of him making the cedar shakes that are so prevalent on the property.

This might be a good place to include a map of the property, showing where we were at that point(red arrow). Our destination now was the top of the ridge above where we would find our cabin and the central hall.

Then we set out along the boardwalk under mossy, leaning trees…..

…… past the skunk cabbages I remember so vividly from my British Columbia childhood….

…… and drifts of deer fern (Blechnum spicant).

We climbed up, up, up and I looked back down towards three staircase runs flanking a mossy rock outcrop, marvelling that this entire journey – 700 metres (2300 feet) of red cedar boardwalk – was created by one man with a vision as passionate and tenacious as the woman who had lived her for almost 70 years.

I felt small in the midst of these forest giants, standing and fallen.

Natural rises in the land were negotiated via stairways and bridges.

I looked out over the forest here and caught a glimpse of Rae Lake. Alas, I did not make it down to the lake in our time here (blame my aching knee).

I longed to have a rest in the shelter of this cedar, harvested at some point by first nations people for its bark or boards, but kept on climbing.

At one point I turned around to gaze at the miniature ecosystem that takes hold in the slowly-rotting bole of a dead red cedar.

Finally we came out into a clearing and there was the central hall, aka the lodge, aka the Temperate Rainforest Study Centre.

I loved the Boat Basin logo cutout in the heavy yellow cedar door.

And what a clever use for an old power line insulator!

Then we were inside the hall. Measuring 50′ x 50’, it is heated by a wood stove and features a well-supplied kitchen with propane appliances turned on for each visiting group during the time they are there.  Flashlights, battery-powered lights and candles provide illumination.

After leading us to the top, Peter headed back down to the road to drive our supplies up by truck.  We explored the hall and the outer deck and marveled at the spectacular view of the property and Hesquiat Harbour.

From here I could see red cedar, yellow cedar, amabilis fir and lodgepole pine. I’m sure there were more species in this complex forest ecosystem, so different from the monoculture second- and third-growth forests planted by the timber companies to “replace” the old-growth they cut down.

When we had our bags and groceries, Doug made us all a sandwich lunch, then we made our way up the path through the forest to our cabins.  Ours was #6 – the honeymoon cabin!

There was a rusty mirror and I decided a rainforest selfie was in order.

Huckleberries and salal made me feel as if my own little garden was pure west coast!

This was the view from behind our platform bed. Not bad, eh?  I quickly made up the bed with provided sheets and sleeping bag blankets and stowed our clothes on the shelf.

Further up the path from our cabin was our own “outhouse with a view”.

As I wandered back towards the central hall, I heard a familiar tapping from the forest. A hairy woodpecker was working its way up an old hemlock.

As the sky darkened, we chopped vegetables, sautéed mushrooms and barbecued steak. Peter joined us for dinner by candelight.

It had been one of the most magical of days: a very special opportunity to share a little slice of this majestic part of Canada. After washing the dishes in water heated on the woodstove, we said good night and headed up the path toward our cabins. It was time for bed.

Continued in Part Two 

***********

To enquire about booking a trip to Cougar Annie’s Garden and the Temperate Rainforest Study Centre, visit the Boat Basin Foundation Website.